16 The Saint Overboard Read online

  "Meaning what?" he demanded grittily.

  "I'm not so thrilled with your promise to put me out," said the Saint. "And I don't know that we can let you go on getting into trouble indefinitely. Twice is all right, but the third time might be unlucky. I may be a boy scout, but I'm not a nurse­maid. One way and another, Steve, it looks as if we may have to shut you up where you won't be able to get into mischief for a while."

  2

  Murdoch hunched over him as if he couldn't believe his ears. There was stark pugnacious incredulity oozing out of every pore of him; and his jaw was levered up till his under lip jutted out in a bellicose ridge under his nose. His complexion had gone as red as a turkey-cock's.

  "Say that again?"

  "I said we may have to keep you where you won't get in the way," answered the Saint calmly. "Don't look so unhappy— there's another bottle of whisky on board, and Orace will bring you your bread and milk and tuck you up at night."

  "That's what you think, is it?" grated Murdoch. "Well, you try to keep me here!"

  The Saint nodded. His right hand, with the half-smoked ciga­rette still clipped between the first two fingers, slid lazily into the shelf beside the settee, under the porthole. It came out with the automatic which he had put down there when he began to dress.

  "I'm trying," he said, almost apologetically.

  Murdoch shied at the gun like a startled horse. His screwed-up eyes opened out in two slow dilations of rabid unbelief.

  "Do you mean you're trying to hold me up?" he barked.

  "That was the rough idea, brother," said the Saint amiably. "I'm not very well up in these things, but I believe this is the approved procedure. I point a rod at you, like this; and then you either do what I tell you or try to jump on me and get shot in the dinner. Correct me if I'm wrong."

  The bantering serenity of his voice lingered on in the air while Murdoch stared at him. The Saint was smiling faintly, and the sheen of sapphire in his eyes was alive with irrepressible humour; but the automatic in his hand was levelled with a per­fectly sober precision that denied the existence of any joke.

  Murdoch blinked at it as if it had been the first specimen of its kind which he had ever seen. His gaze travelled lingeringly up from it to the Saint's face, and the incredulity faded out of his features before a spreading hardness of cold calculating wrath. He swallowed once, and his chin settled down on his chest.

  "You think you can get away with that, do you?"

  "I'm betting on it."

  Simon met the other's reddened glare as if he hadn't a shadow on his horizon, and wondered what the odds ought to be if it were a betting proposition. And he became reluctantly aware that any prudent layer would consider them distinctly hazardous. There was something consolidating itself on Murdoch's thinned-out lips which stood for the kind of raging foolhardy fearlessness that produces heroes and tombstones in cynically unequal pro­portions.

  And at the same time something quite different was thrusting itself towards the front of the Saint's consciousness. It had started like the hum of a cruising bee away out in the far reaches of the night, a mere stir of sound too trivial to attract attention. While they were talking it had grown steadily nearer, until the drone of it quivered through the saloon as a definite pulse of disturbance in the universe. And now, in the silence while he and Murdoch watched each other, it suddenly roared up and stopped, leaving a sharp void in the auditory scale through which came the clear swish and chatter of settling wa­ters.

  Simon felt the settee dip gently under him, and Murdoch's glass tinkled on the table as the wash slapped against the side. And then an almost imperceptible jar of contact ran through the boat, and a voice spoke somewhere outside.

  "Ahoy, Corsair!"

  The Saint felt as if a starshell had burst inside his head. Un­derstanding dawned upon him in a blinding light that showed him the meaning of that sequence of sounds, the owner of the voice that had hailed them, and everything that had led up to what lay outside, as clearly as if they had been focused under a batten of sun arcs. If he had not been so taken up with the im­mediate problem that had been laid in front of him, he might have guessed it and waited for it all down to the last detail; but now it came to him as a shock that electrified all his faculties as if he had taken a shot of liquid dynamite.

  It could hardly have taken a second to develop, that galvanic awakening of every nerve; but in the latter half of that scorch­ing instant the Saint reviewed the circumstances and realised everything that had to be done. Murdoch was still half arrested in the stillness which the interruption had brought upon him: his head was turned a little to the left, his mouth a little open, his gaze fractionally diverted. At that moment his train of thought was written across him in luminous letters a yard high. He also was considering the interruption, working over its bearing on his own predicament, while the simmer of fighting obstinacy in him was boiling up to outright defiance. The Saint knew it. That chance event was wiping out the last jot of hesitation in the American's mind. In another split second he would let out a yell or try to jump the gun—or both. But his powers of comprehen­sion were functioning a shade less rapidly than the Saint's, and that split second made as much difference as twenty years.

  Simon let go the automatic and unfolded himself from the settee. He came up like the backlash of a cracked whip, and his fist hit Murdoch under the jaw with a clean crisp smack that actually forestalled the slight thud of the gun hitting the carpet. Murdoch's eyes glazed mutely over, and Simon caught him ex­pertly as he straightened up on his feet.

  "Ahoy, Corsair!"

  "Ahoy to you," answered the Saint.

  The communicating door at the end of the saloon was opening, and Orace's globular eyes peered over his moustache through the gap. There was no need of words. Simon heaved Murdoch's inanimate body towards him like a stuffed dummy, with a dozen urgent commands sizzling voicelessly on his gaze, and followed it with the glass from which Murdoch had been drinking. And then, without waiting to assure himself that Orace had grasped the situation to the full, he snatched up his gun and leapt for the companion in one continuous movement, slipping the automatic into his hip pocket as he went.

  He started with lightning speed, but he emerged into the after cockpit quite leisurely; and everything else had been packed into such a dizzy scintilla of time that there was no undue hiatus between the first hail and his appearance. He turned unhurriedly to the side; and Kurt Vogel, standing up in the speedboat, looked up at him with his sallow face white in the dim light.

  "Hullo," said the Saint genially.

  "May I come aboard for a moment?"

  "Surely."

  Simon reached out an arm and helped him up. Again he exper­ienced the peculiar revulsion of the other's strong clammy grip.

  "I'm afraid this is a most unseemly hour to pay a visit," said Vogel, in his suave flat voice. "But I happened to be coming by, and I hoped you hadn't gone to bed."

  "I'm never very early," said the Saint cheerfully. "Come on below and have a drink."

  He led the way down to the saloon, and pushed the cigarette-box across the table.

  "D'you smoke?" Vogel accepted; and Simon raised his voice. "Orace!"

  "As a matter of fact, I only called in in case you'd made up your mind about to-morrow," said Vogel, taking a light. "Per­haps you didn't take my invitation seriously, but I assure you we'll be glad to see you if you care to come."

  "It's very good of you." Simon looked up as Orace came in, "Bring another glass, will you, Orace?"

  He put the match to his own cigarette and lounged back on the opposite berth while Orace brought the glass. He rested his finger-tips on the edge of the table and turned his hand over with a perfectly natural movement that brought his thumb downwards. With his back turned to Vogel, Orace set down the glass. His face was always inscrutable, and the fringe of his luxu­riant moustache concealed any expression that might ever have touched his mouth; but without moving another muscle of his features he droop
ed one eyelid deliberately before he retired, and the Saint felt comforted.

  "I would rather like to come," said the Saint frankly, as he poured out the whisky.

  "Then we'll expect you definitely. Loretta is coming, too."

  "Who's coming?"

  "You know—Miss Page——"

  Simon eased a drop of liquid from the neck of the bottle on to the rim of the glass with a hand as steady as a rock, and looked up with a smile.

  "I'm afraid I don't," he murmured. "Who is the lady?"

  "She was with us—— I beg your pardon," Vogel said quickly.

  "My memory is playing me tricks—I had an idea she was with us when we met this morning. Perhaps you will meet her in Guernsey."

  "If she's as pretty as her name, I hope I do," said the Saint lightly.

  He passed the glass over and sat down again, feeling as if his stomach had been suddenly emptied with a vacuum pump.

  "We shall be sailing about eleven," proceeded Vogel urbanely. "But we shan't take long on the trip—we marine motorists have rather an advantage in speed," he added deprecatingly. "I don't wonder you thorough-going yachtmen despise us, but I'm afraid I'm too old to learn your art."

  Simon nodded vaguely. But there was nothing vague in his mind. Every fibre of his being seemed to have been dissected into an individual sentience of its own: he was conscious of the vitality of every cell and corpuscle of his body, as though each separate atom of him was pressed into the service of that super­charged aliveness. His whole intellect was waiting, cat-like, for Vogel to show his hand.

  Vogel gave him no sign. His smooth aggressively profiled face might have been moulded out of wax, with its appearance of hard and uniform opacity under the thin glaze of skin. The Saint's keenest scrutiny could find no flaw in it. He had watched Vogel working up through a conspiracy of intricate and marvel­lously juggled tensions towards a climax of cunning that had been exploded like a soap-bubble at the very instant of crisis; he knew that even after that Vogel must have taken a re-staggering shock when he discovered the vanishment of their prisoner and the slumber of Otto Arnheim; he could guess that even Vogel's impregnable placidity must have felt the effect of a cumulation of reverses that would have shaken any other man to the beginnings of fear; and yet there was not a microscopical fissure in the sleek veneer of that vulturine face. Simon admitted after­wards that the realisation of all that was implied by that im­movable self-command gave him a queer momentary supersti­tious feeling of utter helplessness, like nothing else that he had ever experienced in the presence of another human being.

  He took hold of the feeling with a conscious effort and trod it ruthlessly down. Vogel was holding his drink up in one steady hand, imperturbably surveying the details of the saloon, with the eyelids drooping under the shadow of his black overhanging brows; and Simon watched him without a tremor in the careless good humour of his gaze.

  "But this is a charming boat," Vogel remarked idly. "What is her tonnage?"

  "About twenty-five."

  "Delightful . . ." Vogel got up and began to wander around, studying the panelling, touching the fittings, investigating the ingenious economy of space with all the quiet pleasure of an enthusiast. "I envy you, really—to be able to have something like this all to yourself, without bothering about crews and for­malities. If I were twenty years younger . . . Did you have her fitted out yourself?"

  "Yes."

  "Of course. And are all the other rooms as attractive as this one?"

  So that was how it was coming. The Saint felt a tiny pulse beginning to beat way back in the depths of his brain, like the frantic ticking of a distant clock racing with time.

  "They're pretty comfortable," he said modestly; and Vogel caught him up without a second's hesitation.

  "I wish I could see them. I'm tremendously interested—I had no idea a small boat could be so luxurious. You might even con­vert me!"

  Simon, brought the tip of his cigarette to a red glow, and feathered a fading cloud of smoke through his lips.

  He was for it. The fuse was lighted. There was no excuse, however plausible, no tactful way of changing the subject, how­ever fluent, from which Vogel would not draw his own conclu­sions. Vogel had got him, exactly as he had got Loretta a few hours before. He had paid that belated call, transparently, with the one object of discovering whether the Corsair would yield any connecting link with the night's disturbances, and he would not be prepared to go home satisfied after one brief confined session in the saloon. Simon could see the man's black unswerv­ing eyes fixed on him intently, outwardly with no more than the ingenuous eagerness which made the granting of his request a favour that it would be difficult in any circumstances to refuse— inwardly with a merciless insistence of which no one without the Saint's knowledge would have been conscious. The fuse was lighted; and how soon the mine would go up depended only on Orace's perception of the secondary uses of keyholes.

  Now that the die was cast, Simon felt a curious contented relaxation.

  "By all manner of means," he said amicably. "Let me show you the works."

  3

  He stood up, lighting a second cigarette from the stub of the first. The movement gave a few seconds' grace in which Orace, if he had been listening, might prepare for the emergency as best he could. But it could not be prolonged a moment beyond the requirements of the bare physical facts; and with an inaudible prayer to the hardworked gods of all good buccaneers, the Saint flattened his discarded butt in the ashtray and opened the com­municating door.

  Simon Templar could rake over his memory at any time and comb out an impressive crop of moments which he had no desire to live over again. In spite of the ultimate balance of success that showed on the books of his meteoric career, his life had contained its full quota of occasions that definitely looked their best in distant retrospect. But of all that collection of unenjoya­ble contingencies there were very few to which he would so fer­vently have refused an encore as those hectic instants during which the vista beyond the saloon unrolled itself before the opening door. The spectacle of Orace sitting curled up in the diminutive galley, alone, with a paper-covered detective story on his knee, was such a dizzy anti-climax that it made the Saint feel somewhat lightheaded. He could have raised the protective cur­tain of Orace's moustache and kissed him.

  Fortunately the presence of Kurt Vogel precluded any such regrettable demonstration. Simon cleared his throat and spoke almost hesitatingly through the ecstatic glow which enveloped him.

  "This is the kitchen, where we heat the tins and open the bot­tles. On the right, the refrigerator, where we keep the beer warm ..."

  He exhibited all the features of the galley with feverish pride; and Vogel, as flatteringly impressed as any proud owner could want a guest to be, admired them all in turn—the cunningly fitted glass and crockery racks, the planned compartments for all kinds of provisions, the paraffin geyser that provided hot water at the turn of a tap, the emergency stove slung in gimbals for use when the weather was too rough for a kettle to stand on the ordinary gas cooker, and all the other gadgets which had been installed to reduce discomfort to the vanishing point. All the time Simon was casting hopeful glances at Orace, searching for a hint of what his staff had done to meet the situation; but the staff had returned phlegmatically to its volume of blood, and its battle-scarred face offered as many clues as a boiled pudding.

  Eventually they had to move on. Beyond the galley there was a short alleyway, and Simon led the way briskly down it.

  "That's the bathroom and toilet," he explained casually, indicating the first door on the left as he went by; and he would have gone quickly on, but Vogel stopped.

  "A bathroom—really? That's even more remarkable on a boat this size. May I look at it?"

  Simon turned, with the glow of relief on him dying down again to a cold resignation. Of all the places where Orace might have been expected to dump his charge in a hurry, the bathroom seemed the most probable. Simon looked innocently at Vogel;
and the edge of his gaze, overlapping his guest, sought frantically for inspiration over Vogel's shoulder. But Orace was deep in his sanguinary literature: only the back of his head could be seen, and he had not moved.

  "There's nothing much to see," began the Saint diffidently; but Vogel had already turned the handle.

  Simon leaned sidelong against the bulkhead and very deliber­ately estimated the chances of a shot going unheard by the sea­man whom Vogel had left outside in charge of his speedboat. He also gave some consideration to the exact spot on Vogel's anat­omy where a bullet could be made to do a regulated amount of damage without leaving any margin for an outcry to add itself to the noise. His left thumb was tucked loosely into his belt; his right hand was a little behind his hip, the fingers hovering on the opening of the pocket into which he had slipped his gun. The cigarette between his lips slanted out at a rakish angle that would have made certain people who knew him well stand very still while they decided what scrap of cover they were going to dive for when the storm broke loose. And yet there was the ghost of a smile lingering on his mouth, and a shifting twinkle in his blue eyes, which might have misled those who were not so well informed.

  "But that's almost luxurious!" came Vogel's bland ingratiating accents. "And a shower, too ... I certainly am learning a les­son—I almost wish I could find something that you've forgotten."

  Simon prised himself off the bulkhead and let his right hand fall to his side. He didn't take out a handkerchief and mop his brow, but he wished he could have indulged in that sedative gesture. His shirt felt damp in the small of his back.

  "I hope you won't do that," he said earnestly. "Now, this is just a small single cabin——"

  The tour went on. Vogel praised the small single cabin. He studied the berth, the lockers under it, and peeped inside the wardrobe.

  The Saint began to wonder if he was simply undergoing one of Vogel's diabolically clever psychological third degrees. There was something as nightmarish as a slow-motion avalanche about Vo­gel's patient thoroughness, a suggestion of feline cruelty in his velvety smoothness, that burred the edges of Simon's nervous system into crystals of jagged steel. He felt an almost irresistible temptation to throw guile to the winds—to say: "Okay, brother. I have got Steve Murdoch here, and he is the bird who paid you a call earlier this evening; and so what?"—to do any foolish thing that would wipe that self-assured smirk off the other's face and bring the fencing match to a soul-satisfying showdown. Only the knowledge that that might very well be what Vogel was play­ing for eased the strain of holding himself in check.