Saint Overboard (4 page)

“It sank, didn’t it?” he said.

“In 1799—with about a million pounds’
worth of gold on
board. There’ve been plenty of attempts to salve the
cargo, but
so far the sand’s been too much for them. Then the
Lutina Com
pany took over with a new idea: they were going to suck
away the silt through a big conical sort of bell which was to be low
ered over
the wreck. It was quite a simple scheme, and there’s no
reason why
it shouldn’t have worked. The company received a
few letters warning
them not to go on with it, but naturally they
didn’t pay much
attention to them.”

“Well?”

“Well, they haven’t tried out their
sand-sucker yet. The whole
thing was blown sky-high in 1933—and the
explosion wasn’t an
accident.”

The Saint sat up slowly. In that supple
movement the
buffoonery slipped off him as his dressing-gown might have
slipped off; and in the same transformation he was listening intently.
Something like a breath of frozen feathers strolled up
his spine—an
instinct, a queer clairvoyance born of the years of
inspired
filibustering.

“Is that all the story?” he asked, and knew that it was
not.

She shook her head.

“Something else happened in the same
year. An American
salvage ship, the
Salvor,
went out to search a
wreck off Cape
Charles. The
Merida,
which sank in 1911 and took
the Emperor
Maximilian’s crown jewels to the bottom with her—another
mil
lion-pound cargo. They didn’t find anything. And fish don’t wear
jewellery.”

“I remember the Terschelling Island
fireworks—the
Lutine.
But that’s a new one.”

“It’s not the only one. Two years before that another salvage
company went over the
Turbantia
with
a fine comb. She was
torpedoed near
the Maars Lightship in 1916, and she had seven
hundred and fifty
thousand pounds’ worth of German bullion on her—then. The salvage company knew
just where to look for it.
But they didn’t
find it.
…
That was quite a small job. But in
1928
the Sorima Company made an official search for a collec
tion of uncut diamonds and other stones
worth more than a mil
lion and a quarter,
which were on board the
Elizabethville
when
another U-boat got her on her way
back from South Africa dur
ing the
war. Well, they found a lot of ammunition in the strongroom, and thirty
shillings in the safe; which didn’t show a big
dividend.”

“And this has been going on for
years?”

“I don’t know how long. But just look at
those three jobs.
They average out at over a million pounds a time. Leave
out all
the other official treasure hunts that are going on now, and all
the other
millions that may have been sneaked away before the
authorised salvage
companies get there. Leave out all the other jobs that haven’t been discovered
yet. Doesn’t it tell you any
thing?”

Simon Templar sat back and let the electric
tingles play up his
vertebrae and toe-dance airily over the back of his
scalp. His
whole body felt the pulse of adventure in exactly the same
way
as a sensitively tuned instrument can detect sounds inaudible to
the human
ear. And to him the sounds were music.

In that short silence he had a vivid picture
of all the far
reaches of the sea on which the
Corsair
cushioned
her light
weight. He saw the lift of storms and the raw break of
hungry rocks and death stealing out of the invisible to give the waters
their
treasure. He saw the green depths, the ultimate dim places
under the spume and sapphire
beauty; saw the vast whale-shapes
of steel
hulls sunk in the jade stillness, and the gaunt ribs of
half-forgotten galleons reaching out of the fronds
of weed. What
unrecorded argosies
might lie under those infinite waters, no one
would ever know. But those
that were known, those that the sea
had
claimed even in the last four hundred years … His imag
ination reeled at the thought. The
Almirante
Florencia,
lost treas
ure-house
of the Armada, foundering in Tobermory Bay with £2,000,000 in plate and jewels.
The Russian flagship
Rurik,
sunk
on the Korean coast with two and a half million pounds in
specie. The sixty-three ships of the Turkish Navy
sent to the
bottom of Navarino Bay
in 1827 with £10,000,000 between them.
The
Chalfont Castle,
with her steering carried away and her
plates sprung below the waterline in the great
storm of that very
year, drifting
helplessly down on to the Casquets to the west of
Alderney, and sinking in twenty fathoms with
£5,000,000 of bar
gold in her
strong-room. Odd names and figures that he had
heard disinterestedly from time to time and practically forgotten crept
back from the hinterlands of unconscious memory and
staggered him … And he saw the only possible,
the only
plausible corollary: the
ghost pirate stealing through grey dawns to drop her divers and her steel
grabs, the unsuspected gangsters of the sea who had discovered the most
pluperfect racket of all
time.

He would have thought that he had heard every
note in the
register of crime, but he had never dreamed of anything
like that. The plot to swindle the Bank of Italy by means of one
million
perfectly genuine 100-lire bills, for his share in which he
was
entitled to wear the pendant of the Order of the Annunziata
in the unlikely event of his
ever attending a State function, was
mere
petty pilfering beside it. Sir Hugo Renway’s scheme for
pillaging the cross-Channel gold routes was mere
clumsy experi
ment in comparison. And yet he knew that the girl who sat
looking at him was not romancing. She threw up the stark terse facts
and left him to find the link; and the
supernatural creep of his
nerves told
him where the link was.

Her grey eyes were on him, tempting and challenging as they
had been when he first saw her with the lights
striking gold in
her hair and the
sea’s damp on her slim shoulders; and in his
mind he had a vision of the black expressionless eyes of the
hooknosed man who stood up in the boat and lied to
him.

“Why?” he said, with a dreamy
rapture in his slow deep
breath. “Why didn’t I know all this before?”

“Perhaps you were too busy.”

“Anything else could have waited,” said the Saint, with
pro
found conviction. “Except perhaps
the Bank of England… .
And is that what you’re detecting?”

She took a cigarette from his pack, and a
light from the butt
between his fingers.

“Yes. I work for the Ingerbeck Agency—we
have a contract
with Lloyd’s, and we handle a lot of other insurance
business.
You see,
where we work, there’s no ordinary police force. Where
a ship sinks, the wreck is nominally under the protection of the
country that covers the water; but if the
underwriters have paid
out a total loss the salvage rights belong to
them. Which means
precisely nothing. In the
last fifty years alone, the insurance
companies have paid out millions
of pounds on this kind of risk. Of course they hoped to get a lot of it back in
salvage, but the
amounts they’ve seen would
make you laugh.”

“Is it always a loss?”

“Of course not. But we’ve known—they’ve
known—for a long
time,
that there was some highly organised racket in the back
ground cheating them out of six figures or more a year. It’s
efficient. It’s got to be. And yet it’s easy. It
has clever men, and
the best
equipment that money can buy. We went out to look for
them.”

“You?”

“Oh, no. Ingerbeck’s. They’ve been on it
for the last five
years. Some of their men went a long way. Three of them
went too far—and didn’t come back.” She met his eyes steadily. “It’s
that sort of racket… . But
one of them found a trail that led
somewhere,
out of hundreds that didn’t; and it’s been followed
up.”

“To here?”

She nodded.

“You see, we came to a brick wall. The
men could get so far,
but they couldn’t go on. They couldn’t get inside the racket. Two
of those who didn’t come back—tried. We couldn’t
take a chance on anything drastic, because we’ve no official standing, and we
hadn’t any facts. Only a good guess. Well, there
was one other
way. Somewhere at the
top of the racket there must be a head
man, and the odds are that he’s
human.”

He took in the grace of her as she lounged
there in the over
sized bathrobe, understanding the rest.

“You came out to be human with
him.”

The turn of her head was sorcery, the sculpture of her neck
merging into the first hinted curve between the
lapels of the
bathrobe was a pattern
of magic that made murder and sudden
death
egregious intrusions.

“I didn’t succeed—so far. I’ve tried.
I’ve even had dinner with
him, and danced at the Casino. But I haven’t
had an invitation
to go on board his boat. To-night I got the devil in me,
or some
thing. I
tried to go on board without an invitation.”

“Didn’t you guess there’d be a watch on
deck?”

“I suppose so. But I thought he’d
probably be sleepy, and I
could move very quietly.” She grimaced. “He got me, but
he let me go when I fired a shot beside his ear—I didn’t hurt him—and
I dived overboard.”

“And thereby hangs a tale,” said
the Saint.

4

He stood up and flicked his cigarette-end
through a porthole,
helping himself to another. The lines of his face were
lifted in
high relief as he drew at a match.

“You didn’t tell me all this to pass the
time, did you?” he
smiled.

“I told you because you’re—you.” She
was looking at him directly, without a trace of affected hesitation. “I’ve
no author
ity. But I’ve seen you, and I know who you are. Maybe I
thought
you might be interested.”

She straightened the bathrobe quickly, looking round for an
ashtray.

“Maybe I might,” he said gently. “Where are you
staying?”

“The Hotel de la Mer.”

“I wish you could stay here. But
to-night—I’m afraid there
must be a thin chance that your boy friend wasn’t quite satisfied
with my lines when we exchanged words, and you
can’t risk it.
Another time——
”

Her eyes opened wider, and he stretched out his hand with a
breath of laughter.

“I’m going to row you home now,” he said. “Or do we
have another argument?”

“I wouldn’t argue,” she began
silkily; and then, with the cor
ners of her mouth tugging against her will,
she took his hand.
“But
thanks for the drink—and everything.”

“There are only two things you haven’t
told me,” he said.
“One is the name of this boat you
wanted to look at.”

She searched his face for a moment before she
answered:

“The
Falkenberg”

“And the other is the name of the boy
friend—the bloke who
passed in the night.”

“Kurt Vogel.”

“How very appropriate,” said the
Saint thoughtfully. “I think’
I shall call him Birdie when we get
acquainted. But that can
wait.
…
I want to
finish my beauty sleep, and I suppose you
haven’t
even started yours. But I’ve got a hunch that if you’re
on the beach before lunch we may talk some more.
I’m glad you
dropped in.”

The fog was thinning to a pearl-grey
vagueness lightening with
the dawn when he rowed her back; and when he woke up there
were ovals of yellow sunlight stencilled along
the bulkhead from
the opposite
portholes. He stretched himself like a cat, freshen
ing his lungs with the heady nectar of the
morning, and lighted a
cigarette.
For a while he lay sprawled in delicious laziness, taking
in the familiar cabin with a sense of new
discovery. There she
had sat, there
was the cup and glass she had used, there was the
crushed stub of her cigarette in the ashtray.
There on the carpet
was still a
darkened patch of damp, where she had stood with
the salt water dewing
her slim legs and pooling on the floor. He
saw
the ripple of gold in her hair, the shaft of challenge in her eyes, the
exquisite shape of her as he first saw her like a shy
nymph spiced with the devil’s temper; and knew a
supreme con
tent which was not artistically rewarded by the abrupt
apparition
of a belligerent face sheltering
behind a loose walrus moustache
in
the door leading to the galley.