Free Salvage for the Saint by Leslie Charteris

pronounced it. “You driving by yourself in France is what I’m thinking of—with all those fifty million Frenchmen there, or whatever it is, and on the wrong side of the road, too!”
    Arabella had smiled at that. She knew that Mrs Cloonan was genuinely fond of her and concerned for her well-being.
    “They’re not all like Fournier, thank goodness!” she told her soothingly. “And I’ve driven in France before, you know. Actually you get used to it very quickly. And the French countryside’s marvellous, and the road to Marseilles is hardly a footpath.” Arabella grinned. “So stop worrying. I promise I’ll call you, the first overnight stop I make.”
    That was Arabella Tatenor. She had to go to Marseille? Very well, then go she would. Right away. Or as near right away as could comfortably be managed.
    She had seen the MG and herself safely aboard the eight o’clock ferry to Southampton on the morning after Brightly’s visit. From Southampton—which in those days had no direct ferry link with France—she had driven the seventy-five miles along the south coast to Newhaven in good time to catch the one o’clock boat to Dieppe; and some five hours later she had driven the MG off the boat and on to a French quay. The French customs formalities had delayed her only a minute or so, mostly taken up with a stylish piece of ogling from a raffish-looking douanier who wielded the chalk of his species, with, Arabella thought, unusual panache.
    And then she had emerged into the sunshine of a late Normandy afternoon, and within minutes she was zipping through that rich green countryside, so hauntingly like yet unlike its English counterpart a mere hundred miles back across the water. She had driven contentedly for the better part of four hours—and not so contentedly for the worse part.
    The worse part was driving through the towns that straddle the main road— towns like Rouen and Evreux, Dreux and Chartres—every one of which meant a two-or three-kilometre intrusion of those cobbles so beloved of the French and so bone-jarring to anyone travelling in a firmly sprung sports car.
    Daylight was dissolving into the transparency of a star-spangled night when she pulled up outside the hotel, a few miles beyond Orleans. The place looked as if it had once been a barn; all half-timbered and skew-whiff, it had a warm, friendly look and an obviously active restaurant. And it had the name Hotel des Anglais, which at least offered prospect of sympathetic welcome for weak speakers of French, in which category Arabella unreservedly placed herself.
    She chose the hotel for these reasons and because it happened to come into view at the right moment. But the two occupants of the ordinary black Citroen that pulled up outside the same hotel a minute or so later, after she had gone inside with her suitcase, chose it for a very different reason.
    They chose it because they had followed her, very carefully and discreetly, all the way from Cowes, and they had not the slightest intention of losing her now.
    She had settled herself in the hotel’s restaurant and was preparing to order her dinner when the fat man came in and sat down at a neighbouring table.
    The fatness made the sitting down into a rather protracted operation. Arabella watched the performance discreetly but with more than normal curiosity. She had a vague feeling that there was something familiar about the fat man; but it was no more than that, and for the moment she dismissed it.
    He was large generally, but his midriff was of a vast and pendulous corpulence out of proportion to the rest of him. Arabella noticed with concealed amusement that he had to sit well back from the table to leave room for that great wobbling paunch. His sparse greying hair was matched by a similarly greying but luxuriant moustache that drooped to give him the look of an ageing Mexican bandido.
    The impression, however, was contradicted by his clothing, which was so incongruously dapper that Arabella