Saint Overboard (25 page)

Over breakfast he had had to make his own decision, and his
crew glared at him incredulously.

“Yer must be barmy,” was Orace’s
outspoken comment.

“Maybe I am,” admitted the Saint.
“But I’ve got to do it. If I
don’t keep that date this morning, I’m branded. An innocent
man would keep it, even if he had caught a burglar during the night. Even a
policeman would keep it—and that card may be worth
holding for another few hours, though it won’t last much
longer.”

“It’s that perishin’ girl,” said Orace morosely.

Simon paused in the act of fastening a strap
around his leg
just below the knee—a strap which supported the sheath of
the
slim razor-sharp knife, Belle, which in his hands was almost as deadly
as any firearm. He looked up at Orace sardonically, then ruefully; and he
smiled.

“She’s not perishing, Orace. Not while
I’m still on my feet.”

“Yer won’t be on yer feet fer long,
any’ow,” said Orace, as if
the thought gave him a certain gloomy
satisfaction. “And wot
the ‘ell ‘appens to my job when yer feedin’ the shrimps like that
bloke I ‘it last night?” he added, practically.

“I expect you could always go back to
your old job as an
artist’s
model,” said the Saint.

He straightened his sock and stood up,
smiling that curiously
aimless and lazy smile which only came to him
when he was
shaking the dice to throw double or quits with death.
His hand
dropped on Orace’s shoulder.

“But it won’t be so bad as that. I’ll
put the cards in the port
hole for Mr Conway or Mr Quentin to look you
up during the day, and they’ll see you don’t starve. And I’ll be having the
time
of my life. I’ll bet Birdie is just hoping and praying that I’ll
plant
myself by not showing up. Instead of which, it’ll take all the wind out of
their sails when I step on board, bright and
beautiful as a spring
morning, as if I hadn’t one little egg of a
wicked thought on my
mind. It ought to be a great moment.”

In its way, it had been quite a great moment;
but it had suf
fered
from the inherent brevity of its description.

Simon watched the play of light on the water,
the swiftly-
changing
lace of the foam patterns swirling and spawning along
the side, and recalled the moment for what it was worth. It was
the
first time he had found any of the signs of human strain on
Vogel’s face. Even so, his practised eyes had to
search for them;
but they were there.
A fractionally more than ordinary glaze of
the waxen skin, as if it had been drawn a shade tighter over the
high prominent cheekbones. An extra trace of
shadow under the
black deep-set eyes.
Nothing else. Vogel was as spotlessly turned out as usual, his handshake was
just as cold and firm, his geniality no
less smooth-flowing and urbane.

“A perfect morning
,
Mr
Tombs.”

“A lovely morning after a gorgeous night
before,” murmured
the Saint.

“Ah, yes! You enjoyed our little
evening?”

“And the bed-time story.”

Vogel lifted his dark eyebrows in tolerant
puzzlement—and
the Saint could just imagine how well that gesture of
polite perplexity must have been rehearsed.

Simon smiled.

“There must be something catching about
this harbour thief
business,” he explained, with the air of a man in the
street who is simply bursting with his little adventure and is trying to ap
pear blase
about it. “I had a caller myself last night.”

“My dear Mr Tombs! Did you lose anything
valuable?”

“Nothing at all,” said the Saint
smugly. “We caught him.”

“Then you were luckier than we
were,” said Arnheim, with his
round flabby face full of admiration
and interest. “Did he put up
a fight?”

“He didn’t have a chance——”

Simon looked up as Loretta came towards them
along the
deck. He had felt the beat of his heart when he saw her,
had
seemed to discover an absurb lightening of the perfect morning as if a
screen had been taken away from before the sun. Vogel
took her arm.

“My dear, Mr Tombs has been telling us
what happened after
he left us last night. He had one of those harbour thieves
on
board his own boat—and caught him!”

“But how exciting.” She was smiling
coolly, but her eyes were
steady with questions. “How did you do
it?”

“He came along to my bloke, Orace, and
said I wanted him—it must have been while we were at the hotel. Orace was a bit
sus
picious and wanted to know more about it, and then this fellow hit
him over
the head with something. Orace came to again before
the burglar had gone,
and he went on with the fight. They were
still at it when I
got back. The burglar had a gun and every
thing, but it had
misfired, so——
”

“What happened?”

Vogel had asked the question, with his face as
calm as stone;
and the Saint had known that his answer would mark the
sharp
pinnacle of the moment which he had deliberately courted. He
had allowed
himself time to light a cigarette before he replied.

“Well, we were wrestling all over the
saloon trying to get his
gun away from him, and Orace grabbed hold of
a stanchion that
he’d brought down to clean and hit him over the head. Then
we
tied him up and took him ashore and lugged him along to the
police station.
But when they tried to give him first aid, they
found he was—sort of
dead.”

For a little while there was an absolute
silence. Even in the
most humdrum circumstances, a revelation
like that would natu
rally have taken a few seconds to establish itself in the minds of
the audience; but the Saint had been waiting
for a more preg
nant silence than
that. It was while he was actually on his way over to the
Falkenberg
that
he had finally decided to bring his
story
as close to the truth as possible. If he had said that the
burglar was lodged alive in jail, and Vogel’s
ingenuity had been equal to devising a way of putting through an inquiry, the
fiction could have been exposed in an hour or two. But the truth would
offer an obvious inducement to wait for confirmation
in a news
paper story which could not
appear for another twenty-four
hours,
and it might well dispose of direct inquiries by making their prospects
manifestly unprofitable: and, as Simon had told
it, it had a ring of authenticity which an invention might not
have had.

Simon had been waiting for a pregnant
silence, and he was not
disappointed. Yet even he did not know until
later how much
that silence had contained.

“Dead?” Arnheim repeated at last,
in a strained voice.

The Saint nodded.

“Orace must have underestimated his strength, or something— I
suppose it’s quite understandable, as we were fighting all over
the place. He’d bashed the devil’s skull right
in.”

“But—but won’t you be arrested?” faltered Loretta.

“Oh, no. They call it accidental death.
It was the fellow’s own
fault for being a burglar. Still, it’s rather
a gruesome sort of
thing to have on your conscience.”

Vogel put up a hand and stroked the side of
his chin. His pas
sionless eyes, hard and unwinking as discs of jet, were
fastened on the Saint with a terrible brightness of concentration. For the
first time since they had been
talking there seemed to be some
thing frozen
and mechanical about his tight-lipped smile.

“Of course it must be,” he agreed. “But as you say,
the man
brought it on himself. You mustn’t
let it worry you too much.”

“What’s worrying him?”

The Professor came ambling along, with his
rosy cheeks beaming and his premature grey beard fluttering in the breeze, and
the story had to be started over again. While it was being repeated, a
seaman came up and handed Vogel
a telegram. Vogel opened it with a slow measured stroke of his thumb-nail:
while he read it, and during the conclusion of the second telling of the
adventure,
he seemed to regain complete
command of himself with a mental
struggle
that showed only in the almost imperceptibly whitened pallor of his face.

He buttoned his jacket and glanced along the
deck as Yule
added his hearty voice to the general vote of
exoneration.

“We’re ready to sail,” he said.
“Will you excuse me if I go and
attend to it?”

And in that way the big moment had touched its
climax and
gone on
its incalculable trajectory, leaving Simon Templar to
consider where it left him.

2

The Saint lighted a cigarette in the shield
of his cupped hands,
and stared thoughtfully over the
sun-sprinkled ripple of the sea
towards the blue-pencilled line of the
horizon. An impenitent
ripple of the same sunlight glinted at the back of his eyes and
fidgeted impudently with the fine-drawn corners of
his mouth.
He had always been mad, by the Grace of God. He still was.
Obviously.

Roger, Peter, and Orace were back in St Peter
Port; and
though
they knew where he had gone, they could do nothing to
help him. And there he was, with Loretta, racing through the
broad waters of the Channel on the
Falkenberg
while
Vogel and
Arnheim thought him over. In
addition to whom, there was a
crew
of at least ten more of Vogel’s deep-water gangsters, whom he personally had
inspected, also on board; and presumably none
of them would be afflicted with any more suburban scruples than
their
master. Out there on the unrecording water, as he had real
ised to the full when Loretta was the only
passenger, anything
could happen: a
shot could be fired that no unsuspected wit
nesses would hear, a cry for help could waste itself in the vast
emptiness of the air, an unfortunate accident
could be registered
in the log which
no investigations on shore could disprove. There
were no prying busybodies peeping from behind curtains of
seaweed to come forward later and upset a
well-constructed
story. The sea kept
its secrets—only a few hours ago he had
availed himself of that inviolable silence… . Verily, he was an
accredited member of the company of divine lunatics.

Wherefore the Saint allowed that twinkle of
sublime reckless
ness
to play at the back of his eyes, and drew sea air and smoke
into his lungs with the seraphic zest which he had
always found
in the fierce tang of
danger.

The deep-voiced hum of the engines died away suddenly to a
soft murmur, and the curling bow wave sank down
and shortened
to a feather of ripples
along the side. Simon looked about him
and
turned to the Professor, who was puffing a stubby briar at
his side.

“Is this where you take your dip?”

Yule nodded. Vogel was in the wheelhouse
with Loretta, and
Arnheim
had moved out of the sun to spread his perspiring bulk
in a deck chair.

“This should be it. We went over the
chart last night, and the
deepest sounding we could find was
ninety-four fathoms. It isn’t
much, but it’ll do for the preliminary test.”

Simon gazed out to sea with his eyebrows
drawn down against
the glare. Under them his set blue eyes momentarily gave
up
their carefree twinkle. He realised that there was a third person
in the
same danger as himself, about whom he had forgotten to
worry very much
before.

“Have you known Vogel long?” he
asked casually.

“About six months now. He came to me
after my first descent and offered to help, and I was very glad to accept his
offer. He’s
been a kind of fairy godmother to me. And all I’ve been
able to
do in return was to name a new deep-water fish that I discovered after
him—
Bathyphasma vogeli!”
The Professor chuckled in his
refreshingly
boyish way.

“You haven’t started to think about the commercial possibilities
of your invention yet?”