Saint Overboard (13 page)

“I don’t want you to be alarmed,” he
said in his cold even
voice, “but I should like you to stay
here a few minutes longer.”

She felt the creep of her skin up towards
the nape of her neck, and searched for the voice that had once been her own.

“I’m quite comfortable,” she said.

“I think you’d better stay,” he
said, and turned round as he
slipped the jacket of a big blued automatic
in his hand. “The
stewards have seen someone prowling about the ship again, just
like that mysterious person I told you about who
was here last
night. But this time
he isn’t going to get away so easily.”

3

Something as intangible as air and as vicious
as a machinegun began hammering at the pit of Loretta’s stomach. The cohort of
ghostly dynamos sang in her
ears again, blotting out her precar
ious
instant of hard-won peace in a din that was twice as bad as
anything before it. She felt the blood draining
down from her
head until only a dab
of powder and the sea-tan on her skin were
left to save her from
ultimate disaster.

“Not really?” she said.

Her voice seemed to come from four or five
miles away, a
mere hollow echo of itself. She knew that by some
miracle of
will-power she had kept the smile steady on her face; but
even
that wasn’t enough. The disaster was not dispelled—it was barely
checked.

A queer glimpse of desperate humour was the only thing she
could cling to. She, who had met case-hardened men
on their own ground, who had faced death as often as dishonour, and
with the same poised contempt and unfaltering
alertness—she,
Loretta Page, who was ranked at Ingerbeck’s as the
coolest head
on a roster of frost-bitten
intellects which operated in the per
petual
bleakness of temperatures below zero—was being slowly
and inevitably broken up. The rasps of a third
degree more
subtle and deadly than
anything she had ever dreamed of were
achieving
what mere violence and crude terrorism could never have achieved. They were
working away as implacably and untiringly as fate, turning her own self into
her bitterest enemy.

Vogel’s jet-black eyes were fixed on her
now. They had moved
on
to her face like the poles of a magnet from which she would have had to
struggle transparently to get away; and yet his aqui
line features were still without positive expression.

“You’ve nothing to worry about,” he
said, in a purr of caress
ing reassurance.

“But I’m thrilled.” She met his gaze
unflinchingly, with the
same smile of friendly innocence. “What
is it that makes you so
popular?”

He shrugged.

“They’re probably just some common
harbour thieves who
think the boat looks as if she might have some valuables
on
board. We shall find out.”

“Let me come with you.”

“My dear——”

“I’m not a bit frightened. Not while
you’ve got that gun. And
I’ll be awfully quiet. But I couldn’t bear to
miss anything so
exciting. Please—would you mind?”

He hesitated for a moment only, and then opened the door on
the starboard side.

“All right. Will you keep behind
me?”

He switched out the lights, and she followed
him out on to the
deck.
Under the dim glow of the masthead light she caught sight
of his broad back moving forward, and stepped
after him. In the
first shock of
transition from the bright illumination of the
wheelhouse there was no difference in quality between the black
ness of the air and the sea, so that the night
seemed to lie all
around them, above
and below, as if the
Falkenberg
was sus
pended in a vast bowl of darkness sprinkled with tiny twinkling lights.
Vogel was almost invisible in his black evening clothes as
he tiptoed round in the half-solid shadow to the
other side of the
deck; and when he
halted she could hardly have been a pace
behind him—his shape swam up before her eyes so suddenly that she
touched him as she stopped.

“He’s still there.”

His voice touched her eardrums as a mere bass
vibration in the stillness. From where she stood she could look down the
whole
length of the deck, a grey pathway stencilled with the
yellow windows of
the saloon where Yule and Arnheim were still
presumably discussing
the port. The deckhouse profiled itself in
black and slanted
black banks of shadow across the open space.
Away aft there was
another shadow merging into the rest, a
thing that
distinguished itself only by its shorter and sharper
curves from the long
cubist lines of the others—something that
her eyes found and
froze on.

Vogel lifted his automatic.

Her left hand gripped the weather rail. She
was trembling,
although her mind was working with a clarity that seemed
out side herself. That psychological third degree had accomplished
its
purpose.

Vogel had got her. Even if she had bluffed
him all the evening,
even if she had betrayed nothing in that
paralysed moment of
realisation
at the chart table, even if she had kept the mask un
moved on her face when he came back—he had got her now. The
story of a man prowling on the ship might be a
lie. She might be
imagining the shadow
out of her own guilty fear; or it might
only be a member of the crew put out to play the part and build up the
deception—to be aimed at and perhaps shot at by Vogel
with a blank cartridge. But she didn’t know. There
was no way
for her to know. She had to choose between letting the Saint
be
shot down without warning, or——

A dozen crazy thoughts crashed through her
head. She might
throw a noisy fit of maidenly hysterics. She might sneeze,
or
cough, or faint
on his shoulder. But she knew that that was just what he was waiting for her to
do. The first hint of interference
that she
gave would brand her for all time. He would have no
more doubts.

She stared at him in a kind of chilled
hopeless agony. She
could see his arm extended against the lighter grey of
the deck,
the dull
gleam of the automatic held rigidly at the end of it, his
black deepset eyes lined unwinkingly along the
sights. Something
in the nerveless
immobility of his position shouted at her that he
was a man to whom the
thought of missing had never occurred.
She
saw the great hungry crook of his nose, the ends of his
mouth drawn, back so that the thin lips rolled
under and van
ished into two parallel
lines that were as vicious and pitiless as
the smile of a cobra would have been. Her own words thundered
through her head in a strident mocking chorus:
“When you join
Ingerbeck’s, you
don’t sign on for a cocktail party … You
take an oath
…
to do your job … keep your mouth
shut … take the consequences …” She
had to choose.

So had the Saint.

Moving along the deckhouse roof as silently
as a ghost, he had
followed everything that happened outside; lying
spreadeagled over the wheelhouse, he had leaned out at a perilous angle until
he could
peer down through one of the windows and see what
was happening inside.
He had bunched his muscles in a spasm of
impotent
exasperation when he saw Loretta’s hand going out to
touch the pencil and
spring the trap, and had breathed again
when she drew back.
Everything that she had endured he had
felt sympathetically within himself; and
when Vogel came back
and took out his
automatic, Simon had heard what was said and had understood that also.

Now, gathering his limbs stealthily under
him, so close above
Loretta’s head that he could almost have reached down and
touched
her, he understood much more. The first mention of a
man prowling about
the deck had prickled a row of nerve centres
all along his spine;
then he had disbelieved; then he had seen the
shadow that Loretta
was staring at, and had remembered the
dark speeding canoe
which had nearly run him down on his way
there. But Loretta
hadn’t seen that; and he knew what she must
be thinking. He could
read what was in her mind, could suffer
everything she was suffering, as if by
some clairvoyant affinity
that transcended
reason he was identified with her in the stress
of that satanically conceived ordeal; and there was a queer ex
altation in his heart as he stepped off the
wheelhouse roof, out
into space over
her head.

She saw him as if he had fallen miraculously
out of the sky,
which was more or less what he did—with one foot knocking
down the automatic and the other striking flat-soled at the side
of
Vogel’s head. The gun went off with a crash that echoed back and forth across
the estuary, and Vogel staggered against the rail
and fell to his
knees.

Simon fell across the rail, caught it with his
hands, and hung on for a moment. Down at the after end of the deck, the shape
that had
been lurking there detached itself from the shadows and
scurried across the narrow
strip of light to clamber over the rail
and
drop hectically downwards.

Loretta Page stared across six feet of Breton
twilight at the
miracle—half
incredulously, with the breathlessness of inde
scribable relief choking in her throat. She saw the flash of white
teeth in a familiar smile, saw him put his fingers
to his lips and
kiss them out to her
with a debonair flourish that defied compar
ison; and then, as Vogel began to drag himself up and around
with
the gun still clutched in his right hand, she saw the Saint launch himself up
with a ripple of brown muscles to curve over
with
hardly a splash into the sea.

He went down in a long shallow dive, and
swam out of the
Falkenberg’s
circle of light
before he rose. He had judged his timing and his angle so well that the canoe
flashed past his eyes
as he broke the surface. He put up one hand
and caught the
gunnel as it went by, nearly upsetting the craft until the
man in
it leaned out to the other side and balanced it.

“I thought I told you to say goodbye to
France,” said the
Saint.

“I thought I told you I didn’t take your
orders,” said the
other grimly.

“They were Loretta’s orders, Steve.”

Murdoch dug in the paddle and dragged the canoe round the stern of
another yacht moored in the river.

“She’s crazy, too,” he snarled.
“Because you’ve got around her
with your gigolo line doesn’t mean I
don’t know what she’ll say
when she comes to her senses. I’m staying
where I like.”

“And getting shot where you like, I
hope,” murmured Simon.
“I won’t interfere in the next bonehead
play you make. I only
butted in this time to save Loretta. Next
time, you can take your
own curtain.”

“I will,” said Murdoch prophetically.
“Let go this boat.”

Simon let go rather slowly, resisting the
temptation to release
his hold with a deft jerk that would have
capsized the canoe and
damped the pugnaciousness of its ungrateful
occupant. He won
dered whether Murdoch’s aggressiveness was founded on
sheer
blind
ignorance of what might have been the result of his clumsy
intrusion, or whether it was put up to bluff away
the knowledge of having made an egregious mistake; and most of all he won
dered what else would come of the insubordinations
of that
tough inflexible personality.

One of those questions was partly answered
for him very
quickly.

He sculled back with his hands, under the
side of the yacht
near which they had parted company, listening to the low
sono
rous purr of a powerful engine that had awoken in the darkness.
There were
no lights visible through any of the portholes, and he
concluded that the
crew were all on shore. He was on the side
away from the
Falkenberg,
temporarily screened even from the
most lynx-eyed
searcher. The purr of the engine grew louder;
and with a quick
decision he grasped a stanchion, drew himself
up, and rolled over
into the tiny after cockpit.