16 The Saint Overboard Page 6

  "Just a home girl's husband," murmured the Saint lightly. He tapped a cigarette on his thumb-nail, and slanted his brows side­long at the objector. "Who's the young heart's delight?"

  She shrugged.

  "Name of Steve Murdoch."

  "Of Ingerbeck's?"

  "Yes."

  "Simon to you," said the Saint, holding out his hand.

  Murdoch accepted it sullenly. Their grips clashed, battled in a sudden straining of iron wrists; but neither of them flinched. The Saint's smile twitched at his lips, and some of the sullenness went out of the other's stare.

  "Okay, Saint," Murdoch said dourly. "I know you're tough. But I don't like fresh guys."

  "I hate them, myself," said the Saint unblushingly. He sat on the arm of a chair, making patterns in the atmosphere with ciga­rette-smoke. "Been here long?"

  "Landed at Cherbourg this morning."

  "Did you ask for Loretta downstairs?"

  "Yeah."

  "Notice anyone prick up his ears?"

  Murdoch shook his head.

  "I didn't look."

  "You should have," said the Saint reprovingly. "I didn't ask, but I looked. There was a bloke kicking his heels in a corner when I arrived, and he had watchdog written across his chest in letters a foot high. He didn't see me, because I walked through with my face buried inside a newspaper; but he must have seen you. He'd 've seen anyone who wasn't expecting him, and he was placed just right to hear who was asked for at the desk."

  There was a short silence. Loretta leaned back against a table with her hands on the edge and her long legs crossed.

  "Did you know Steve was here?" she asked.

  "No. He only makes it more difficult. But I discovered that a ferret-faced bird with the most beautiful line in gent's half hose was sitting on my tail, and that made me think. I slipped him and came round to warn you." Simon looked at her steadily. "There's only a trace of suspicion attached to me at the moment, but Vogel's taking no chances. He wants to make sure. There's probably a hell of a lot of suspicion about you. so you weren't likely to be forgotten. And apparently you haven't been. Now Steve has rolled up to lend a hand—he's branded himself by asking for you, and he'll be a marked man from this moment."

  "That's okay," said Murdoch phlegmatically. "I can look after myself without a nurse."

  "I'm sure you can, dear old skunk," said the Saint amiably. "But that's not the point. Loretta, at least, isn't supposed to be looking after herself. She's the undercover ingenue. She isn't supposed to have anything to look after except her honour. Once she starts any Mata Hari business, that boat is sunk."

  "Well?"

  Simon flicked ash on to the carpet.

  "The only tune is the one I'm playing. Complete and childlike innocence. With a pan like yours, Steve, you'll have a job to get your mouth round the flute, but you've got to try it. Because any sucker play you make is going to hit Loretta. The first thing is to clean yourself up. If you've got a star or anything like that of Ingerbeck's, flush it down the lavatory. If you've got anything in writing that could link you up, memorise it and burn it. Strip yourself of every mortal thing that might tie you on to this party. That goes for you too, Loretta, because sooner or later the ungodly are going to try and get a line on you from your lug­gage, if they haven't placed you before that. And then, Steve, you blow."

  "What?"

  "Fade. Waft. Pass out into the night. Loretta can go down­stairs with you, and you can take a fond farewell in the foyer, with a few well-chosen lines of dialogue from which any listeners can gather that you're an old friend of her father's taking a holi­day in Guernsey, and hearing she was in Dinard you hopped an excursion and came over for the day. And then you beetle down to the pier, catch the next ferry to St Malo, and shoot on to the return steamer to St Peter Port like a cork out of a bottle. Vo­gel will be there to-morrow."

  "How do you know that?" asked Loretta quickly.

  "He told me. We got into conversation before lunch." Simon's gaze lifted to hers with azure lights of scapegrace solemnity play­ing in it. "He was trying to draw me out, and I was just devilling him, but neither of us got very far. I think he was telling me the truth, though. If I chase him to St Peter Port, he'll be able to put my innocence through some more tests. So when you're say­ing goodbye to Steve, he might ask you if you're likely to take a trip to Guernsey, and you can say you don't think you'll be able to—that may make them think that you haven't heard anything from me."

  Murdoch took out a cigar and bit the end from it with a bull­dog clamp of his jaws. His eyes were dark again with distrust.

  "It's a stall, Loretta," he said sourly. "How d'ya know Vogel isn't capable of having an undercover man, the same as us. All he wants to do is get me out of the way, so he can take you alone."

  "You flatter yourself, brother," said the Saint coldly "If I wanted to take her, you wouldn't stop me. Nor would you stop Vogel."

  "No?"

  "No."

  "Well, I'm not running."

  Loretta glanced from one man to the other. The animosity between them was creeping up again, hardening the square obstinacy of Murdoch's jaw, glittering like chips of elusive steel in the Saint's eyes. They were like two jungle animals, each superb in his own way and conscious of his strength, but of two different species whose feud dated back too far into the grey dawns of history for any quick forgetting.

  "Yes, you are, Steve," said the girl.

  "When I start taking orders from that——"

  "You aren't." Her voice was quiet and soothing, but there was a thread of calm decision under the silky texture. "You're taking orders from me. The Saint's right. We'd better break off again, and hope we can alibi this meeting."

  Murdoch was staring at her half incredulously.

  "Orders?" he repeated.

  "That's right, Steve. At present I'm running this end of it. Until Martin Ingerbeck takes me off the assignment, you do what I tell you."

  "I think you're crazy."

  She didn't answer. She took a cigarette from a bos on the table and walked to the window, standing there with her arms lifted and her hands on either side of the frame. The silver dragon lifted on her waist.

  Murdoch's lips flattened the butt of his cigar. His hands clutched the arms of his chair, and he started to get up slowly. With a sudden burst of vicious energy he grabbed for his hat and thumped it on his head.

  "If you put it that way, I can't argue," he growled. "But you're going to wish I had!" He transferred his glare from her unconscious back to the Saint's face. "As for you—if anything happens to Loretta through my not being here——"

  "We'll be sure to let you know about it," said the Saint, and opened the door for him.

  Murdoch stumped through with his fists clenched; and the Saint half closed it as Loretta turned from the window and came across the room. He took her hands.

  "I shall be gone while you're seeing Steve off," he said. "I can't risk the foyer again, but I spotted a fire escape."

  "Must you?" The faint irony of her voice was baffled by the enigma of her smiling mouth.

  He nodded.

  "Not because I want to. But they ought to see me going back to the Corsair before there's too much excitement about my shadow having lost me. You're still sure you mean to go to‑night?"

  "Quite sure."

  "Did I dream the rest of it, after you'd gone last night?"

  "I don't know, dear. What did you have for dinner?"

  "Lobster mayonnaise. I dreamt that you came back from the Falkenberg. Safe. And always beautiful. To me."

  "And then the danger really started."

  "I dreamt that you didn't think it was too dangerous."

  Her eyes searched his face, with the laughter stilled in them for a moment. The tip of the dragon's tongue stirred on her shoulder as she drew breath. One hand released itself to trace the half-mocking line of his mouth.

  "But I am afraid," she said.

  Suddenly he felt her lips crushed and
melting against his, and her body pressed against him, for one soundless instant; and then, before he could move, she had brushed past him and gone.

  Orace was waiting for him anxiously when he got back.

  "Yer bin a long time," Orace remarked shatteringly.

  "Thousands of years," said the Saint.

  He sat out on deck again after he had taken his last daylight swim, and sipped a glass of sherry, and dined on one of Orace's superlative meals. The speed tender had set out again from the Falkenberg and returned about half-past seven with Vogel, in evening dress, sitting beside Loretta. Through the binoculars, from one of the saloon portholes, he had seen Vogel smiling and talking, his great nose profiled against the water.

  He sat out, with a cigarette clipped and half-forgotten between his lips and his eyes creased against the smoke, as motionless as a bronze Indian, while the water turned to dark glass and then to burnished steel. There was no fog that night. The river ran blue-black under the wooded rocks of the Vicomté and the ramparts and granite headland of St Malo. Lights sprang up, multiplying, on the island, and were mirrored in St Servan and Dinard, and spread luminous rapiers across the river. The hulls of the craft anchored in the Ranee sank back into the gloom until the night swallowed them, and only their winking lights remained on the water. The lighthouses of the inlet were awake, green and red flashes stabbing irregularly across the bay and twinkling down from Grand Larron. A drift of music from one of the Casinos lingered across the estuary; and the anchorage where the Falk­enberg should be was a constellation of lights.

  Loretta was there; but Simon saw no need for her to be alone.

  The idea grew with him as the dark deepened and his imagina­tion worked through it. In his own way he was afraid, impatient with his enforced helplessness. . . . Presently he sent another cigarette spinning like a glow-worm through the blackness, and went below to take off his clothes. He tested the working of his automatic, brought a greased cartridge into the breech, secured the safety-catch, and fastened the gun to the belt of his trunks. The dark water received him without a sound.

  Curiously enough, it was during that stealthy swim that he had a sudden electric remembrance of a news photographer who had been so unusually blind to the presence of all celebrities save one. Perhaps it was because his mind had been unconsciously revolving the subject of Vogel's amazing thoroughness. But he had a startlingly vivid picture of a camera aiming towards him— fully as much towards him as towards Professor Yule—and a sudden reckless smile moved his lips as he slid through the water.

  If that news photographer was not a real news photographer, and the picture had been developed and printed and rushed across to England by air that evening, a correspondent could show it around in certain circles in London with the virtual cer­tainty of having it identified within forty-eight hours . . . And if the result of that investigation was cabled to Kurt Vogel at St Peter Port, a good many interrogation marks might be wiped out with deadly speed.

  III. HOW KURT VOGEL WAS NOT SO CALM, AND

  OTTO ARNHEIM ACQUIRED A HEADACHE

  A CEILING of cloud had formed over the sky, curtaining off the moon and leaving no natural light to relieve the blackness. Out in the river it was practically pitch dark, except where the riding lights of anchored craft sprang their small fragments of scattered luminance out of the gloom.

  The Saint slid through the water without sound, without leav­ing so much as a ripple behind him. All of the rhythmic swing of his arms and legs was beneath the surface, and only his head broke the oily film of the still water; so that not even as much as the pit-pat of two drops of water could have betrayed his passing to anyone a yard away. He was as inconspicuous and unassertive as a clump of sea-weed drifting up swiftly and si­lently with the tide.

  He was concentrating so much on silence that he nearly al­lowed himself to be run down by some nocturnal sportsman who came skimming by in a canoe when he was only a stone's throw from the Falkenberg. The boat leapt at him out of the darkness so unexpectedly that he almost shouted the warning that came instinctively to his lips; the prow brushed his hair, and he submerged himself a fraction of a second before the paddle speared down at him. When he came up again the canoe had vanished as silently as it had come. He caught a glimpse of it again as it arrowed across the reflected lights of the Casino de la Vicomté, and sent a string of inaudible profanities sizzling across the wa­ter at the unknown pilot, apparently without causing him to drop dead by remote control.

  Then the hull of the Falkenberg loomed up for undivided at­tention. At the very edge of the circle of visibility shed by its lights, he paused to draw a deep breath; and then even his head disappeared under the water, and his hands touched the side before he let himself float gently up again and open his lungs.

  He rose under the stern, and trod water while he listened for any sound that would betray the presence of a watcher on the deck. Above the undertones of the harbour he heard the murmur of voices coming through open portholes in two different direc­tions, the dull creak of metal and the seep of the tide making under the hull; but there was no trace of the sharper sound that would have been made by a man out in the open, the rustle of cloth or the incautious easing of a cramped limb. For a full three minutes the Saint stayed there, waiting for the least faint disturbance of the ether that would indicate the wakefulness of a reception committee prepared to welcome any such unauthor­ised prowler as himself. And he didn't hear any such thing.

  The Saint dipped a hand to his belt and brought it carefully out of the water with a mask which he had tucked in there be­fore he left the Corsair. It was made of black rubber, as thin and supple as the material of a toy balloon; and when he pulled it on over his head it covered every inch of his face from the end of his nose upwards, and held itself in place by its own gentle elasticity. If by any miscalculation he was to be seen by any member of the crew, there was no need for him to be recognised.

  Then he set off again to work himself round the boat. There were three lighted portholes aft, and he stopped by the first of them to find a finger-hold. When he had got it he hauled himself up out of the water, inch by inch, till he could bend one modest eye over the rim.

  He looked into a large cabin running the whole width of the vessel. A treble tier of bunks lined two of the three sides which he could see, and seemed to be repeated on the side from which he was looking in. On two of them half-dressed men were stretched out, reading and smoking. At a table in the centre four others, miscellaneously attired in shirtsleeves, jerseys, and sin­glets, were playing a game of cards, while a fifth was trying to poach enough space out of one side to write a letter. Simon ab­sorbed their faces in a travelling glance that dwelt on each one in turn, and mentally ranked them for as tough a harvest of hard-case sea stiffs as anyone could hope to glean from the scourings of the seven seas. They came up to his expectations in every single respect, and two thin fighting lines creased themselves into the corners of his mouth as he lowered himself back into the river as stealthily as he had pulled himself out of it.

  The third porthole lighted a separate smaller cabin with only four bunks, and when he looked in he had to peer between the legs of a man who was reclining on the upper berth across the porthole. By the light brick-red hosiery at the ends of the legs he identified the sleuth who had trailed him that afternoon; and on the opposite side of the cabin the man who had been busily doing nothing in the foyer of the Hotel de la Mer, with one shoe off and the other unlaced, was intent on filling his pipe.

  He couldn't look into any of the principal rooms without ac­tually climbing out on to the deck, but from the scraps of con­versation that floated out through the windows he gathered that was where the entertainment of Loretta Page was still pro­ceeding. Professor Yule appeared to be concluding some anec­dote about his submarine experiences.

  ". . . and when he squashed his nose against the glass, he just stayed there and stared. I never imagined a fish could get so much indignation into its face."
/>   There was a general laugh, out of which rose Vogel's smooth toneless suavity: "Wouldn't even that tempt you to go down, Otto?"

  "Not me," affirmed a fat fruity voice which the Saint had not heard before. "I'd rather stay on top of the water. Wouldn't you, Miss Page?"

  "It must be awfully interesting," said Loretta—and Simon could picture her, sitting straight and slim, with the light lifting the glints of gold from her brown head. "But I couldn't do it. I should be frightened to death. . . ."

  The Saint passed on, swimming slowly and leisurely up to the bows. He eeled himself round the stem and drifted down again, close up in the shadow of the other side. As he paddled under the saloon windows on the return journey, Vogel was offering more liqueurs. The man in the pink socks was snoring, and his companion had lighted his pipe. The card game in the crew's quarters finished a deal with a burst of raucous chaff, the letter-writer licked his envelope, and the men who had been reading still read.

  Simon Templar edged one hand out of the water to scratch the back of his ear. During the whole of that round tour of inspec­tion he hadn't collected one glimpse or decibel of any sight or sound that didn't stand for complete relaxation and goodwill towards men. Except the faces of some of the crew, which may not have been their faults. But as for any watch on deck, he was ready to swear that it simply didn't exist.

  Meaning . . . Perhaps that Loretta had been caught the night before by accident, through some sleepless mariner happening to amble up for a breath of fresh air. But even if that was the explanation, a watch would surely have been posted afterwards to frustrate any second attempt. Unless . . . and he could only see that one reason for the moment . . . unless Loretta had been promoted from a suspect to a certainty—in which case, since she was there on board, the watch could take an evening off.

  The Saint gave it up. By every ordinary test, anyhow, he could find nothing in his way; and the only thing to do was to push on and search further.

  He hooked his fingers over the counter and drew himself up until he could hitch one set of toes on to the deck. Only for an instant he might have been seen there, upright against the dark water; and then he had flitted noiselessly across the dangerous open space and merged himself into the deep shadow of the su­perstructure.