Saint Overboard (12 page)

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 foolish
ness.”

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 conclu
sion 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 es
cape 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 any
one 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 lit
tered chart table
filling the forward bay, looked almost like prop
erty 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 miracu
lously 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
nav
igation, books on national and international law in various
languages.
There were works on criminology, memoirs of espio
nage, 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 pos
sess 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 distances by the angle
of the thin
pencilled lines. Nothing
in that … Her glance wandered help
lessly
over the scattered smudges of red which stood for light
houses 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 night
mare 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 an
other 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
…

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.