16 The Saint Overboard Read online

  Then he looked at the Saint. Was that intended to be a tragic appeal, or was it derision and sinister watchfulness in the black eyes? Simon felt his self-command snapping under the intolera­ble strain. He turned to the loud speaker and stared at it in the most vivid torment of mind that he had ever known. Was it possible that some expert manipulation of the wiring might have made it possible to cut off the Professor's voice, while one of Vogel's crew somewhere on the ship spoke through it instead?

  "The cylinder has just given out."

  Yule's voice came through again unfalteringly, almost casually. The Saint saw that Loretta's eyes were also fixed on the loud speaker: her chest was scarcely moving, as if her own breathing had stopped in sympathy with what those six words must have meant to the man helplessly imprisoned in his grotesque armour five hundred feet below the bountiful air.

  "Can't you put the cable on to another winch?" asked the Saint, and hardly recognised his own voice.

  "There's no other winch on the ship that would take the load."

  "We can rig up a tackle if you've got a couple of large blocks."

  "It takes more than twenty minutes to raise the bathystol from this depth," Vogel said flatly. "With a block and tackle it would take over an hour."

  Simon knew that he was right. And his brain worked on, mechanically, with its grim computation. In that confined space it would take no more than a few minutes to consume all the oxygen left in the air. And then, with the percentage of carbon dioxide leaping towards its maximum ...

  "I'm getting very weak and giddy." The Professor's voice was fainter, but it was still steady and unflinching. "You will have to be very quick now, or it will be no use."

  Something about the scene was trying to force itself into the Saint's attention. Was he involuntarily measuring his distances and marking down positions, with the instinct of a seasoned fighter? The group of seamen at the stern. One of them by the drum of insulated cable, further up the deck. Vogel at the head of the companion. Arnheim . . . Why had Arnheim moved across to stand in front of the winch controls, so that his broad squat bulk hid them completely?

  There was another sound trying to break through the silence— a queer jerky gasping sound. A second or two went by before the Saint traced it to its source and identified it. The terrible throaty sound of a man battling for breath, relayed like every other sound from the bathystol by the impersonal instrument on the table . . .

  In some way it wiped out the last of his indecision. He was prepared to be wrong; prepared also not to care. Any violence, whatever it might bring, was better than waiting for his nerves to be slowly racked to pieces by that devilish inquisition.

  He moved slowly forwards—towards the bulkhead where the winch controls were. Towards Arnheim. And Arnheim did not move. The Saint smiled for the first time since the Professor had gone down, and altered his course a couple of points to pass round him. Arnheim shifted himself also, and still blocked the way. His round pouting mouth with the bruise under it opened like a trout's.

  "It isn't easy to wait, is it?" he said.

  "It isn't," agreed the Saint, with a cold and murderous preci­sion; and the automatic flashed from his pocket to grind its muz­zle into the other's yielding belly. "So we'll stop waiting. Walk backwards a little way, Otto."

  Arnheim's jowl dropped. He looked down at the gun in his stomach, and looked up again with his eyes round as saucers and his wet mouth sagging wider. He coughed.

  "Really, Mr Tombs——"

  "Have you gone mad?"

  Vogel's dry monotone lanced across the feeble protest with calculated contempt. And the Saint grinned mirthlessly.

  "Not yet. But I'm liable to if Otto doesn't get out of my way in the next two seconds. And then you're liable to lose Otto."

  "I know this is a ghastly situation." Vogel was still speaking calmly, with the soothing and rather patronising urbanity with which he might have tried to snub a drunkard or a lunatic. "But you won't help it by going into hysterics. Everything possible is being done."

  "One thing isn't being done," answered the Saint, in the same bleak voice, "and I'm going to do it. Get away from those con­trols, Otto, and watch me start that winch!"

  "My dear Mr Tombs——"

  "Behind you!"

  Loretta's desperate cry pealed in the Saint's ears with a frantic urgency that spun him round with his back to the deckhouse. He had a glimpse of a man springing at him with an upraised belaying-pin; and his finger was tightening on the trigger when Arn­heim dragged down his wrist and struck him a terrific left-handed blow with a rubber truncheon. There was an instant when his brain seemed to rock inside his skull. Then darkness.

  4

  "I trust you are feeling better," said Vogel.

  "Much better," said the Saint. "And full of admiration. Oh, it was smooth, very smooth, Birdie—you don't mind if I call you Birdie, do you? It's so whimsical."

  He sat in an armchair in the wheelhouse, with a brandy and soda in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Both of them had been provided by Kurt Vogel. He was not even tied up. But there the free hospitality ended, for Vogel kept one hand obtru­sively in his jacket pocket, and so did Arnheim.

  Simon Templar allowed himself a few more moments to digest the profound smoothness of the ambush. He had been fairly caught, and he admitted it—caught by a piece of machiavellian strategy that was ingenious enough to have netted even such a wary bird as himself without disgrace. Oh, it had been exceed­ingly smooth; a bait that flesh and blood and human feeling could scarcely have resisted. And the climax had supervened with an accuracy of co-ordination that could hardly have been slicker if it had been rehearsed—from which he deduced that it proba­bly had. If he had been unprepared, the seaman with the belay­ing-pin would have got him; if he was warned, Arnheim had his chance . . .

  "And the Professor?" he asked.

  Vogel lifted his shoulders.

  "Unfortunately the fault was traced too late, Mr Templar."

  "So you knew," said the Saint softly.

  The other's thin lips widened.

  "Of course. When you were photographed in Dinard—you remember? I received the answer to my inquiry this morning. You were with us when I opened the telegram. That was when I knew that there would have to be an accident."

  Naturally. When once the Saint was known, a man like Vogel would not have run the risk of letting the Professor be warned, or snatched out of his power. He had been ready in every detail for the emergency—was there anything he had not been ready for? . . . Simon had a moment's harrowing vision of that naive and kindly man gasping out his life down there in the cold gloom of the sea. and the steel frosted in his blue eyes . . .

  He thought of something else. Loretta's piercing cry; the last voice he had heard before he was knocked down, still rang through his aching head. If he had been known since the morn- . ing, the stratagem had had no object in making him give himself away. But it had provided a subsidiary snare for Loretta while it was achieving the object of disarming him. And she also had been caught. Simon acknowledged every refinement of the con­spiracy with inflexible resolution. Kurt Vogel had scooped the pool in one deal, with the most perfectly stacked deck of cards that the Saint had ever reviewed in a lifetime of going up against stacked decks.

  He realised that Vogel was watching him, performing the sim­ple task of following his thoughts; and smiled with unaltered coolness.

  "So where," he murmured, "do you think we go from here?"

  "That depends on you," said Vogel.

  He put a match to his cigar and sat on the arm of a chair, leaning forward until the Saint was sitting under the shadow of his great eagle's beak. Looking at him with the same lazy smile still on his lips, Simon was aware of the vibration of the power­ful engines, and saw out of the corner of his eye that a seaman was standing at the wheel, with his back to them, his eyes intent upon the compass card. Wherever they were going, at any rate they were already on their way . . .

  "You
have given me a good deal of trouble, Templar. Not by your childish interference—that would be hardly worth talking about—but by an accident for which it was responsible."

  "You mean the Professor?" Simon suggested grittily.

  Vogel snapped his fingers.

  "No. That's nothing. Your presence merely caused me to get rid of him a little earlier than I should otherwise have done. He would have come to the same end, anyway, within the next few weeks. The accident I am referring to is the one which hap­pened last night."

  "Your amateur burglar?"

  "My burglar. I should hardly call him an amateur—as a mat­ter of fact he was one of the best safe-breakers in Europe. An invaluable man . . . And therefore I want him back."

  The Saint sipped his brandy.

  "Birdie," he said gently, "you're calling the wrong number. What you want is a spiritualist."

  "You were telling the truth, then?"

  "I always do. My Auntie Ethel used to say——"

  "You killed him?"

  "That's a crude way of putting it. If the Professor had an unfortunate accident this afternoon, so did your boy friend last night."

  "And then you took him ashore?"

  "No. That was the only part of my story where I wandered a little way from the truth. A bloke with my reputation can't afford to deliver dead bodies at police stations, even if they died of old age—not without wasting a lot of time and answering a lot of pointed questions. So we gave him a sailor's funeral. We rowed him out some way from the harbour and fed him to the fish."

  The other's eyes bored into him like splinters of black marble, as if they were trying to split open his brain and impale the first fragment of a lie; but Simon met them with the untroubled steadiness of a clear conscience. And at last Vogel drew back a little.

  "I believe you. I suspected that there was some truth in your story when you first told it. That is why you are alive now."

  "You're too generous, Birdie."

  "But how long you will remain alive is another matter."

  "I knew there was a catch in it somewhere," said the Saint, and inhaled thoughtfully from his cigarette.

  Vogel got up and walked over to one of the broad windows; and Simon transferred his contemplative regard to Otto Arn­heim, estimating how long it might take him to bridge the dis­tance between them. While Vogel and the man at the wheel both had their backs turned to the room, could a very agile man . . . ?

  And Simon knew that he couldn't. Reclining as he was in the depths of one of those luxuriously streamlined armchairs, he couldn't even hope to get up on his feet before he was filled full of lead. He tried hauling himself up experimentally, as if in search of an ashtray, and Arnheim had a gun thrusting out at him before he was even sitting upright. The Saint dropped his ash on the carpet and lay back again, scratching his leg rumina­tively. At least the knife strapped to his calf was still there—if it came to a pinch and the opportunity offered, he might do some­thing with that. But even while he knew that his life would be a speculative buy at ten cents in the open market, he was being seized with an overpowering curiosity to know why Vogel had left it even that nominal value.

  After about a minute Vogel turned round and came back.

  "You are responsible for the loss of one of my best men," he said with peremptory directness. "It will be difficult to replace him, and it may take considerable time. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to wait. But fortunately, I have you here instead."

  "So we can still play cut-throat," drawled the Saint.

  Vogel stood looking down at him impassively, the cigar glow­ing evenly between his teeth.

  "Just now you wanted to know where we were going, Templar. The answer is that we are going to a point a little way south­west of the Casquet Lighthouse. When we stop again there, we shall be directly over the wreck of the Chalfont Castle—you will remember the ship that sank there in March. There are five mil­lion pounds' worth of bullion in her strong-room which I intend to remove before the official salvage operations are begun. The only difficulty is that your clumsiness has deprived me of the only member of my crew who could have been relied upon to open the strong-room. I'm hoping that that is where your inter­ference will prove to have its compensations. I said that the man you killed was one of the best safe-breakers in Europe. But I have heard that the Saint is one of the greatest experts in the world."

  So that was it ... Simon dropped his cigarette-end into his empty glass, and took out his case to replace it. A miniature power plant was starting up under his belt and sending a new and different tingle along his arteries.

  It was his turn to follow Vogel's thoughts, and the back trail was blazed and signposted liberally enough.

  "You want me to go down and give a demonstration?" he said lightly, and Vogel nodded.

  "That is what I intend you to do."

  "In the bathystol?"

  "That won't be necessary. The Chalfont Castle is lying in twenty fathoms, and an ordinary diving suit will be quite sufficient."

  "Are you offering me a partnership?"

  "I'm offering you a chance to help your partner."

  Something inside the Saint turned cold. Perhaps it was not until he heard that last quiet flat sentence that he had realised how completely Vogel had mastered the situation. Every twist and turn of strategy fitted together with the geometrical exacti­tude of a jigsaw puzzle. Vogel hadn't missed one finesse. He had dominated every move of the opposition with the arrogant ease of a Capablanca playing chess with a kindergarten school.

  Simon Templar had never known the meaning of surrender; but at that moment, in the full appreciation of the supreme gen­eralship against which he had pitted himself, the final understanding of how efficiently the dice had been cogged, he was as near to admitting the hopelessness of his challenge as he would ever be. All he had left was the indomitable spirit that would keep him smiling and fighting until death proved to his satisfac­tion that he couldn't win all the time. It hadn't been proved yet . . . He looked fearlessly into the alabaster face of the man in front of him, and told himself that it had still got to be proved.

  "And what happens if I refuse?" he asked quietly.

  Vogel shrugged.

  "I don't need to make any melodramatic threats. You are intelligent enough to be able to make them for yourself. I prefer to assume that you will agree. If you do what I tell you, Loretta will be put ashore as soon as it is convenient—alive."

  "Is that all?"

  "I don't need to offer any more."

  The answer was calm, uncompromising; blood-chilling in its ruthless economy of detail. It left volumes unsaid, and expressed every necessary word of them.

  Simon looked at him for a long time.

  "You've got all these situations down to their lowest common denominator, haven't you?" he said, very slowly. "And what inducement have I got to take your word for anything?"

  "None whatever," replied Vogel carelessly. "But you will take it, because if you refuse you will certainly be dead within the next half-hour, and while you are alive you can always hope and scheme and believe in miracles. It will be interesting to watch a few more of your childish manoeuvres." He studied his watch, and glanced out of the forward windows. "You have about fifteen minutes to make your choice."

  VII. HOW SIMON AND LORETTA TALKED TOGETHER,

  AND LORETTA CHOSE LIFE

  "ONCE upon a time," said the Saint, "there was a lugubrious yak named Elphinphlopham, who grazed on the plateaus of Tibet and meditated over the various philosophies and religions of the world. After many years of study and investigation he eventually decided that the only salvation for his soul lay in the Buddhist faith, and he was duly received into the Eightfold Path by the Grand Lama, who was fortunately residing in the district. It was then revealed to Elphinphlopham that the approved method of attaining Nirvana was to spend many hours a day sitting in a most uncomfortable position, especially for yaks, whilst engaging in an ecstatic contemplation of the navel. Dutifully search
ing for this mystic umbilicus, the unhappy Elphinphlopham discovered for the first time that his abdomen was completely overgrown with the characteristic shaggy mane of his species; so that it was physically impossible for him to fix his eyes upon the prescribed organ, or indeed for him to discover whether nature had ever endowed him with this indispensable adjunct to the Higher Thought. This awful doubt worried Elphinphlopham so badly——"

  "Nothing worries you very much, does it?" said Loretta gently.

  The Saint smiled.

  "My dear, I gave that up after the seventh time I was told I had about ten minutes to live. And I'm still alive."

  He lay stretched out comfortably on the bunk, with his hands behind his head and the smoke spiralling up from his cigarette. It was the same cabin in which he had knocked out Otto Arnheim not so long ago—the same cabin from which he had so successfully rescued Steve Murdoch. With the essential dif­ference that this time he was the one in need of rescuing, and there was no one outside who would be likely to do the job. He recognised it as Kurt Vogel's inevitable crowning master-stroke to have sent him down there, with Loretta, while he made the choice that had been offered him. He looked at the steady hu­mour in her grey eyes, the slim vital beauty of her, and knew by the breathless drag of his heart how accurately that master‑stroke had been placed; but he could never let her know.

  She sat on the end of the bunk, leaning against the bulkhead and looking down at him, with her hands clasped across her knees. He could see the passing of time on her wrist watch.

  "How long do you think we shall live now?" she said.

  "Oh, indefinitely—according to Birdie. Until I'm a toothless old gaffer dribbling down my beard, and you're a silver-haired duenna of the Women's League of Purity. If I do this job for him, he's ready to send us an affectionate greeting card on our jubilee."

  "If you believe him."

  "And you don't."

  "Do you?"

  Simon twitched his shoulders. He thought of the bargain which he had really been offered, and kept his gaze steadfastly on the ceiling.

  "Yes. In a way I think he'll keep his word."