Saint Overboard (28 page)

“The cylinder has just given out.”

Yule’s voice came through again
unfalteringly, almost casually.
The Saint saw that Loretta’s eyes were also
fixed on the loud
speaker:
her chest was scarcely moving, as if her own breathing
had stopped in sympathy with what those six words must have meant to
the man helplessly imprisoned in his grotesque armour
five hundred feet below the bountiful air.

“Can’t you put the cable on to another
winch?” asked the
Saint, and hardly recognised his own voice.

“There’s no other winch on the ship that
would take the load.”

“We can rig up a tackle if you’ve got a couple of large
blocks.”

“It takes more than twenty minutes to
raise the bathystol
from
this depth,” Vogel said flatly. “With a block and tackle it
would take over an hour.”

Simon knew that he was right. And his brain
worked on, mechanically, with its grim computation. In that confined space it
would take no more than a few minutes to consume all the oxy
gen left
in the air. And then, with the percentage of carbon diox
ide
leaping towards its maximum
…
     

“I’m getting very weak and giddy.”
The Professor’s voice
was fainter, but it was still steady and
unflinching. “You will
have to be very quick now, or it will be no
use.”

Something about the scene was trying to
force itself into the
Saint’s attention. Was he involuntarily
measuring his distances
and marking down positions, with the instinct
of a seasoned
fighter? The group of seamen at the stern. One of them by
the
drum of insulated cable, further up the deck. Vogel at the head
of the companion.
Arnheim … Why had Arnheim moved
across to stand in front of the winch controls, so that his
broad
squat bulk hid them completely?

There was another sound trying to break
through the silence—
a queer jerky gasping sound. A second or two
went by before the
Saint traced it to its source and identified it. The
terrible throaty
sound of a man battling for breath, relayed like every
other
sound from the bathystol by the impersonal instrument on the
table…

In some way it wiped out the last of his indecision. He was
prepared to be wrong; prepared also not to care.
Any violence,
whatever it might
bring, was better than waiting for his nerves
to be slowly racked to pieces by that devilish inquisition.

He moved slowly forwards—towards the
bulkhead where the
winch
controls were. Towards Arnheim. And Arnheim did not
move. The Saint smiled for the first time since the Professor had
gone down, and altered his course a couple of
points to pass
round him. Arnheim
shifted himself also, and still blocked the
way. His round pouting mouth with the bruise under it opened
like
a trout’s.

“It isn’t easy to wait, is it?” he
said.

“It isn’t,” agreed the Saint, with
a cold and murderous preci
sion; and the automatic flashed from his
pocket to grind its muz
zle into the other’s yielding belly. “So
we’ll stop waiting. Walk
backwards a little way, Otto.”

Arnheim’s jowl dropped. He looked down at the
gun in his
stomach, and looked up again with his eyes round as
saucers and
his wet mouth sagging wider. He coughed.

“Really, Mr Tombs——
”

“Have you gone mad?”

Vogel’s dry monotone lanced across the
feeble protest with
calculated contempt. And the Saint grinned mirthlessly.

“Not yet. But I’m liable to if Otto
doesn’t get out of my way
in the next two seconds. And then you’re
liable to lose Otto.”

“I know this is a ghastly
situation.” Vogel was still speaking
calmly, with the
soothing and rather patronising urbanity with
which he might have tried to snub a
drunkard or a lunatic. “But
you won’t
help it by going into hysterics. Everything possible is
being done.”

“One thing isn’t being done,”
answered the Saint, in the same
bleak voice, “and I’m going to do it. Get away from those controls,
Otto, and watch me start that winch!”

“My dear Mr Tombs——
”

“Behind you!”

Loretta’s desperate cry pealed in the Saint’s ears with a frantic
urgency that spun him round with his back to the
deckhouse. He
had a glimpse of a man
springing at him with an upraised belaying-pin
; and his finger was
tightening on the trigger when Arn
heim
dragged down his wrist and struck him a terrific left-
handed blow with a rubber truncheon. There was an
instant
when his brain seemed to rock
inside his skull. Then darkness.

4

“I trust you are feeling better,” said Vogel.

“Much better,” said the Saint.
“And full of admiration. Oh, it
was smooth, very smooth, Birdie—you don’t mind if I call
you
Birdie, do you? It’s so
whimsical.”

He sat in an armchair in the wheelhouse, with
a brandy and
soda in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Both of
them had
been provided by Kurt Vogel. He was not even tied up. But
there the free hospitality ended, for Vogel kept one hand obtru
sively in
his jacket pocket, and so did Arnheim.

Simon Templar allowed himself a few more
moments to digest
the profound smoothness of the ambush. He had been fairly
caught, and he admitted it—caught by a piece of machiavellian
strategy
that was ingenious enough to have netted even such a
wary bird as himself without disgrace. Oh,
it had been exceed
ingly smooth; a bait that
flesh and blood and human feeling
could
scarcely have resisted. And the climax had supervened with
an accuracy
of co-ordination that could hardly have been slicker
if it had been rehearsed—from which he deduced that it proba
bly had. If he had been unprepared, the seaman
with the belaying-pin
would have
got him; if he was warned, Arnheim had his
chance …

“And the Professor?” he asked.

Vogel lifted his shoulders.

“Unfortunately the fault was traced too late, Mr
Templar.”

“So you knew,” said the Saint
softly.

The other’s thin lips widened.

“Of course. When you were photographed
in Dinard—you
remember? I received the answer to my inquiry this
morning.
You were with us when I opened the telegram. That was
when I knew that there would have to be an accident.”

Naturally. When once the Saint was known, a
man like Vogel
would not have run the risk of letting the Professor be
warned,
or
snatched out of his power. He had been ready in every detail
for the emergency—was there anything he had not
been ready
for? … Simon had a moment’s harrowing vision of that
naive
and kindly man gasping out his life
down there in the cold gloom
of the sea. and the steel frosted in his
blue eyes …

He thought of something else. Loretta’s piercing cry; the last
voice he had heard before he was knocked down,
still rang
through his aching head.
If he had been known since the morn- .
ing,
the stratagem had had no object in making him give himself
away. But it had provided a subsidiary snare for
Loretta while it
was achieving the
object of disarming him. And she also had
been caught. Simon acknowledged every refinement of the con
spiracy with inflexible resolution. Kurt Vogel had
scooped the
pool in one deal, with the
most perfectly stacked deck of cards
that
the Saint had ever reviewed in a lifetime of going up against
stacked decks.

He realised that Vogel was watching him,
performing the sim
ple task of following his thoughts; and smiled with
unaltered
coolness.

“So where,” he murmured, “do
you think we go from here?”

“That depends on you,” said Vogel.

He put a match to his cigar and sat on the arm
of a chair,
leaning forward until the Saint was sitting under the
shadow of
his great eagle’s beak. Looking at him with the same lazy
smile still on his lips, Simon was aware of the vibration of the power
ful
engines, and saw out of the corner of his eye that a seaman
was
standing at the wheel, with his back to them, his eyes intent
upon the
compass card. Wherever they were going, at any rate
they were already on
their way …

“You have given me a good deal of trouble, Templar. Not by
your childish interference—that would be hardly worth talking
about—but by an accident for which it was
responsible.”

“You mean the Professor?” Simon
suggested grittily.

Vogel snapped his fingers.

“No. That’s nothing. Your presence merely
caused me to get
rid of him a little earlier than I should otherwise have
done. He
would have come to the same end, anyway, within the next
few weeks.
The accident I am referring to is the one which hap
pened last
night.”

“Your amateur burglar?”

“My burglar. I should hardly call him an
amateur—as a mat
ter of fact he was one of the best safe-breakers in
Europe. An
invaluable man … And therefore I want him back.”

The Saint sipped his brandy.

“Birdie,” he said gently,
“you’re calling the wrong number.
What you want is a spiritualist.”

“You were telling the truth, then?”

“I always do. My Auntie Ethel used to
say——
”

“You killed him?”

“That’s a crude way of putting it. If the
Professor had an
unfortunate accident this afternoon, so did your boy
friend last
night.”

“And then you took him ashore?”

“No. That was the only part of my story
where I wandered a
little way from the truth. A bloke with my reputation
can’t
afford to
deliver dead bodies at police stations, even if they died
of old age—not without wasting a lot of time and
answering a
lot of pointed questions. So we gave him a sailor’s funeral.
We
rowed him out some way from the harbour
and fed him to the
fish.”

The other’s eyes bored into him like
splinters of black marble,
as if they were trying to split open his
brain and impale the first
fragment of a lie; but Simon met them with
the untroubled
steadiness
of a clear conscience. And at last Vogel drew back a
little.

“I believe you. I suspected that there
was some truth in your
story when you first told it. That is why
you are alive now.”

“You’re too generous, Birdie.”

“But how long you will remain alive is
another matter.”

“I knew there was a catch in it
somewhere,” said the Saint,
and inhaled thoughtfully from his cigarette.

Vogel got up and walked over to one of the
broad windows;
and Simon transferred his contemplative regard to Otto
Arnheim
, estimating how long it might take him to bridge the dis
tance
between them. While Vogel and the man at the wheel both
had their
backs turned to the room, could a very agile
man …
 
?

And Simon knew that he couldn’t. Reclining
as he was in the
depths of one of those luxuriously streamlined armchairs,
he
couldn’t even hope to get up on his feet before he was filled full
of lead. He
tried hauling himself up experimentally, as if in search of an ashtray, and
Arnheim had a gun thrusting out at
him before he was even sitting
upright. The Saint dropped his
ash on the carpet and lay back again,
scratching his leg ruminatively. At least the knife strapped to his calf was
still there—if it came to a pinch and the opportunity offered, he might do some
thing with
that. But even while he knew that his life would be a
speculative buy at ten
cents in the open market, he was being
seized with an
overpowering curiosity to know why Vogel had
left it even that nominal value.