Saint Overboard (14 page)

He reached it only a second before the beam
of a young
searchlight swept over the ship, wiping a bar of brilliant
illu
mination across the deck in its passing. The throb of the engine
droned
right up to him; and he hitched a very cautious eye over
the edge of
the cockpit, and saw the
Falkenberg’s
speed tender
churning
around his refuge, so close that he could have touched
it with a boathook. A
seaman crouched up on the foredeck, swinging the powerful spotlight that was
mounted there; two
other men stood up beside the wheel, following the path of
the
beam with their eyes. Its long finger danced on the water,
touched
luminously on the hulls of other craft at their anchorages, stretched faintly
out to the more distant banks of the es
tuary … fastened
suddenly on the shape of a canoe that
sprang up out of the dark as if from
nowhere, skimming towards
the bathing pool at the end of the Plage du
Prieur
é
. The canoe
veered
like a startled gull, shooting up parallel with the rocky
foreshore;
but the beam clung to it like a magnetised bar of
light, linking it with
the tender as if it were held by intangible
cables. At the same
time the murmur of the tender’s engine
deepened its note: the
bows lifted a little, and a white streamer
of foam lengthened
away from the stern as the link-bar of light
between the two
craft shortened.

The canoe turned once more, and headed south again, the man
in it paddling with unhurried strokes again, as if
he was trying to
undo the first
impression he had given of taking flight. The
Falkenberg’s
tender
turned and drifted up alongside him as the en
gine was shut off; and at that moment the spotlight was switched
out.

Simon heard the voices clearly across the
water.

“Have you seen anyone swimming around
here?”

And Murdoch’s sullen answer: “I did see
someone—it was
over
that way.”

“Thanks.”

The voice of the tender’s spokesman was the last one Simon
heard. And then, after the very briefest pause,
the engine was cut in again, and the tender began to slide smoothly back to
wards the
Falkenberg,
while the canoe went
on its way to the
shore. In that
insignificant pause the only sound was a faint thud
such as a man might have made in dumping a heavy
weight on a
hard floor. But Simon
Templar knew, with absolute certainty, that the man who paddled the canoe on
towards the shore was
not the man who
had been caught by the spotlight, and that the
man who had been in the canoe was riding unconsciously in the
speedboat as it turned back.

4

The tender slid in under the side of the
Falkenberg,
and the
man on the foredeck who had been working the spotlight
stood
up and threw
in the painter. Vogel himself caught the rope and
made it fast. Under the natural pallor of his skin there was a
curious
rigidity, and the harsh black line of his brows over that
great scythe of a nose was accentuated by the
shadows that fell
across his face as
he leaned over the rail.

“Did you find anything?”

“No.” The man at the wheel
answered, standing up in the
cockpit. He looked up at Vogel intently as he
spoke, and his
right
hand fingered a rug that seemed to have been thrown down in a rather large
bundle on the seat beside him. His phlegmatic
voice,
with a thick guttural accent, boomed on very slowly and
deliberately: “We asked a man in a boat, but
he had seen no
body.”

“I see,” answered Vogel quietly.

He straightened up with a slight shrug; and
Professor Yule
and Arnheim, on his right, turned away from the rail with
him.

“That’s a pity,” said Yule
enthusiastically. “But they can’t
have searched very far. Shall we go out
and have another look?”

“I’m afraid we shouldn’t be likely to
have any more success, my dear Professor,” replied Vogel. “There is
plenty of room in
the river for anyone to disappear quite quickly, and we
were slow
enough in starting after them.” He turned to
Loretta. “I’m very
sorry—you must have had rather a shock, and
you’re more im
portant
than catching a couple of harbour thieves.”

In some way the quality of his voice had
altered—she could feel the change without being able to define it. She felt
like
somebody who has been watching a fuse smouldering away into a
stack of
lethal explosive under her feet, and who has seen the
fuse miraculously
flicker and go out. The sensation of limpness in her muscles was no longer the
paralysis of nightmare; it was
the relaxation of pure relief. She knew that
for that night at
least
the ordeal was over. Vogel had shot his bolt. In a few hours he would be as
balanced and dangerous as ever, his brain would
be working with the same ruthless insistence and ice-cold de
tachment;
but for the moment he himself was suffering from a
shock, intrinsically slight, and yet actual enough to have jarred
the delicately calculated precision of his attack.
Something told
her that he realised
what he had lost, and that he was too clever
to waste any more effort on a spoiled opportunity.

“I’m perfectly all right,” she said;
and her nerves were so
steady again that she had to call on acting for the vestiges of
trepidation which she felt were demanded.

“All the same, I expect you would like a
drink.”

“That wouldn’t do any of us any
harm,” agreed Arnheim.

In his own way he had altered, although his
broad flat face
was as bland as ever, and his wet little red mouth was
pursed up to the same enigmatic sensual bud that it had been all the eve
ning. He
took it on himself to officiate with the decanter, and
swallowed half a
tumbler of neat whisky in two methodical
gulps. Vogel took a
very modest allowance with a liberal splash
of soda, and sipped
it with impenetrable restraint.

But even the artificial film of lightness had gone murky. Vogel’s
unshaken suavity, with Arnheim’s solid
co-operation, elimi
nated any
embarrassing silences; but a curious heavy tenseness
like the threat of thunder had crept into the
atmosphere, a tense
ness so subtle and
well concealed that at any other time she
might have been persuaded that it was purely subjective to her
own fatigue. When at last she said that she had
had too many late nights already that week, and asked if they would excuse
her, she detected a tenuous undercurrent of
relief in their pro
testations.

“I’m sorry all this should have happened
to upset the
evening,” said Vogel, as they left the saloon.

She laid her hand on his arm.

“Honestly, it hasn’t upset me,” she said. “It’s been
quite an
adventure. I’m just rather tired.
Do you understand?”

In that at least she was perfectly truthful.
A reaction had set
in that had made her feel mentally and physically bruised,
as if
her mind and body had been crushed together through machine
rollers.
Sitting beside him again in the cockpit of the speed ten
der, with a light sea breeze
stirring refreshingly through her hair,
it
seemed as if a whole week of ceaseless effort had gone by
since she set out to keep that dangerous
appointment.

She felt his arm behind her shoulders and his
hand on her
knee, and steeled herself to be still.

“Will you come with us to-morrow?”

She shook her head, with a little despairing
breath.

“I’ve been through too much to-night… You don’t give a
girl a chance to think, do you?”

“But there is so little time. We go
to-morrow——
”

“I know. But does that make it any
easier for me? It’s my life
you want to buy. It mayn’t seem very much to
you, but it’s the
only
one I’ve got.”

“But you will come.”

“I don’t know. You take so much for
granted——
”

“You will come.”

His hand on her shoulder was weighting into
her flesh. The
deep toneless hypnotic command of his voice reverberated
into
her ears like an iron bell tolling in a resonant abyss; but it was
not his
command which scarred itself into her awareness and told
her that she would have to go.
There had been danger, ordeal,
respite; but
nothing accomplished. She would still have to go.

“Oh, yes … I’ll come.” She
turned her face in to his shoul
der; and then she broke away. “No,
don’t touch me again now.”

He left her alone; and she sat in the far
corner of the cockpit
and stared out over the dark water while the
tender came in alongside the quay. He walked up to her hotel with her in the
same
silence, and she wondered what kind of superhumanly im
mobilised exaltation was pent up in his
obedience. She turned at
the door, and held
out her hand.

“Goodnight.”

“Will half-past ten be too early? I
could send a steward down before that to do your packing.”

“No. I can be ready.”

He put her fingers to his lips, and went back
to the jetty. On
the return journey he took the wheel himself, and sent the
speedboat creaming through the dark with her graceful bows
lifting
and the searchlight blazing a clear pathway over the wa
ter. The man who had been in
charge of the hunt a little while
before
stood beside him.

“Where did you put him, Ivaloff ?”
Vogel asked quietly.

“In No. 9 cabin,” answered the man
in his sullen throaty
voice. “He is tied up and gagged; but I
think he will sleep for a
little while.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“I have not seen him before. Perhaps one of the men who has
been watching on shore will know him.”

Vogel said nothing. Even if the captive was a
stranger, it
would be possible to find out who he was. If he carried
no papers
that would identify him, he would be made to talk. It
never
occurred to him that the prisoner might be innocent: Ivaloff
made no
mistakes, and Vogel himself had seen the canoe’s
significant swerve
and first instinctive attempt to dodge the
searchlight. He threw
the engine into neutral and then into re
verse, bringing the
tender neatly up to the companion, and went
across the deck to
the wheelhouse.

Professor Yule was there. He glanced up from
a newspaper.

“I wish I knew what these gold mining
shares were going to
do,” he remarked casually. “I could
sell now and take a profit,
but I’d like to see another rise first.”

“You should ask Otto about it—he is an
expert,” said Vogel.
“By the way, where is he?”

“I don’t know. He went out to look for
part of a broken cuff
link. Didn’t you see him on deck?”

Vogel shook his head.

“Probably he was on the other side of the
ship. Do you hold
very many of these shares?”

He selected a cigar from a cedarwood cabinet
and pierced it
carefully while Yule talked. So Arnheim hadn’t been able
to wait
more than a few minutes before he tried to find out something
about the
man they had captured. Otto had always been impa
tient—his brain
lacked that last infinitesimal milligram of poise
which gave a man the
power to possess himself indefinitely and
imperturbably. He
should have waited until Yule went to bed.

Not that it was vitally important. The Professor was as unsus
pecting as a child; and No. 9 cabin was the
dungeon of the ship
—a room so
scientifically soundproofed that a gun fired in it
would have been inaudible where they were. Vogel
drew steadily
at his cigar and
discussed the gold market with unruffled compo
sure for a quarter of an
hour, until Yule picked himself up and
decided
to retire.