16 The Saint Overboard Read online

  16 The Saint Overboard

  Leslie Charteris

  By LESLIE CHARTERIS

  FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY • NEW YORK

  Copyright, 1935, 1936 by Leslie Charteris.

  Published by Arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc. Printed in U.S.A.

  AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

  WHEN this book was first published, it appeared with the fol­lowing preface:

  For the diving sequences in this story I am deeply indebted to Messrs. Siebe Gorman & Co., of Westminster Bridge Road, London, the well-known submarine engineers, who most kindly made it possible for me to obtain the first-hand experience of diving without which the latter part of this book could not possibly have been written.

  For the idea of the story I am indebted solely to history. I have become so used to seeing the adjective "incredible" regu­larly used even in the most flattering reviews of the Saint's ad­ventures, even when I have taken my plots from actual incidents which may be found in the files of any modern newspaper, that I almost hesitate to deprive the critics of their favourite word. But I have decided, after some profound searchings of heart, that in this case it is only fair to give them warning. For their benefit, therefore, and also for that of any other reader who may be interested, I should like to say that the facts mentioned on pages 18-19 may be verified by anyone who cares to take the trouble; and I submit that my solution of one of the most baffling mys­teries of the sea is as plausible as any.

  Obviously, this was long before the invention of the Aqualung brought "skin diving" to replace many of the cumbersome pro­cedures described in some sequences in this story, to say nothing of special kinds of miniature submarines which can now cruise, observe, and perform certain sampling and pick-up operations at depths which seemed fantastic when Professor Yule invented his "bathystol."

  That seems to be the trouble with writing any story that hinges on some fabulous invention, in the days we live in. Once upon a time, as with the imaginative predictions of Jules Verne, progress moved with enough dignity and deliberation to allow the book to become a quaint old classic, and the author to pass on to his immortality, before making his incredible creations merely commonplace. Today, the most preposterous contraption a fictioneer can dream up is liable to be on sale in the neighborhood drug store or supermarket while he is still trying to flog his paperback rights.

  This is a trap I have fallen into a number of times, and I think I must now resolve to write no more stories of that type. I shall attempt no more adventurous predictions of what some mad (or even sane) scientist will come out with next.

  But I am certainly not going to withdraw this story, or any other, simply because technology has outstripped many of the premises and limitations that it was based on. I think it still stands up as a rattling good adventure, and that should be enough for anybody's money. Including my own.

  I. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR'S SLEEP WAS DISTURBED,

  AND LORETTA PAGE MADE AN APPOINTMENT

  SIMON TEMPLAR woke at the shout, when most men would probably have stirred uneasily in their sleep and gone on sleep­ing. It was distant enough for that, muffled by the multiple veils of white summer fog that laid their five prints of mist on the portholes and filled the night with a cool dampness. The habit of years woke him, rather than the actual volume of sound—years in which that lightning assessment and responses to any chance sound, that almost animal awareness of events even in sleep, that instantaneous leap to full consciousness of every razor-edge faculty, might draw the thin precarious hair-line between life and death.

  He woke in a flash, without any sudden movement or alteration in his rate of breathing. The only difference between sleep and wakefulness was that his eyes were open and his brain searching back over his memory of that half-heard shout for a more precise definition of its meaning. Fear, anger, and surprise were there, without any articulate expression. . . . And then he heard the sharp voice of a gun, its echoes drumming in a crisp clatter through the humid dark; another fainter yell, and a splash. . . .

  He slid from between the blankets and swung his long legs over the side of the bunk with the effortless natural stealth of a great cat. The moist chill of the fog went into his lungs and goosefleshed his skin momentarily through the thin silk of his pyjamas as he hauled himself up the narrow companion, but he had the other animal gift of adapting himself immediately to temperature. That one reflex shiver flicked over him as his bare feet touched the dew‑damp deck; and then he was nervelessly relaxed, leaning a little forward with his hands resting on the weatherboard of the after cockpit, listening for anything that might explain that queer interruption of his rest.

  Overhead, according to the calendar, there was a full moon;— but the banks of sea-mist which had rolled up towards midnight, in one of those freakish fits of temperament that sometimes strike the north coast of France in early summer, had blanketed its light down to a mere ghostly glimmer that did no more than lend a tinge of grey luminance to the cloudy dark. Over on the other side of the estuary St. Malo was lost without trace: even the riding lights of the yacht nearest to his own struggled to achieve more than a phosphorescent blur in the baffling obscu­rity. His own lights shed a thin diffused aurora over the sleek sea-worthy lines of the Corsair, and reached no further beyond than he could have spun a match. He could see nothing that would give him his explanation; but he could listen, and his ears shared in that uncanny keenness of all his senses.

  He stood motionless, nostrils slightly dilated almost as if he would have brought scent to his aid against the fog and sniffed information out of the dank saltiness of the dark. He heard the whisper of ripples against the hull and the faint chatter of the anchor-chain dipping a link or two as the Corsair worked with the tide. He heard the sibilant creak of a rope as the dinghy strained against the side of a craft moored two berths away, and the clanking rumble of a train rolling over the steel ways some­where behind the dull strip of almost imperceptible luminousness that was Dinard. The mournful hooting of a ship groping to­wards harbour, way out over the Channel towards Cherbourg, hardly more than a quiver of vibration in the clammy stillness, told him its own clear story. The murmur of indistinguishable voices somewhere across the water where the shout had come from he heard also, and could build up his own picture from the plunk of shoe-heels against timber and the grate of an oar slip­ping into its rowlock. All these things delineated themselves on his mind like shadings of background detail on a photographic plate, but none of them had the exact pitch of what he was lis­tening for.

  He heard it, presently—an ethereal swish of water, a tiny pit­ter of stray drops from an incautiously lifted head tinkling back into the oily tide, a rustle of swift movement in the grey gloom that was scarcely audible above the hiss and lap of the sea under his own keel. But he heard it, and knew that it was the sound he had been waiting for.

  He listened, turning his head slightly, ears pricked for a more precise definition of the sound. Over in the fog where the voices had been muttering he heard the whirr of a lanyard whipped from its coiling, and the sudden splutter and drone of an out­board motor taking life jarred into the fine tuning of his atten­tion. Then he cut it out again, as one tunes out an interfering station on a sensitive radio receiver, and touched on that silent dragging cleave of the water once more, that sluicing ripple of an expert swimmer striving to pass through the water quickly but without noise. Nearer, too. Coming directly towards him.

  Still Simon Templar did not move, but his immobility had an electric tension about it, like that of a leopard about to spring. Whatever might be happening out in that steamy darkness was not strictly any concern of his, except in the role of public-spir­ited citizen—which he was not. But it was for just that bl
ithe willingness to meddle in affairs which did not concern him that he had come by the Corsair herself and all his other outward tokens of unlimited wealth, and which made certain persons think it so epically absurd that he should go about with the nick­name of the Saint. Only for that sublimely lawless curiosity, a variegated assortment of people whose habitats ranged from the gutters of Paris to the high spots of Broadway, from the beaches of the South Pacific to the most sanctified offices of Scotland Yard, could see no just reason why he should be taking a million­aire's holiday at Dinard instead of sewing mail-bags in Larkstone Prison or resting in a nice quiet cemetery with a stomach­ful of lead to digest. But the roots of that outlaw vigilance were too deep for cure, even if he had wished to cure them; and out there in the vaporous twilight something odd was happening of which he had to know more. Wherefore he listened, and heard the outboard chuffing around in the murk, and the swimmer com­ing closer.

  And then he saw her. A shift of the air moved the mist-cur­tains capriciously at the very limit of his vision, and he saw her suddenly in the down-seeping nimbus of his riding lights.

  Her.

  It was that realisation of sex, guessed rather than positively asserted by the dimly-seen contour of her features and the glis­tening curve of a green bathing cap, which sent a skin-deep tin­gle of intuition plunging into profound and utter certainty. If it had been a man, he would not have lost interest; but he could have produced half a dozen commonplace theories to assimilate that final fact, with a regretful premonition that the adventure would not be likely to run for long. But a girl swimming stealth­ily through a fogbound sea at three o'clock in the morning could not be associated with yells and shooting in the dark by any prosaic theory; and his pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster at the knowledge. Somewhere out there in the leaden haze big medicine was seething up, and inevitably it was ordained that he must dip his spoon in the brew.

  He was standing so motionless, half cloaked by the deep shadow of the deckhouse, that she had taken three more long strokes towards the ketch before she saw him. She stopped swim­ming abruptly, and stared up—he could almost read the wild thought tearing through her mind that she was caught in a trap, that in such a situation he could not help challenging her. And then, as the monotonous chugging of the outboard circled round and came closer, he caught in her upturned eyes a frantic for­lorn-hope appeal, a desperate voiceless entreaty that placed the ultimate seal on his destiny in that adventure.

  He leaned over the side and grasped her wrist; and her first revelation of his steel-wire strength was the amazing ease with which he lifted her inboard with one hand. Without a word he pushed her down on the floor of the cockpit and unhitched a fender, dipping it in the water to repeat the faint splash she had made as she came out.

  At that moment the outboard loomed up through the mist and coughed itself to silence. Dropping the fender to water level once again, so that there should be no doubt left in any interested minds about the origin of whatever noise had been heard from that quarter, he adjusted it under the gunwale of his dinghy and made it fast to the stanchion from which he had slipped it. The other boat was gliding up under its own momentum while he did so, and he was able to make a swift summary of its occupants.

  There were three of them. Two, in rough seamen's jerseys, sat in the sternsheets, one of them holding the tiller and the other rewinding the starter lanyard. The third man was sitting on one of the thwarts forward, but as the boat slid nearer he rose to his feet.

  Simon Templar studied him with an interest that never ap­peared more than casual. From his position in the boat, his well-cut reefer jacket and white trousers, and the way he stood up, he was obviously the leader of the party. A tallish well-built man with one hand resting rather limply in his coat pocket—a typical wealthy yachtsman going about his own mysterious business. And yet, to the Saint, who had in his time walked out alive from the bright twisted places where men who keep one hand in a side pocket are a phenomenon that commands lightning alertness, there was something in the well-groomed impassivity of him as he rose there to his full height that touched the night with a new tingling chill that was nevertheless a kind of unlawful ecstasy. For a couple of seconds the Saint saw his face as the dinghy hissed under the lee of the Corsair, a long swarthy black-browed face with a great eagle's beak of a nose.

  Then the beam of a powerful flashlight blazed from the man's free hand, blotting out his face behind its dazzling attack. For a moment it dwelt on Simon's straightening figure, and he knew that in that moment the dryness of his hair and his pyjamas were methodically noted and reduced to their apparent place in the scheme of things. Then the light swept on, surveyed the lines of the ketch from stern to bow, rested for another moment on the name lettered there, and went flickering over the surrounding water.

  "Lost something?" Simon inquired genially; and the light came back to him.

  "Not exactly." The voice was clear and dispassionate, almost lackadaisical in its complete emptiness of expression. "Have you seen anyone swimming around here?"

  "A few unemployed fish," murmured the Saint pleasantly. "Or are you looking for the latest Channel swimmer? They usually hit the beach further east, towards Calais."

  There was a barely perceptible pause before the man chuckled; but even then, to the Saint's abnormally sensitive ears, there was no natural good humour in the sound. It was simply an efficient adaptation to circumstances, a suave getout from a sit­uation that bristled with question marks.

  "No—nothing like that. Just one of our party took on a silly bet. I expect he's gone back."

  And with that, for Simon Templar, a flag somewhere among the ghostly armadas of adventure was irrevocably nailed to the mast. The mystery had crept out of the night and caught him. For the tall hooknosed man's reply presumed that he hadn't heard any of the other sounds associated with the swimmer; and, presuming that, it stepped carefully into the pitfall of its own surpassing smoothness. More—it attempted deliberately to lead him astray. A swim on a foggy night that included gun-play and .the peculiar kind of shout that had awakened him belonged to a species of silly bet which the Saint had still to meet; and he couldn't help being struck by the fact that it disposed so ade­quately of the obvious theory of an ordinary harbour theft, and the hue and cry which should have arisen from such an explana­tion. Even without the glaring error of sex in the last sentence, that would have been almost enough.

  He stood and watched the search party vanishing on their way into the fog, the flashlight in the hooknosed man's hand blinking through the mist until it was lost to sight; and then he turned and slid down the companion into the saloon, switching on the lights as he did so. He heard the girl follow him down, but he drew the curtains over the portholes before he turned to look at her.

  2

  She had pulled off the green bathing cap, and her hair had tumbled to her shoulders in ,a soft disorder of chestnut rippled with spun gold. Her red mouth seemed to be of the quality that triumphs even over salt water; and the purely perfunctory covering of her attenuated bathing costume left room for no deception about the perfection of her slender sun-gilt figure. Her steady grey eyes held a tentative gleam of mischief, soberly checked at that moment and yet incorrigibly seeking for natural expression, which for one fleeting instant worked unpardonable magic on his breathing.

  "A bit wet in the water to-night, isn't it?" he remarked coolly.

  "Just a little."

  He pulled open a drawer and selected a couple of towels. As an afterthought, he detached a bathrobe from its hook and dropped that also on the couch.

  "D'you prefer brandy or hot coffee?"

  "Thanks." The impulse of mischief in her eyes was only a wraith of itself, masked down by a colder intentness. "But I think I'd better be getting back—to collect my bet. It was aw­fully good of you to—understand so quickly—and—and help me."

  She held out her hand, in a quick gesture of final f
riendliness, with a smile which ought to have left the Saint gaping dreamily after her until she was lost again in the night.

  "Oh, yes." Simon took the hand, but he didn't complete the action by letting go of it immediately as he should have done. He put one foot up on the couch and rested his forearm on his knee; and the quiet light of amusement that twinkled in his sea-blue eyes was suddenly very gay and disturbing. "Of course, I did hear something about a bet——"

  "It—it was rather a stupid one, I suppose." She took her hand away, and her voice steadied itself and became clearer. "We were just talking, about how easy it would be to get away with anything on a foggy night, and somehow or other it got around to my saying that I could swim to Dinard and back without them finding me. They'd nearly caught me when you pulled me on board. I don't know if that was allowed for in the bet, but——"

  "And the shooting?"

  Her fine brows came together for a moment.

  "That was just part of the make-believe. We were pretending that I'd come out to rob the ship——"

  "And the shouting?"

  "That was part of it, too. I suppose it all sounds very idiotic——"

  The Saint smiled. He slipped a cigarette out of a packet on the shelf close by and tapped it.

  "Oh, not a bit. I like these games myself—they do help to pass away the long evenings. Who did the shooting?"

  "The man who spoke to you from the dinghy."

  "I suppose he didn't shoot himself by mistake? It was a most realistic job of yelling." Simon's voice expressed nothing but gentle interest and approval; his smile was deceptively lazy. And then he left the cigarette in his mouth and stretched out his hand again. "By the way, that's a jolly-looking gadget."

  There was a curious kind of thick rubber pouch strapped on the belt of her swim suit, and he had touched it before she could draw back.