16 The Saint Overboard Page 8

  She stood there shivering inside, although her hand was quite steady—scanning a meaningless succession of pictures which printed themselves on her retinas without ever reaching her brain. For several seconds she hadn't the strength to move again.

  She fought back towards mastery of herself. After an eternity that could scarcely have lasted a quarter of a minute, she let the magazine fall shut on the table and strolled idly back to the chair from which she had started. She sat down. She could feel that her movements were smooth and unhurried, her face calm and untroubled in spite of the tumult within her. Before that, her face and hands might have betrayed her—it only depended on the angle from which she must have been watched. But when Vogel came back, the smile with which she looked up to greet him was serene and artless.

  He nodded.

  "Please excuse me."

  The smile with which he answered her was perfunctory and preoccupied—he didn't even make the mistake of looking closely at her. He went straight across to a folding bureau built into the panelling on one side of the room, and pulled out a drawer.

  "I don't want you to be alarmed," he said in his cold even voice, "but I should like you to stay here a few minutes longer."

  She felt the creep of her skin up towards the nape of her neck, and searched for the voice that had once been her own.

  "I'm quite comfortable," she said.

  "I think you'd better stay," he said, and turned round as he slipped the jacket of a big blued automatic in his hand. "The stewards have seen someone prowling about the ship again, just like that mysterious person I told you about who was here last night. But this time he isn't going to get away so easily."

  3

  Something as intangible as air and as vicious as a machinegun began hammering at the pit of Loretta's stomach. The cohort of ghostly dynamos sang in her ears again, blotting out her precarious instant of hard-won peace in a din that was twice as bad as anything before it. She felt the blood draining down from her head until only a dab of powder and the sea-tan on her skin were left to save her from ultimate disaster.

  "Not really?" she said.

  Her voice seemed to come from four or five miles away, a mere hollow echo of itself. She knew that by some miracle of will-power she had kept the smile steady on her face; but even that wasn't enough. The disaster was not dispelled—it was barely checked.

  A queer glimpse of desperate humour was the only thing she could cling to. She, who had met case-hardened men on their own ground, who had faced death as often as dishonour, and with the same poised contempt and unfaltering alertness—she, Loretta Page, who was ranked at Ingerbeck's as the coolest head on a roster of frost-bitten intellects which operated in the perpetual bleakness of temperatures below zero—was being slowly and inevitably broken up. The rasps of a third degree more subtle and deadly than anything she had ever dreamed of were achieving what mere violence and crude terrorism could never have achieved. They were working away as implacably and untiringly as fate, turning her own self into her bitterest enemy.

  Vogel's jet-black eyes were fixed on her now. They had moved on to her face like the poles of a magnet from which she would have had to struggle transparently to get away; and yet his aquiline features were still without positive expression.

  "You've nothing to worry about," he said, in a purr of caress­ing reassurance.

  "But I'm thrilled." She met his gaze unflinchingly, with the same smile of friendly innocence. "What is it that makes you so popular?"

  He shrugged.

  "They're probably just some common harbour thieves who think the boat looks as if she might have some valuables on board. We shall find out."

  "Let me come with you."

  "My dear——"

  "I'm not a bit frightened. Not while you've got that gun. And I'll be awfully quiet. But I couldn't bear to miss anything so exciting. Please—would you mind?"

  He hesitated for a moment only, and then opened the door on the starboard side.

  "All right. Will you keep behind me?"

  He switched out the lights, and she followed him out on to the deck. Under the dim glow of the masthead light she caught sight of his broad back moving forward, and stepped after him. In the first shock of transition from the bright illumination of the wheelhouse there was no difference in quality between the black­ness of the air and the sea, so that the night seemed to lie all around them, above and below, as if the Falkenberg was sus­pended in a vast bowl of darkness sprinkled with tiny twinkling lights. Vogel was almost invisible in his black evening clothes as he tiptoed round in the half-solid shadow to the other side of the deck; and when he halted she could hardly have been a pace behind him—his shape swam up before her eyes so suddenly that she touched him as she stopped.

  "He's still there."

  His voice touched her eardrums as a mere bass vibration in the stillness. From where she stood she could look down the whole length of the deck, a grey pathway stencilled with the yellow windows of the saloon where Yule and Arnheim were still presumably discussing the port. The deckhouse profiled itself in black and slanted black banks of shadow across the open space. Away aft there was another shadow merging into the rest, a thing that distinguished itself only by its shorter and sharper curves from the long cubist lines of the others—something that her eyes found and froze on.

  Vogel lifted his automatic.

  Her left hand gripped the weather rail. She was trembling, although her mind was working with a clarity that seemed out side herself. That psychological third degree had accomplished its purpose.

  Vogel had got her. Even if she had bluffed him all the evening, even if she had betrayed nothing in that paralysed moment of realisation at the chart table, even if she had kept the mask unmoved on her face when he came back—he had got her now. The story of a man prowling on the ship might be a lie. She might be imagining the shadow out of her own guilty fear; or it might only be a member of the crew put out to play the part and build up the deception—to be aimed at and perhaps shot at by Vogel with a blank cartridge. But she didn't know. There was no way for her to know. She had to choose between letting the Saint be shot down without warning, or——

  A dozen crazy thoughts crashed through her head. She might throw a noisy fit of maidenly hysterics. She might sneeze, or cough, or faint on his shoulder. But she knew that that was just what he was waiting for her to do. The first hint of interference that she gave would brand her for all time. He would have no more doubts.

  She stared at him in a kind of chilled hopeless agony. She could see his arm extended against the lighter grey of the deck, the dull gleam of the automatic held rigidly at the end of it, his black deepset eyes lined unwinkingly along the sights. Something in the nerveless immobility of his position shouted at her that he was a man to whom the thought of missing had never occurred. She saw the great hungry crook of his nose, the ends of his mouth drawn, back so that the thin lips rolled under and van­ished into two parallel lines that were as vicious and pitiless as the smile of a cobra would have been. Her own words thundered through her head in a strident mocking chorus: "When you join Ingerbeck's, you don't sign on for a cocktail party . . . You take an oath ... to do your job . . . keep your mouth shut . . . take the consequences . . ." She had to choose.

  So had the Saint.

  Moving along the deckhouse roof as silently as a ghost, he had followed everything that happened outside; lying spreadeagled over the wheelhouse, he had leaned out at a perilous angle until he could peer down through one of the windows and see what was happening inside. He had bunched his muscles in a spasm of impotent exasperation when he saw Loretta's hand going out to touch the pencil and spring the trap, and had breathed again when she drew back. Everything that she had endured he had felt sympathetically within himself; and when Vogel came back and took out his automatic, Simon had heard what was said and had understood that also.

  Now, gathering his limbs stealthily under him, so close above Loretta's head that he could almost have
reached down and touched her, he understood much more. The first mention of a man prowling about the deck had prickled a row of nerve centres all along his spine; then he had disbelieved; then he had seen the shadow that Loretta was staring at, and had remembered the dark speeding canoe which had nearly run him down on his way there. But Loretta hadn't seen that; and he knew what she must be thinking. He could read what was in her mind, could suffer everything she was suffering, as if by some clairvoyant affinity that transcended reason he was identified with her in the stress of that satanically conceived ordeal; and there was a queer exaltation in his heart as he stepped off the wheelhouse roof, out into space over her head.

  She saw him as if he had fallen miraculously out of the sky, which was more or less what he did—with one foot knocking down the automatic and the other striking flat-soled at the side of Vogel's head. The gun went off with a crash that echoed back and forth across the estuary, and Vogel staggered against the rail and fell to his knees.

  Simon fell across the rail, caught it with his hands, and hung on for a moment. Down at the after end of the deck, the shape that had been lurking there detached itself from the shadows and scurried across the narrow strip of light to clamber over the rail and drop hectically downwards.

  Loretta Page stared across six feet of Breton twilight at the miracle—half incredulously, with the breathlessness of inde­scribable relief choking in her throat. She saw the flash of white teeth in a familiar smile, saw him put his fingers to his lips and kiss them out to her with a debonair flourish that defied compar­ison; and then, as Vogel began to drag himself up and around with the gun still clutched in his right hand, she saw the Saint launch himself up with a ripple of brown muscles to curve over with hardly a splash into the sea.

  He went down in a long shallow dive, and swam out of the Falkenberg's circle of light before he rose. He had judged his timing and his angle so well that the canoe flashed past his eyes as he broke the surface. He put up one hand and caught the gunnel as it went by, nearly upsetting the craft until the man in it leaned out to the other side and balanced it.

  "I thought I told you to say goodbye to France," said the Saint.

  "I thought I told you I didn't take your orders," said the other grimly.

  "They were Loretta's orders, Steve."

  Murdoch dug in the paddle and dragged the canoe round the stern of another yacht moored in the river.

  "She's crazy, too," he snarled. "Because you've got around her with your gigolo line doesn't mean I don't know what she'll say when she comes to her senses. I'm staying where I like."

  "And getting shot where you like, I hope," murmured Simon. "I won't interfere in the next bonehead play you make. I only butted in this time to save Loretta. Next time, you can take your own curtain."

  "I will," said Murdoch prophetically. "Let go this boat."

  Simon let go rather slowly, resisting the temptation to release his hold with a deft jerk that would have capsized the canoe and damped the pugnaciousness of its ungrateful occupant. He won­dered whether Murdoch's aggressiveness was founded on sheer blind ignorance of what might have been the result of his clumsy intrusion, or whether it was put up to bluff away the knowledge of having made an egregious mistake; and most of all he won­dered what else would come of the insubordinations of that tough inflexible personality.

  One of those questions was partly answered for him very quickly.

  He sculled back with his hands, under the side of the yacht near which they had parted company, listening to the low sono­rous purr of a powerful engine that had awoken in the darkness. There were no lights visible through any of the portholes, and he concluded that the crew were all on shore. He was on the side away from the Falkenberg, temporarily screened even from the most lynx-eyed searcher. The purr of the engine grew louder; and with a quick decision he grasped a stanchion, drew himself up, and rolled over into the tiny after cockpit.

  He reached it only a second before the beam of a young searchlight swept over the ship, wiping a bar of brilliant illu­mination across the deck in its passing. The throb of the engine droned right up to him; and he hitched a very cautious eye over the edge of the cockpit, and saw the Falkenberg's speed tender churning around his refuge, so close that he could have touched it with a boathook. A seaman crouched up on the foredeck, swinging the powerful spotlight that was mounted there; two other men stood up beside the wheel, following the path of the beam with their eyes. Its long finger danced on the water, touched luminously on the hulls of other craft at their anchor­ages, stretched faintly out to the more distant banks of the es­tuary . . . fastened suddenly on the shape of a canoe that sprang up out of the dark as if from nowhere, skimming towards the bathing pool at the end of the Plage du Prieuré. The canoe veered like a startled gull, shooting up parallel with the rocky foreshore; but the beam clung to it like a magnetised bar of light, linking it with the tender as if it were held by intangible cables. At the same time the murmur of the tender's engine deepened its note: the bows lifted a little, and a white streamer of foam lengthened away from the stern as the link-bar of light between the two craft shortened.

  The canoe turned once more, and headed south again, the man in it paddling with unhurried strokes again, as if he was trying to undo the first impression he had given of taking flight. The Falk­enberg's tender turned and drifted up alongside him as the en­gine was shut off; and at that moment the spotlight was switched out.

  Simon heard the voices clearly across the water.

  "Have you seen anyone swimming around here?"

  And Murdoch's sullen answer: "I did see someone—it was over that way."

  "Thanks."

  The voice of the tender's spokesman was the last one Simon heard. And then, after the very briefest pause, the engine was cut in again, and the tender began to slide smoothly back towards the Falkenberg, while the canoe went on its way to the shore. In that insignificant pause the only sound was a faint thud such as a man might have made in dumping a heavy weight on a hard floor. But Simon Templar knew, with absolute certainty, that the man who paddled the canoe on towards the shore was not the man who had been caught by the spotlight, and that the man who had been in the canoe was riding unconsciously in the speedboat as it turned back.

  4

  The tender slid in under the side of the Falkenberg, and the man on the foredeck who had been working the spotlight stood up and threw in the painter. Vogel himself caught the rope and made it fast. Under the natural pallor of his skin there was a curious rigidity, and the harsh black line of his brows over that great scythe of a nose was accentuated by the shadows that fell across his face as he leaned over the rail.

  "Did you find anything?"

  "No." The man at the wheel answered, standing up in the cockpit. He looked up at Vogel intently as he spoke, and his right hand fingered a rug that seemed to have been thrown down in a rather large bundle on the seat beside him. His phlegmatic voice, with a thick guttural accent, boomed on very slowly and deliberately: "We asked a man in a boat, but he had seen no­body."

  "I see," answered Vogel quietly.

  He straightened up with a slight shrug; and Professor Yule and Arnheim, on his right, turned away from the rail with him.

  "That's a pity," said Yule enthusiastically. "But they can't have searched very far. Shall we go out and have another look?"

  "I'm afraid we shouldn't be likely to have any more success, my dear Professor," replied Vogel. "There is plenty of room in the river for anyone to disappear quite quickly, and we were slow enough in starting after them." He turned to Loretta. "I'm very sorry—you must have had rather a shock, and you're more im­portant than catching a couple of harbour thieves."

  In some way the quality of his voice had altered—she could feel the change without being able to define it. She felt like somebody who has been watching a fuse smouldering away into a stack of lethal explosive under her feet, and who has seen the fuse miraculously flicker and go out. The sensation of limpness in her mus
cles was no longer the paralysis of nightmare; it was the relaxation of pure relief. She knew that for that night at least the ordeal was over. Vogel had shot his bolt. In a few hours he would be as balanced and dangerous as ever, his brain would be working with the same ruthless insistence and ice-cold de­tachment; but for the moment he himself was suffering from a shock, intrinsically slight, and yet actual enough to have jarred the delicately calculated precision of his attack. Something told her that he realised what he had lost, and that he was too clever to waste any more effort on a spoiled opportunity.

  "I'm perfectly all right," she said; and her nerves were so steady again that she had to call on acting for the vestiges of trepidation which she felt were demanded.

  "All the same, I expect you would like a drink."

  "That wouldn't do any of us any harm," agreed Arnheim.

  In his own way he had altered, although his broad flat face was as bland as ever, and his wet little red mouth was pursed up to the same enigmatic sensual bud that it had been all the eve­ning. He took it on himself to officiate with the decanter, and swallowed half a tumbler of neat whisky in two methodical gulps. Vogel took a very modest allowance with a liberal splash of soda, and sipped it with impenetrable restraint.

  But even the artificial film of lightness had gone murky. Vo­gel's unshaken suavity, with Arnheim's solid co-operation, elimi­nated any embarrassing silences; but a curious heavy tenseness like the threat of thunder had crept into the atmosphere, a tense­ness so subtle and well concealed that at any other time she might have been persuaded that it was purely subjective to her own fatigue. When at last she said that she had had too many late nights already that week, and asked if they would excuse her, she detected a tenuous undercurrent of relief in their pro­testations.

  "I'm sorry all this should have happened to upset the evening," said Vogel, as they left the saloon.

  She laid her hand on his arm.