16 The Saint Overboard Read online

  Again he waited. If any petrified watcher had escaped detec­tion on his first tour, and had seen his arrival on board, no alarm had been raised. Either the man would be deliberating whether to fetch help, or he would be waiting to catch him when he moved forward. And if the Saint stayed where he was, either the man would go for help or he would come on to investigate. In either of which events he would announce his presence unmis­takably to the Saint's tingling ears.

  But nothing happened. Simon stood there like a statue while the seconds ticked into minutes on his drumming pulses, and the wetness drained down his legs and formed a pool around his feet, hardly breathing; but only the drone of conversation in the sa­loon, and a muffled guffaw from the crew's quarters under his feet, reached him out of the stillness.

  At last he relaxed, and allowed himself to glance curiously at his surroundings. Over his head, the odd canvas-shrouded con­trivance which he had observed from a distance reached out aft like an oversized boom—but there was no mast at the near end to account for it. The Falkenberg carried no sail. He stretched up and wriggled his fingers through a gap in the lacing, and felt something like a square steel girder with wire cables stretched inside it; and suddenly the square protuberance, likewise covered with tarpaulin, on which the after end of the boom rested took on a concrete significance. At the end up against the deckhouse he found wheels, and the wire cables turned over the wheels, and ran down close beside the bulkhead to vanish through plated eyes in the deck at his feet ... He was exploring a nifty, well-oiled, and up-to-date ten-ton grab!

  "Well, -well, well," murmured the Saint admiringly, to his guardian angel.

  And that curiously low flattened stern ... It all fitted in. Divers could be dropped over that counter with the minimum of difficulty; and the grab could telescope out or swing round, and run its claw round to be steered on to whatever the divers offered it. While, forward of all those gadgets, there were a pair of high-speed engines and a super-stream-lined hull to facilitate a lightning getaway if an emergency emerged. . . . Which, how­ever priceless a conglomeration of assets, is not among the amen­ities usually advertised with luxurious pleasure cruisers.

  A slow smile tugged at the Saint's lips; and he restrained him­self with a certain effort from performing an impromptu horn­pipe. The last lingering speck of doubt in his mind had been catastrophically obliterated in those few seconds. Loretta Page hadn't been pulling his leg, or raving, or leading him up the garden. He wasn't kidding himself to make the book read accord­ing to the blurb. That preposterous, princely, pluperfect racket did exist; and Kurt Vogel was in it. In it right up to the blue cornice of his neck.

  If someone had been wearing a hat, he would have raised it in solemn salute to the benign deities of outlawry that had poured him into such a truly splendiferous tureen of soup.

  And then a door opened further up the deck, and footsteps began to move down towards him. Where he was standing, there wasn't cover for a cat, except what was provided by the shadow of the deckhouse. In another second even that was taken from him, as a switch was clicked over somewhere and a pair of bulk­head lights behind frosted panels suddenly wiped out the dark­ness in. a glow of yellowish radiance.

  The Saint's heart arrived in his mouth, as if it had soared up there in an express elevator; and for a moment his hand dropped to the gun in his belt.

  And then he realised that the lights which had destroyed his hiding-place hadn't been switched on with that intention. They were simply a part of the general system of exterior illumination of the boat, and their kindling had doubtless been paralleled by the lighting up of other similar bulbs all around the deck. But the footsteps were drawing close to the corner where they would find him in full view, and he could hear Vogel discoursing proprietorially on the details of beam and draught.

  Simon looked up speculatively, and his hands reached for the deckhouse roof. In another second he was up there, spread out flat on his stomach, peeping warily down over the edge.

  2

  All the evening Kurt Vogel had been studiously affable. The dinner had been perfectly cooked and perfectly served; the wine, presented with a charming suggestion of apology, just dulcet enough to flatter a feminine palate, without being too sweet for any taste. Vogel had set himself out to play the polished cosmo­politan host, and he filled the part brilliantly. The other guest, whom he called Otto and who had been introduced to Loretta as Mr Arnheim, a fat broad-faced man with small brown eyes and a moist red pursed-up mouth, fitted into the play with equal correctness. And yet the naïve joviality of Professor Yule, with his boyish laugh and his anecdotes and his ridiculously premature grey beard, was the only thing that had eased the strain on her nerves.

  She knew that from the moment when she set foot on board she was being watched like a mouse cornered by two patient cats. She knew it, even without one single article of fact which she could have pointed out in support of her belief. There was nothing in the entertainment, not the slightest scintilla of a hint of an innuendo, to give her any material grounds for discomfort. The behaviour of Vogel and Arnheim was so punctilious that without their unfailing geniality it would have been almost em­barrassingly formal.

  The menace was not in anything they said or did. It was in their silences. Their smiles never reached their eyes. Their laughter went no deeper than their throats. All the time they were watching, waiting, analysing. Every movement she made, every turn of a glance, every inflection of her voice, came under their mental microscope—was wafered down, dissected, scrutin­ised in all its component parts until it had given up its last parti­cle of meaning. And the fiendish cleverness of it was that a per­fectly innocent woman in the role she had adopted wouldn't have been bothered at all.

  She had realised halfway through the meal that that was the game they were playing. They were merely letting her own imag­ination work against her, while they looked on. Steadily, skilfully, remorselessly, they were goading her own brain against her, keying her millimetre by millimetre to the tension of self-con­sciousness where she would make one false step that would be sufficient for their purpose. And all the time they were smiling, talking flatteringly to her, respecting her with their words, so cunningly that an outside observer like Professor Yule could have seen nothing to give her the slightest offence.

  She had clung to the Professor as the one infallible lodestar on the tricky course she had to steer, even while she had realised completely what Vogel's patronage of scientific exploration meant. Yule's spontaneous innocence was the one pattern which she had been able to hold to; and when he remained behind in the saloon she felt a cold emptiness that was not exactly fear.

  Arnheim had engineered it, with a single sentence of irre­proachable and unarguable tact, when Vogel suggested showing her over the ship.

  "We'll stay and look after the port," he said, and there was not even the suspicion of a smirk in his eyes when he spoke.

  She looked at staterooms, bathrooms, galleys, engines, and refrigerators, listening to his explanations and interjecting the right expressions of admiration and delight, steeling herself against the hypnotic monotone of his voice. She wondered whether he would kiss her in one of the rooms, and felt as if she had been let out of prison when they came out on deck under the open sky.

  His hand slid through her arm. It was the first time he had touched her, and even then the touch had no more than an avun­cular familiarity.

  ". . . This open piece of deck is rather pleasant for sitting out when it's hot. We rig an awning over that boom if the sun's too strong."

  "It must be marvellous to own a boat like this," she said.

  They stood at the rail, looking down the river. Somewhere among the lights in the broadening of the estuary was the Cor­sair, but there was nothing by which she could pick it out.

  "To be able to have you here—this is pleasant," he said. "At other times it can be a very lonely ownership."

  "That must be your own choice."

  "It is. I am a rich
man. If I told you how rich I was you might think I was exaggerating. I could fill this boat hundreds of times over with—delectable company. A generous millionaire is always attractive. But I've never done so. Do you know that you're the first woman who has set foot on this deck?"

  "I'm sorry if you regret it," she said carelessly.

  "I do."

  His black eyes sought her face with a burning intensity. She realised with a thrill of fantastic horror that he was absolutely sincere. In that cold passionless iron-toned voice he was making love to her, as if the performance was dragged out of him against his will. He was still watching her; but within that inflexible vigilance there was a grotesque hunger for illusion that was an added terror.

  "I regret it because when you give a woman even the smallest corner of your mind, you give her the power to take more. You are no longer in supreme command of your destiny. The building of a lifetime can be betrayed and broken for a moment's foolish­ness."

  She smiled.

  "You're too cynical—you sound as if you'd been disappointed in love."

  "I have never been in love——"

  The last word was bitten off, as if it had not been intended to be the last. It gave the sentence a curiously persistent quality, so that it seemed to reverberate in the air, repeating itself in ghostly echoes after the actual sound was gone.

  She half turned towards him, in a natural quest for the conclu­sion of that unfinished utterance. Instead she found his hands pinning her to the rail on either side, his great predatory nose thrust down towards her face, his wide lipless mouth working under a torrent of low-pitched quivering words.

  "You have tempted me to be foolish. For years I shut all women out of my life, so that none of them could hurt me. And yet what does wealth give without women? I knew that you wanted to come and see my boat. For you it might only have been a nice boat to look at, part of your holiday's amusement; for me it was a beginning. I broke the rule of a lifetime to bring you here. Now I don't want you to go back."

  "You'll change your mind again in the morning." Somehow she tore her gaze away, and broke through his arms. "Besides, you wouldn't forget a poor girl's honour——"

  She was walking along the deck, swinging her wrap with an affectation of sophisticated composure, finding a moment's es­cape in movement. He walked beside her, speaking of emotion in that terrifying unemotional voice.

  "Honour is the virtue of inferior people who can't afford to dispense with it. I have enough money to ignore whatever any­one may think or anyone may say. If you shared it with me, nothing need hurt you."

  "Only myself."

  "No, no. Don't be conventional. That isn't worthy of you. It's my business to understand people. You are the kind of woman who can stand aside and look at facts, without being deluded by any fogs of sentimentality. We speak the same language. That's why I talk to you like this."

  His hand went across and gripped her shoulder, so that she had to stop and turn.

  "You are the kind of woman with whom I could forget to be cold."

  He drew her towards him, and she closed her eyes before he kissed her. His mouth was hard, with a kind of rubbery smooth­ness that chilled her so that she shivered. After a long time he released her. His eyes burned on her like hot coals.

  "You'll stay, Loretta?" he said hoarsely.

  "No." She swayed away from him. She felt queerly sick, and the air had become heavy and oppressive. "I don't know. You're too quick. . . . Ask me again to-morrow. Please."

  "I'm leaving to-morrow."

  "You are?"

  "We're going to St Peter Port. I hoped you would come with us."

  "Give me a cigarette."

  He felt in his pockets. The commonplace distraction, thrust at him like that, blunted the edge of his attack.

  "I'm afraid I left my case inside. Shall we go in?"

  He opened the door, and her hand rested on his arm for a moment as she passed him into the wheelhouse. He passed her a lacquer box and offered her a light.

  "You didn't show me this," she said, glancing round the room. was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the most attractive living-rooms on the ship. At the after end there were shelves of books, half a dozen deep long armchairs invited idleness, a rich carpet covered the floor. Long straight windows ran the length of the beam sides, and the forward end was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the structure. There were flowers in chromium wall brackets, and concealed lights built into the ceiling. The wheel and instrument panel up in one corner, the binnacle in front of it and the lit­tered chart table filling the forward bay, looked almost like prop­erty fittings, as if a millionaire's whim had played with the idea of decorating a den in an ordinary house to look like the interior of a yacht.

  "We were coming here," said Vogel.

  He did not smoke, and he had an actor's mastery over his unoccupied hands which in him seemed to be only the index of an inhuman restraint. She thought he was gathering himself to recover the mood of a moment ago; but before he spoke again there was a knock on the door.

  "What is it?" he demanded sharply—it was the first time she had seen a crack in the glassy veneer of his self-possession.

  "Excuse me, sir."

  The steward who had served dinner stood at the door, his saturnine face mask-like and yet obsequiously expressive. He stood there and waited, and Vogel turned to Loretta with an apologetic shrug.

  "I'm so sorry—will you wait for me a moment?"

  The door closed on the two men, and she relaxed against the back of a chair. The cigarette between her fingers was held quite steadily—there wasn't a crease or an indentation in the white oval paper to level a mute accusation at the mauling of unstead­ied fingers. She regarded it with an odd detached interest. There was even a full half-inch of ash built out unbroken from the end of it—a visible reassurance that she hadn't once exposed the nervous strain that had keyed up inside her almost to breaking pitch.

  She dragged herself off the chair-back and moved across the room. This was the first time she had been left alone since she came on board. It was the chance which had forced her through the ordeal of dinner, the one faint hope of finding a shred of evidence to mark progress on the job, without which anything she suffered would have been wasted—and would have to be gone through again.

  She didn't know exactly what she was looking for. There was no definite thing to find. She could only search around with an almost frantic expectancy for any scrap of something that might be added to the slowly mounting compilation of what was known about Kurt, Vogel—for something that might perhaps miracu­lously prove to be the last pointer in the long paper-chase. Others had worked like that before, teasing out fragments of knowledge with infinite patience and at infinite risk. Fragments that had been built up over many months into the single clue that had brought her there.

  She ran her eyes over the titles of the books in the cases. There were books on philosophy, books on engineering and nav­igation, books on national and international law in various languages. There were works on criminology, memoirs of espio­nage, a very few novels of the highly mathematical detective type. They didn't look like dummies. She pulled out a couple at random and flicked the pages. They were real; but it would have taken twenty minutes to try them all.

  Her fingers curled up and tightened. Nothing in the books. The littered chart table, perhaps . . . She crossed the room quickly, startled by the loud swish of her dress as she moved, her heart throbbing at a speed which surprised her even more. Funny, she thought. Three weeks ago she would have sworn she didn't pos­sess a heart—or nerves. A week ago. A day ago. Or a century.

  She was staring down at the table, at a general chart of the Channel Islands and the adjacent coast of France, spread out on the polished teak. But what was there in a chart? A course had been ruled out from Dinard to St Peter Port, with a dog's-leg bend in it to clear the western end of the Minquiers. There was a jotted note of bearings and dista
nces by the angle of the thin pencilled lines. Nothing in that . . . Her glance wandered helplessly over the scattered smudges of red which stood for light­houses and buoys.

  And then she was looking at a red mark that wasn't quite the same as the other red marks. It was a distinct circle drawn in red ink around a dot of black marked to the east of Sark. Beside it, also in red ink, neat tiny figures recorded the exact bearing.

  The figures jumbled themselves before her eyes. She gripped on her bag, trying to stifle the absurd pulse of excitement that was beginning to work under her ribs. Just like that. So easy, so plain. Perhaps the last clue, the fabulous open sesame that had been tormenting her imagination. Whatever those red marks meant—and others would soon find that out.

  There was a pencil lying on the table; and she had opened her bag before she remembered that she had nothing in it to write on. Lipstick on a handkerchief, then . . . but there were a dozen scraps of torn-up paper in an ashtray beside the pencil, and a square inch of paper would be enough.

  Her hand moved out.

  Suddenly she felt cold all over. There was a feeling of night­mare limpness in her knees, and when she breathed again it was in a queer little shuddering sigh. But she put her hand into her bag quite steadily and took out a powder box. Quite steadily she dabbed at her nose, and quite steadily she walked away to an­other table and stood there turning the pages of a magazine— with the thrum of a hundred demented dynamos pounding through her body and roaring sickeningly in her brain.

  Those scraps of inviting paper. The pencil ready to be picked up at the first dawn of an idea. The chart left out, with the red bearing marked on it. The excuse for Vogel to leave the room. The ordeal on the deck, before that, which had sabotaged her self-control to the point where the finest edge of her vigilance was dulled ... to the point where her own aching nerves had tempted her on to the very brink of a trap from which only the shrieked protest of some indefinable sixth sense had held her back ...