16 The Saint Overboard Page 15

  VI. HOW PROFESSOR YULE TESTED THE BATHYSTOL,

  AND KURT VOGEL MADE A PROPOSITION

  DEFINITELY an uninvited complication, thought the Saint; although he admitted that it was the sort of accident that was always liable to happen when a man had an iron bar in his hand and good reason to be annoyed. Orace had had no cause to feel tenderhearted, and perhaps the deceased's cranium had been more fragile than the average. The Saint's attitude was sympathetic and broadminded. He did not feel that Orace was to be blamed; but he did feel that that momentary lapse had altered the situation somewhat drastically. Considering the point again in the placid light of the morning after, he could find no encouragement to revise his opinion. What he had no way of foreseeing was how drastic that alteration was destined to turn out.

  He folded his arms on the rail of the Falkenberg, and frowned ruminatively at a flight of gulls wheeling over the blue water. Somewhere back under that same blue water, out in the channel between Guernsey and Herm, the unfortunate visitor lay in his long sleep, moored down to the sea bed by a couple of pigs of ballast. The Corsair had been cleaned up and tidied, and every record of his intrusion effaced.

  Simon Templar had done that alone, before he went to sleep; but his own plans had kept him awake for longer.

  "The balloon's gone up, anyway," he had reasoned. "When the search party doesn't come home, Vogel will start thinking until his head gets hot. What'll he decide? That the fellow rat­ted? ... One chance in fifty . . . That he's had an accident. then? That's the forty-nine to one certainty."

  He had thought round it from every angle that he could see, trying to put himself into Vogel's place, but there was no other conclusion he could come to. What then?

  "Vogel won't talk to the police. For one thing, that would give him a hell of a tall story to think up, explaining how he knew anyone would be burgling my boat to-night. And to go on with, he doesn't want to draw the attention of the police any more than I do. And to put a lid on it, for all he may know up to this moment, I might be the police."

  There was still that thin and brittle straw of anonymity to clutch.

  "What would I do? ... I'd come right over and have a look. But Vogel won't. He's pulled that one already; and he'd have a job to find another excuse to get shown over the boat for the second time in twenty-four hours. Besides, he knows he wouldn't find anything. If I'm police or if I'm just one of the idle rich, the burglar's already lodged in jail, and there's nothing he can do about it except try to bail him out in the morning when he hears the story. And if there's a chance that I'm police, he'd have to be damn careful how he went about that. On the other hand, if I'm in the racket too, I'd be waiting for something like that, and he'd expect to be walking into a reception if he did come over."

  That seemed the most unlikely chance of all. The Saint mod­estly reckoned himself to be something unique in his profession; and there was a sober possibility that Vogel would not think of his peculiar brand of interference at all—unless he had already been identified. Simon slept with his hand on his gun and this debatable chance in mind; but he woke for the first time in the early morning. Yet this uninterrupted sleep gave him nothing more definite to work on. It was still possible that Vogel had stayed away for fear of being expected.

  Over breakfast he had had to make his own decision, and his crew glared at him incredulously.

  "Yer must be barmy," was Orace's outspoken comment.

  "Maybe I am," admitted the Saint. "But I've got to do it. If I don't keep that date this morning, I'm branded. An innocent man would keep it, even if he had caught a burglar during the night. Even a policeman would keep it—and that card may be worth holding for another few hours, though it won't last much longer."

  "It's that perishin' girl," said Orace morosely.

  Simon paused in the act of fastening a strap around his leg just below the knee—a strap which supported the sheath of the slim razor-sharp knife, Belle, which in his hands was almost as deadly as any firearm. He looked up at Orace sardonically, then ruefully; and he smiled.

  "She's not perishing, Orace. Not while I'm still on my feet."

  "Yer won't be on yer feet fer long, any'ow," said Orace, as if the thought gave him a certain gloomy satisfaction. "And wot the 'ell 'appens to my job when yer feedin' the shrimps like that bloke I 'it last night?" he added, practically.

  "I expect you could always go back to your old job as an artist's model," said the Saint.

  He straightened his sock and stood up, smiling that curiously aimless and lazy smile which only came to him when he was shaking the dice to throw double or quits with death. His hand dropped on Orace's shoulder.

  "But it won't be so bad as that. I'll put the cards in the port­hole for Mr Conway or Mr Quentin to look you up during the day, and they'll see you don't starve. And I'll be having the time of my life. I'll bet Birdie is just hoping and praying that I'll plant myself by not showing up. Instead of which, it'll take all the wind out of their sails when I step on board, bright and beautiful as a spring morning, as if I hadn't one little egg of a wicked thought on my mind. It ought to be a great moment."

  In its way, it had been quite a great moment; but it had suf­fered from the inherent brevity of its description.

  Simon watched the play of light on the water, the swiftly-changing lace of the foam patterns swirling and spawning along the side, and recalled the moment for what it was worth. It was the first time he had found any of the signs of human strain on Vogel's face. Even so, his practised eyes had to search for them; but they were there. A fractionally more than ordinary glaze of the waxen skin, as if it had been drawn a shade tighter over the high prominent cheekbones. An extra trace of shadow under the black deep-set eyes. Nothing else. Vogel was as spotlessly turned out as usual, his handshake was just as cold and firm, his genial­ity no less smooth-flowing and urbane.

  "A perfect morning, Mr Tombs."

  "A lovely morning after a gorgeous night before," murmured the Saint.

  "Ah, yes! You enjoyed our little evening?"

  "And the bed-time story."

  Vogel lifted his dark eyebrows in tolerant puzzlement—and the Saint could just imagine how well that gesture of polite per­plexity must have been rehearsed.

  Simon smiled.

  "There must be something catching about this harbour thief business," he explained, with the air of a man in the street who is simply bursting with his little adventure and is trying to ap­pear blase about it. "I had a caller myself last night."

  "My dear Mr Tombs! Did you lose anything valuable?"

  "Nothing at all," said the Saint smugly. "We caught him."

  "Then you were luckier than we were," said Arnheim, with his round flabby face full of admiration and interest. "Did he put up a fight?"

  "He didn't have a chance——"

  Simon looked up as Loretta came towards them along the deck. He had felt the beat of his heart when he saw her, had seemed to discover an absurb lightening of the perfect morning as if a screen had been taken away from before the sun. Vogel took her arm.

  "My dear, Mr Tombs has been telling us what happened after he left us last night. He had one of those harbour thieves on board his own boat—and caught him!"

  "But how exciting." She was smiling coolly, but her eyes were steady with questions. "How did you do it?"

  "He came along to my bloke, Orace, and said I wanted him—it must have been while we were at the hotel. Orace was a bit suspicious and wanted to know more about it, and then this fellow hit him over the head with something. Orace came to again before the burglar had gone, and he went on with the fight. They were still at it when I got back. The burglar had a gun and everything, but it had misfired, so——"

  "What happened?"

  Vogel had asked the question, with his face as calm as stone; and the Saint had known that his answer would mark the sharp pinnacle of the moment which he had deliberately courted. He had allowed himself time to light a cigarette before he replied.

 
"Well, we were wrestling all over the saloon trying to get his gun away from him, and Orace grabbed hold of a stanchion that he'd brought down to clean and hit him over the head. Then we tied him up and took him ashore and lugged him along to the police station. But when they tried to give him first aid, they found he was—sort of dead."

  For a little while there was an absolute silence. Even in the most humdrum circumstances, a revelation like that would natu­rally have taken a few seconds to establish itself in the minds of the audience; but the Saint had been waiting for a more preg­nant silence than that. It was while he was actually on his way over to the Falkenberg that he had finally decided to bring his story as close to the truth as possible. If he had said that the burglar was lodged alive in jail, and Vogel's ingenuity had been equal to devising a way of putting through an inquiry, the fiction could have been exposed in an hour or two. But the truth would offer an obvious inducement to wait for confirmation in a news­paper story which could not appear for another twenty-four hours, and it might well dispose of direct inquiries by making their prospects manifestly unprofitable: and, as Simon had told it, it had a ring of authenticity which an invention might not have had.

  Simon had been waiting for a pregnant silence, and he was not disappointed. Yet even he did not know until later how much that silence had contained.

  "Dead?" Arnheim repeated at last, in a strained voice.

  The Saint nodded.

  "Orace must have underestimated his strength, or something— I suppose it's quite understandable, as we were fighting all over the place. He'd bashed the devil's skull right in."

  "But—but won't you be arrested?" faltered Loretta.

  "Oh, no. They call it accidental death. It was the fellow's own fault for being a burglar. Still, it's rather a gruesome sort of thing to have on your conscience."

  Vogel put up a hand and stroked the side of his chin. His pas­sionless eyes, hard and unwinking as discs of jet, were fastened on the Saint with a terrible brightness of concentration. For the first time since they had been talking there seemed to be some­thing frozen and mechanical about his tight-lipped smile.

  "Of course it must be," he agreed. "But as you say, the man brought it on himself. You mustn't let it worry you too much."

  "What's worrying him?"

  The Professor came ambling along, with his rosy cheeks beam­ing and his premature grey beard fluttering in the breeze, and the story had to be started over again. While it was being repeated, a seaman came up and handed Vogel a telegram. Vogel opened it with a slow measured stroke of his thumb-nail: while he read it, and during the conclusion of the second telling of the adventure, he seemed to regain complete command of himself with a mental struggle that showed only in the almost imperceptibly whitened pallor of his face.

  He buttoned his jacket and glanced along the deck as Yule added his hearty voice to the general vote of exoneration.

  "We're ready to sail," he said. "Will you excuse me if I go and attend to it?"

  And in that way the big moment had touched its climax and gone on its incalculable trajectory, leaving Simon Templar to consider where it left him.

  2

  The Saint lighted a cigarette in the shield of his cupped hands, and stared thoughtfully over the sun-sprinkled ripple of the sea towards the blue-pencilled line of the horizon. An impenitent ripple of the same sunlight glinted at the back of his eyes and fidgeted impudently with the fine-drawn corners of his mouth. He had always been mad, by the Grace of God. He still was. Obviously.

  Roger, Peter, and Orace were back in St Peter Port; and though they knew where he had gone, they could do nothing to help him. And there he was, with Loretta, racing through the broad waters of the Channel on the Falkenberg while Vogel and Arnheim thought him over. In addition to whom, there was a crew of at least ten more of Vogel's deep-water gangsters, whom he personally had inspected, also on board; and presumably none of them would be afflicted with any more suburban scruples than their master. Out there on the unrecording water, as he had realised to the full when Loretta was the only passenger, anything could happen: a shot could be fired that no unsuspected wit­nesses would hear, a cry for help could waste itself in the vast emptiness of the air, an unfortunate accident could be registered in the log which no investigations on shore could disprove. There were no prying busybodies peeping from behind curtains of seaweed to come forward later and upset a well-constructed story. The sea kept its secrets—only a few hours ago he had availed himself of that inviolable silence. . . . Verily, he was an accredited member of the company of divine lunatics.

  Wherefore the Saint allowed that twinkle of sublime reckless­ness to play at the back of his eyes, and drew sea air and smoke into his lungs with the seraphic zest which he had always found in the fierce tang of danger.

  The deep-voiced hum of the engines died away suddenly to a soft murmur, and the curling bow wave sank down and shortened to a feather of ripples along the side. Simon looked about him and turned to the Professor, who was puffing a stubby briar at his side.

  "Is this where you take your dip?"

  Yule nodded. Vogel was in the wheelhouse with Loretta, and Arnheim had moved out of the sun to spread his perspiring bulk in a deck chair.

  "This should be it. We went over the chart last night, and the deepest sounding we could find was ninety-four fathoms. It isn't much, but it'll do for the preliminary test."

  Simon gazed out to sea with his eyebrows drawn down against the glare. Under them his set blue eyes momentarily gave up their carefree twinkle. He realised that there was a third person in the same danger as himself, about whom he had forgotten to worry very much before.

  "Have you known Vogel long?" he asked casually.

  "About six months now. He came to me after my first descent and offered to help, and I was very glad to accept his offer. He's been a kind of fairy godmother to me. And all I've been able to do in return was to name a new deep-water fish that I discovered after him—Bathyphasma vogeli!" The Professor chuckled in his refreshingly boyish way.

  "You haven't started to think about the commercial possibili­ties of your invention yet?"

  "No. No. I'm afraid it's just a scientific toy." Yule's eyes wid­ened a little. "Are there any commercial possibilities?"

  The Saint hesitated. In the face of that child-like unworldli­ness he didn't know where to begin. And he knew that to be caught in the middle of an argument, into which Vogel or Arnheim might be drawn, would be more surely fatal than to keep silence.

  "I was only thinking——" he began slowly; and then he heard footsteps behind him, and turned his head to see Vogel and Lo­retta coming out on to the deck. He shrugged vaguely, and said goodbye to the lost chance with a grim question in his mind of whether it had ever really come within his reach. "For instance, could you take movies down there? They'd be something quite new in travelogues."

  "I don't know," said Yule seriously. "What do you think, Mr Vogel?"

  "We must ask someone with more technical knowledge." Vo­gel's bland glance touched on the Saint for a moment with a puzzling dryness, and returned to his protegee. "Would you like to check over the gear before lunch?"

  The Professor knocked out his pipe, and they moved aft. Arn­heim stayed in his chair in the shade, with his mouth half open and his hat tilted over his eyes.

  Simon fell in beside Loretta and followed the procession. It was the first time that day that he had had a chance to speak to her alone—Vogel had kept her close beside him from the mo­ment they left the harbour, and Arnheim had gone puffing after her with some conversational excuse or other if she had ever moved more than a couple of yards away. The Saint dropped his cigarette, and glanced back as he picked it up. Arnheim had not moved, and his round stomach was distending and relaxing with peaceful regularity . . . Simon rejoined the girl, and slackened his stride.

  "Perhaps you heard how I'd been thinking," he said.

  His hand brushed hers as they walked, and he took her fingers and held her bac
k.

  "Is this safe?" she asked, hardly moving her lips.

  "As safe as anything on this suicides' picnic. It'd be more suspicious if I didn't try to speak to you at all." He pointed back towards the turreted fortress of the Casquet lighthouse rising from its plinth of rocks to the south, as if he were making some remark about it, and said quietly: "There's one person who may be sitting on the same volcano as we are; but he doesn't know it."

  "Professor Yule?"

  "Yes. Have you thought about him?"

  "Quite a lot."

  "It's more than I've done. Until just now. Where does he come in—or go out?"

  "I'd like to know."

  "I wish I could tell you. We know Birdie isn't interested in scientific toys. When this new bathystol is passed okay, he'll 've had all he wants out of Yule. Then he'll get rid of him. But how? And how soon?"

  He turned away from the lighthouse and they walked on again. Vogel was watching them. The Saint laughed as if at some trivial flippancy, and said in the same sober undertone: "I'm worried. You can't help liking the old boy. If anything sticky happened to him, I'd feel I had a share in it. If you got a chance you might manage to talk to him. God knows how."

  "I'll try." She smiled back at him, and went on in her natural voice as they came within earshot of Vogel: "But it must be hard for the lighthouse-keeper's wife."

  "I expect it is, if she's attractive."

  Simon came to a lazy halt in front of the apparatus which three seamen were manoeuvring out on to the deck—a creation like some sort of weird Martian robot drawn by an imaginative artist. The upper part of it combined torso and head in one great sphere of shining metal, from the sides of which projected arms that looked like strings of huge gleaming beads socketing together and terminating in steel pincers. It balanced on two short bulbous legs of similar construction. The spherical trunk was studded with circular quartz windows like multiple eyes, and tubes of flexible metal coiled round it from various points and connected with a six-foot drum of insulated cable on the deck.