Saint Overboard (11 page)

“Not me,” affirmed a fat fruity voice
which the Saint had not heard before. “I’d rather stay on top of the
water. Wouldn’t you,
Miss Page?”

“It must be awfully interesting,”
said Loretta—and Simon
could picture her, sitting straight and slim,
with the light lifting
the glints of gold from her brown head. “But I couldn’t do
it. I
should be frightened to death…
.”

The Saint passed on, swimming slowly and
leisurely up to the
bows.
He eeled himself round the stem and drifted down again,
close up in the shadow of the other side. As he paddled under the saloon
windows on the return journey, Vogel was offering more
liqueurs. The man in the pink socks was snoring,
and his compan
ion had lighted his pipe. The card game in the crew’s
quarters
finished a deal with a burst of
raucous chaff, the letter-writer
licked
his envelope, and the men who had been reading still read.

Simon Templar edged one hand out of the water
to scratch the
back of his ear. During the whole of that round tour of
inspec
tion he hadn’t collected one glimpse or decibel of any sight or
sound that
didn’t stand for complete relaxation and goodwill
towards men. Except
the faces of some of the crew, which may
not have been their
faults. But as for any watch on deck, he was ready to swear that it simply
didn’t exist.

Meaning … Perhaps that Loretta had been caught the night
before by accident, through some sleepless mariner
happening to amble up for a breath of fresh air. But even if that was the
explanation, a watch would surely have been posted afterwards to
frustrate any second attempt. Unless … and he
could only see
that one reason for the
moment … unless Loretta had been
promoted
from a suspect to a certainty—in which case, since she
was there on board, the watch could take an
evening off.

The Saint gave it up. By every ordinary test,
anyhow, he could
find nothing in his way; and the only thing to do was to
push on and search further.

He hooked his fingers over the counter and
drew himself up
until
he could hitch one set of toes on to the deck. Only for an instant he might
have been seen there, upright against the dark
water; and then he had flitted noiselessly across the dangerous
open space and merged himself into the deep shadow
of the su
perstructure.

Again he waited. If any petrified watcher had escaped detec
tion on his first tour, and had seen his arrival
on board, no alarm
had been raised.
Either the man would be deliberating whether
to fetch help, or he would be waiting to catch him when he
moved forward. And if the Saint stayed where he
was, either the
man would go for help or he would come on to
investigate. In
either of which events he
would announce his presence unmis
takably
to the Saint’s tingling ears.

But nothing happened. Simon stood there like
a statue while
the seconds ticked into minutes on his drumming pulses,
and the wetness drained down his legs and formed a pool around his feet,
hardly
breathing; but only the drone of conversation in the saloon, and a muffled
guffaw from the crew’s quarters under his
feet, reached him out
of the stillness.

At last he relaxed, and allowed himself to glance curiously at
his surroundings. Over his head, the odd
canvas-shrouded con
trivance which he had observed from a distance
reached out aft
like an oversized boom—but
there was no mast at the near end
to
account for it. The
Falkenberg
carried no sail. He stretched
up
and wriggled his fingers through a gap in the lacing, and felt
something like a square steel girder with wire
cables stretched
inside it; and
suddenly the square protuberance, likewise covered
with tarpaulin, on which the after end of the boom
rested took
on a concrete
significance. At the end up against the deckhouse
he found wheels, and the wire cables turned over
the wheels, and
ran down close beside
the bulkhead to vanish through plated
eyes in the deck at his feet
…
He was exploring a nifty, well-
oiled, and up-to-date ten-ton grab!

“Well, -well, well,” murmured the
Saint admiringly, to his
guardian angel.

And that curiously low flattened stern
…
It all
fitted in.
Divers could be dropped over that counter with the
minimum of
difficulty;
and the grab could telescope out or swing round, and
run its claw round to be steered on to whatever the divers
offered it. While, forward of all those gadgets,
there were a pair
of high-speed
engines and a super-stream-lined hull to facilitate a
lightning getaway if an emergency emerged… .
Which, how
ever priceless a
conglomeration of assets, is not among the amen
ities usually advertised with luxurious pleasure cruisers.

A slow smile tugged at the Saint’s lips; and
he restrained him
self with a certain effort from performing an impromptu
horn
pipe. The last lingering speck of doubt in his mind had been
catastrophically
obliterated in those few seconds. Loretta Page
hadn’t been pulling
his leg, or raving, or leading him up the
garden. He wasn’t
kidding himself to make the book read accord
ing to the blurb. That
preposterous, princely, pluperfect racket did exist; and Kurt Vogel was in it.
In it right up to the blue
cornice of his neck.

If someone had been wearing a hat, he would
have raised it in
solemn
salute to the benign deities of outlawry that had poured
him into such a truly splendiferous tureen of
soup.

And then a door opened further up the deck,
and footsteps
began to move down towards him. Where he was standing,
there
wasn’t cover for a cat, except what was provided by the shadow of the
deckhouse. In another second even that was taken from
him, as a switch was
clicked over somewhere and a pair of bulk
head lights behind
frosted panels suddenly wiped out the dark
ness in. a glow of
yellowish radiance.

The Saint’s heart arrived in his mouth, as if
it had soared up
there
in an express elevator; and for a moment his hand dropped
to the gun in his belt.

And then he realised that the lights which
had destroyed his
hiding-place
hadn’t been switched on with that intention. They
were simply a part of the general system of exterior illumination
of the boat, and their kindling had doubtless been
paralleled by
the lighting up of
other similar bulbs all around the deck. But
the footsteps were drawing close to the corner where they would
find him in
 
full
 
view,
 
and he
 
could hear Vogel
 
discoursing
proprietorially on the details of beam and
draught.

Simon looked up speculatively, and his hands
reached for the
deckhouse roof. In another second he was up there, spread
out
flat on his stomach, peeping warily down over the edge.

2

All the evening Kurt Vogel had been
studiously affable. The
dinner had been perfectly cooked and
perfectly served; the wine,
presented with a charming suggestion of
apology, just dulcet
enough to flatter a feminine palate, without being too sweet for
any taste. Vogel had set himself out to play the
polished cosmo
politan host, and he
filled the part brilliantly. The other guest,
whom he called Otto and who had been introduced to Loretta as
Mr Arnheim, a fat broad-faced man with small
brown eyes and a
moist red pursed-up
mouth, fitted into the play with equal correctness. And yet the na
ï
ve joviality of Professor Yule, with his
boyish laugh and his anecdotes and his
ridiculously premature
grey beard, was the only thing that had eased the
strain on her
nerves.

She knew that from the moment when she set
foot on board
she was being watched like a mouse cornered by two
patient
cats. She knew it, even without one single article of fact which
she could
have pointed out in support of her belief. There was
nothing in the
entertainment, not the slightest scintilla of a hint
of an innuendo, to
give her any material grounds for discomfort.
The behaviour of Vogel and Arnheim was so
punctilious that
without their unfailing
geniality it would have been almost em
barrassingly
formal.

The menace was not in anything they said or
did. It was in their silences. Their smiles never reached their eyes. Their
laughter
went no deeper than their throats. All the time they
were watching,
waiting, analysing. Every movement she made,
every turn of a
glance, every inflection of her voice, came under their mental microscope—was
wafered down, dissected, scrutin
ised in all its component parts until it had given up its last
parti
cle of meaning. And the fiendish
cleverness of it was that a perfectly innocent woman in the role she had
adopted wouldn’t have been bothered at all.

She had realised halfway through the meal
that that was the
game they were playing. They were merely letting her own
imag
ination work against her, while they looked on. Steadily, skil
fully,
remorselessly, they were goading her own brain against her,
keying her
millimetre by millimetre to the tension of self-con
sciousness where she
would make one false step that would be
sufficient for their
purpose. And all the time they were smiling,
talking flatteringly
to her, respecting her with their words, so
cunningly that an
outside observer like Professor Yule could
have seen nothing to
give her the slightest offence.

She had clung to the Professor as the one
infallible lodestar on the tricky course she had to steer, even while she had
realised
completely what Vogel’s patronage of scientific
exploration
meant.
Yule’s spontaneous innocence was the one pattern which
she had been able to hold to; and when he remained behind in
the saloon she felt a cold emptiness that was not
exactly fear.

Arnheim had engineered it, with a single
sentence of irre
proachable
and unarguable tact, when Vogel suggested showing
her over the ship.

“We’ll stay and look after the
port,” he said, and there was
not even the suspicion of a smirk in
his eyes when he spoke.

She looked at staterooms, bathrooms, galleys,
engines, and
refrigerators, listening to his explanations and
interjecting the
right expressions of admiration and delight, steeling
herself
against the hypnotic monotone of his voice. She wondered
whether he would kiss her in
one of the rooms, and felt as if she
had
been let out of prison when they came out on deck under the
open sky.

His hand slid through her arm. It was the
first time he had
touched her, and even then the touch had no more than an
avun
cular familiarity.

“… This open piece of deck is rather pleasant for sitting
out
when it’s hot. We rig an awning over
that boom if the sun’s too strong.”

“It must be marvellous to own a boat
like this,” she said.

They stood at the rail, looking down the river.
Somewhere
among the lights in the broadening of the estuary was the
Cor
sair,
but there was nothing by which she could pick
it out.

“To be able to have you here—this is pleasant,” he said.
“At
other times it can be a very lonely
ownership.”

“That must be your own choice.”

“It is. I am a rich man. If I told you
how rich I was you
might think I was exaggerating. I could fill this boat
hundreds of
times over with—delectable company. A generous
millionaire is
always attractive. But I’ve never done so. Do you know
that
you’re the first woman who has set foot on this deck?”

“I’m sorry if you regret it,” she
said carelessly.

“I do.”