Saint Overboard (15 page)

Vogel stood at the chart table and gave the Professor time to
reach his stateroom. In front of him was the
chart with that lone
position marked
in red ink, the scraps of torn paper in the ash
tray, the pencil lying beside it
…
untouched. Loretta Page
had
stood over those things for a
full minute, but from where he was
watching
he could not see her face. “When she turned away she
had seemed unconcerned. And yet … there were
more things
than that to be
explained. Kurt Vogel was not worried—his passionlessly
efficient brain had no room for such a futile
emotion—
but there had been other
moments in his career, like that, when
he
knew that he was fighting for his life.

He left the chart table without a shrug, and
left the wheelhouse
by the door at the after end. Between him and the saloon
a com
panion ran
down to the lower deck. He went aft along the alley
way at the bottom—the door of the Professor’s cabin was close
to the foot of the companion, and he paused outside
it for a
couple of seconds and heard
the thud of a dropped shoe before
he went on. His cigar glowed evenly,
gripped with the barest
necessary pressure
between his teeth, and bis feet moved with a
curious soundlessness on the thick carpet.

No. 9 cabin was the last door in the
passenger section. Just
beyond it another companion sloped steeply
up to the after deck, and abaft the companion a watertight door shut off the
continua
tion of the alleyway on to which the crew’s quarters opened.
Vogel stopped and turned the handle, and a faint frown creased
in
between his eyebrows when the door did not move.

He raised his hand to knock; and then for some
reason He
glanced downwards and saw that the key was in the lock on
the
outside. At
the same time he became conscious of a cool dampness on his hand. He opened it
under the light, and saw a glisten
of
moisture in the palm and on the inside of his fingers.

For an instant he did not move. And then his
hand went down
slowly and touched the door-handle again. He felt the
wetness of
it
under the light slide of his finger-tips, and bent down to touch
the carpet. That also was damp; so were the
treads of the com
panion.

Without hesitation he turned the key silently
in the lock,
slipped an automatic out of his pocket, and thrust open
the door.
The cabin was in darkness, but his fingers found the
switch in
stantaneously and clicked it down. Otto Arnheim lay at
his feet
in the middle of the floor, with his face turned whitely
up to the
light
and his round pink mouth hanging vacuously open. There were a couple of lengths
of rope carelessly thrown down beside
him—and
that was all.

IV
.
    
HOW STEVE MURDOCH
REMAINED OBSTINATE,

AND
 
SIMON TEMPLAR RENDERED FIRST AID

IF THE quality of surprise had ever been a part of Orace’s emo
tional
make-up, the years in which he had worked for Simon Templar had long since
exhausted any trace of its existence. Probably from sheer instinctive motives
of self-preservation he had acquired the majestically immutable sang-froid of a
jellied eel; and he helped Simon to haul his prize out on to the deck of
the
Corsair
as unconcernedly as he would have lent a hand with
embarking a barrel
of beer.

“How d’you like it?” asked the
Saint, with a certain pardona
ble smugness.

He was breathing a little deeply from the
effort of life-saving
Steve Murdoch’s unconscious body through the
odd half-mile of
intervening water, and the shifting muscles glistened over
his torso as he filled his chest. Murdoch, lying in a heap with the
water
oozing out of his sodden clothes, was conspicuously less
vital;
and Orace inspected him with perceptible distaste.

“Wot is it?” he inquired
disparagingly.

“A sort of detective,” said the
Saint. “I believe he’s a good fellow at heart; but he doesn’t like me and
he’s damned stub
born. He’s tried to die once before to-night, and he
didn’t thank
me when I stopped him.”

Orace sucked his moustache ghoulishly over
the body.

“Is ‘e dead now?”

“Not yet—at least I don’t think so. But
he’s got a lump on the
back of his head the size of an apple, and I
don’t expect he’ll
feel too happy when he wakes up. Let’s try him and
see.”

They undressed Murdoch out on the deck, and
Simon wrung
out his clothes as best he could and tied them in a
rough bundle
which he chucked into the galley oven when they took the
still
unconscious
man below. He left Orace to apply the usual re
storatives, and went back into the saloon to towel himself vigorously and
brush his hair. He heard various groans and
thumps and other sounds of painful resuscitation while he was
doing this; and he had just settled into a clean
shirt and a pair
of comfortable old
flannel trousers when the communicating door
opened and the fruit of Orace’s labours shot blearily in.

It was quite obvious that the Saint’s prophecy was correct. Mr
Murdoch was not feeling happy. The tender imprint
of a skil
fully wielded blackjack had
established at the base of his skull a
high-powered broadcasting station
of ache from which messages
of hate and
ill-will were radiating in all directions with throbbing
intensity,
while the grinding machinery of transmission was set
ting up a roaring din that threatened to split his head. Taking
these
profound disadvantages into consideration, Mr Murdoch
entered, comparatively speaking, singing and dancing; which he
is to say that he only looked as if he would like
to beat some
body on the head with a
mallet until they sank into the ground.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded truculently.

“Just another boat,” answered the
Saint kindly. “On your left,
the port side. On your right, the
starboard. Up there is the for
ward or sharp end, which goes through the
water first——
”

Murdoch glowered at him speechlessly for a
moment; and
then the team of pneumatic drills started work again under
the
roof of his skull, and he sank on to a bunk.

“I thought it would be you,” he
said morosely.

Orace came in like a baronial butler, put
down a tray of whisky
and glasses, sniffed loudly, and departed.
Murdoch stared at
the
door which closed behind him with the penumbras of homi
cide darkening again on his square features.

“I could kill that guy twice, and then drown him.”
Murdoch
grabbed the whisky-bottle, poured
three fingers into a glass, and swallowed it straight. He compressed his lips
in a grimace, and
looked up at the
Saint again. “Well, here I am—and who the hell
asked you to bring me here?”

“You didn’t,” Simon admitted.

“Didn’t you tell me you’d keep out of the way next
time?”

“That was the idea.”

“Well, what d’ya think I’m going to
do—fall on your neck and
kiss you?”

“Not in those trousers, I hope,” said the Saint.

The trousers belonged to Orace, who was
taller but not so
bulky. As a result, they were stretched dangerously across
the
seat, and hung in a graceful concertina over the ankles. Murdoch
glared
down at them venomously, and they responded with an ominous rending squeak as
he moved to get hold of the whisky
again.

“I didn’t ask you to pull me out, and
I’m not going to thank
you. If you thought I’d fall for you, you’re
wrong. Was that the
idea, too? Did you think you might be able to get under
my skin
that way—make the same sort of monkey outa me that you’ve
made outa Loretta? Because you
won’t. I’m not so soft. You can
slug me
again and take me back to the
Falkenberg,
and we’ll
start again
where we left off; and that’s as far as you’ll get.”

Simon sauntered over to the table and helped
himself to a
measured drink.

“Well, of course that’s certainly a
suggestion,” he remarked. He sat down opposite Murdoch and put up his feet
along the
settee. “I’ve always heard that Ingerbeck’s was
about the ace
firm in the business.”

“It is.”

“Been with them long?” asked the
Saint caressingly.

“About ten years.”

“Mmm.”

Murdoch’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“What the hell d’you mean?”

“I mean they can’t be so hot if they’ve
kept you on the over
head for ten years.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah—as we used to say in the movies.
Stay where you are,
Steve. If you try to start any rough stuff with me I shall
hit
your face so hard that you’ll have to be fed from behind. Besides
which, those pants will split.”

“Go on.”

Simon flicked open the cigarette-box and
helped himself to a
smoke. He slipped a match out of the ashstand and sprung
it
into flame with his thumb-nail.

“Now and for the last time,” he
said, with the caress in his
voice smoothed out until it was as soothing as
a sheet of ice,
“will you try to understand that I don’t give a good
God-damn
how soon you have your funeral. Your mother may miss you,
and even Ingerbeck’s may send a wreath; but personally I shall
be as
miserable as a dog with a new tree. The only reason I in
terfered on the
Falkenberg
was
because Vogel wasn’t half so
interested in
shooting you as in seeing how Loretta would like it.
The only reason I pulled you out again——
”

“Was what?”

“Because if you’d stayed there they’d
have found out more
about you. You’re known. Thanks to your brilliant
strategy in
tearing into the Hotel de la Mer and shouting for Loretta
at the
top of your voice, the bloke who was sleuthing her this after
noon knows
your face. And if he’d seen you to-night on an
identification
parade—that would have been that. For Loretta,
anyway. And that’s
all I’m interested in. As it is, you may have been recognised already. I had to
take a chance on that. I could only lug you out as quickly as possible, and
hope for the best.
Apart from that, you could have stayed there and been
massaged
with hot
irons, and I shouldn’t have lost any sleep. Is that plain enough or do you
still think I’ve got a fatherly interest in your
future?”

Murdoch held himself down on the berth as
gingerly as if it
had
been red hot, and his chin jutted out as if Ms fists were itch
ing to follow it.

“I get it. But you feel like a father to
Loretta—huh?”

“That’s my business.”

“I’ll say it is. There are plenty of greasy-haired dagoes
making big money at it.”

“My dear Steve!”

“I know you, Saint,” Murdoch said
raspingly. His big hands
rolled his glass between them as if they were
playing with the
idea of crushing it to fragments with a single savage
contraction,
and the hard implacable lights were smouldering under the
sur
face of his eyes. “You’re crook. I’ve heard all about you. Maybe
there aren’t any warrants out
for you at the moment. Maybe you
kid some
people with that front of yours about being some kind
of fairy-tale Robin Hood trying to put the world
right in his own
way. That stuff don’t
cut any ice with me. You’re crook—and
you’re in the racket for what you
can get out of it.”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“Aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I get one hundred bucks a week out of it; and the man
who says I don’t earn ‘em is a liar. But that’s the
last cent I
take.”

“Of course, that’s very enterprising of
you,” murmured the
Saint, in the same drawl of gentle mockery. “But we can’t all
be
boy scouts. I gather that you think I
wouldn’t be content with
one hundred
bucks a week?”