“He ran away. I’m not built for running — or football tackles. What was it about?”
There were more hurrying footsteps, and the beam of a flashlight stabbed at them. In the reflected glow behind it Simon saw the outlines of a uniform.
“Here’s someone who’s going to be professionally interested in the answer to that,” he said grimly.
The policeman spoke in the atrocious guttural dialect of the region. It was well out of the Saint’s considerable linguistic range, but he needed no interpreter to translate it as some variant of the standard gambit of law officers in such situations anywhere: “What goes on here?”
The roly-poly man answered in the same patois. His face in the light was round and soft and childish, with rimless glasses over rather prominent blue eyes. He wore a tweed coat and a round soft pork-pie hat. He talked volubly, with graphic gestures, so that Simon easily understood that he was describing the Saint’s encounter with the stocky thug, which he must have witnessed. The policeman asked another question, and the round man handed him a card from a small leather folder.
The policeman turned to the Saint.
“ Vous parlez français? ”
“ Mais oui,” said the Saint easily. “This gentleman saw me trying to catch one man. There was another. Over there.”
They walked to where Simon had dropped the gaunt man. But there was no one there.
“He seems to have got away too,” he said ruefully. Then he pointed across the promenade. “But there’s the man they robbed.”