Saint Overboard (24 page)

“You’re sure you haven’t any designs on
me?”

“Turn round!”

The Saint turned with a shrug.

“I suppose you know what’ll happen if your hand shakes with
that gun of yours, brother,” he remarked. “You might have an
accident and hit me. There’s something about your
voice which
makes me think you’ve been
practising in a place where little things like that don’t matter, but over here
they’re a bit fussy. Have you ever seen a man hanged, old dear? It does the
most
comic things to his face.
Although probably your face is comic
enough——”

“You can forget that stuff,” said
the man behind him, coldly.
“Now just drop that thing you’ve got in your hand.”

“What, my little umbrella?”

“Yeah—whatever it is.”

The Saint bent down slowly and laid the
stanchion on the
floor, choosing the place for it carefully.

“Now take two steps forward.”

Simon measured the two paces, and stood
still. His body was
braced for the bullet which might conclude the interlude
within
the next three seconds, and yet his one desperate hope was
pinned to
the temptation he had left two steps behind—the iron
rod which he had put
down so carefully, with one end on an upset ashtray from which it could not be
moved without the
slight grating sound for which his ears were straining.
Out of the
corner of his eye he saw Orace leaning rigidly forward on
the
couch, his scarecrow face set in a stare of indomitable
wrath…
.

It came—the faint gritting scrape of metal
which told him
that the stanchion was being picked up. And the Saint
flung himself back with an instantaneous release of his tensed muscles.

His right heel went kicking backwards like a mule’s, straight as
a gunshot for the place where the head of the man
behind him
should have been if he was
bending to pick up the stanchion,
with
all the power of the Saint’s vengeful thews packed into it,
and a silent
prayer to speed it on its way. And the head of the
intruder was exactly where Simon had computed it should have
been. He felt the ecstatic squelch of the leather
sogging home
into something hard and
only superficially yielding, heard the
plop!
of a silencer and
felt something tug at his sleeve, and spun
round, half overbalancing with the violence of his own impetuous
effort.

From the man behind had come one single
shrill hiccough of
agony: and the Saint twisted round in time to see him
rocking
back on his haunches with one hand clapped to his face and the
blood
spurting through his fingers. His other hand still clutched the silenced gun,
weaving it round in a blind search for a target.
It plopped again, chipping the corner from
a mirror on the after
bulkhead; and Simon
laughed softly and fell on him with his
knees. As he grabbed the man’s gun wrist he saw Orace lurching
forward to pick up the iron bar which had given
him his
chance, and the obvious
justice of the team play appealed to him irre
stibly. He rolled under his victim with a quick squirm and a
heave, and the man’s weight came dead on his hands
as Orace
struck.

The Saint wriggled out from underneath and sat
up, feeling
for a cigarette and leaning against the bunk.

“A shrewd swipe, Orace—very
shrewd,” he commented, eyeing
the sleeping beauty with professional
approval. “It must have
made you feel a lot better. What’s all the
excitement been
about?”

While he explored the extent of his crew’s
injuries, Orace told
him.

” ‘E came alongside abaht ‘arf-parst
nine, sir. Said ‘e ‘ad a
messidge from yer. ‘Ho, yus?’ I ses, ‘wot is
this ‘ere messidge?’
‘Yer to go an’ meet Mr Tombs at the Queen’s
right awy,’ ‘e ses. ‘Ho, yus?’ I ses, ‘well, Mr Tombs’s larst words to me was
to sty
‘ere till it snows,’ I ses. So ‘e ses: ‘This is very urgent. Can I
come
aboard an’ tell yer the rest of the messidge?’—and before I
could say anythink ‘e’d come
aboard. ‘Not aht ‘ere,’ ‘e ses, ‘where
we
can be seen. Let’s go below.’ So ‘e goes below, wivout so
much as a by-your-leave, an’ I follers ‘im to tell
‘im where ‘e gets orf. ‘I gotter whisper it,’ ‘e ses; an’ then, bang, I got a
biff
on the ‘ead that lide me right aht.”

“What about this bullet?”

“That was afterwards. When I woke up ‘e
was still tearin’ the
saloon to pieces, an’ ‘e didn’t notice me. I
lay doggo fra bit, an’
then I got ‘old of one of the drawers wot ‘e’d
pulled out an’
shied
it at ‘im. Must ‘ve knocked ‘im arf silly, becos I nearly got
me ‘ands on ‘im, but I ‘adn’t got me legs back so
much as I
thought I ‘ad, an’ ‘e pulled out ‘is gun an’ shot me.”

“And damned nearly killed you,”
said the Saint thoughtfully.

The bullet had struck one of Orace’s left
ribs, glanced off, and
torn an ugly gash in the muscle of his arm.
So far as the Saint
could tell, there were no bones broken; and he busied
himself
with expertly dressing and bandaging the wound, while his mind probed
for the origins of that riotous visit.

It wasn’t homicide alone and primarily, at
least—he was sure
of that. From the story, the shot which had crippled Orace
looked more like an accident of panic, the desperate impulse of
any thug
who had felt himself on the point of being cornered and captured. And if that
had been the object, it would have
been easy enough to finish the job—he
himself could have been
picked off without warning while he stood at
the head of the
companion. If not that, then what? The eruptive appearance
of
the saloon provided a ready answer. Vogel was still searching
for
information; and the legend of convenient harbour thieves
had
already been established in Dinard.

There was another suggestion which he
remembered as he put
the last touches to Orace’s bandages.

“Did a porter bring a couple of trunks
along for me?” he
asked; and Orace nodded.

“Yessir. They came abaht arf-parst
seven. I put ‘em in the
starboard cabin.”

Simon went forward as soon as he had
finished, and found
more or less what he had expected. The cords had been cut
away
from the trunks, and the locks had been ripped away by the
scientific
application of a jemmy. One of them was already open,
and the lid of the
other lifted at a touch. Clearly the visitor had just been completing his
investigations when the sound of the
Saint’s arrival had disturbed him.

“Which is all very festive and
neighbourly,” reflected the
Saint, as he surveyed the wreckage.

He strolled back to the saloon in a meditative frame of mind.
There remained the problem of the investigator
himself, who
seemed destined to wake
up with a sore head as well as a flat
tened face. The sore head might return
to normal in twenty-four
hours; even the
flattened face might endear itself by a few years
of devotion, and become as acceptable to its
owner as the sym
metrical dial which
perhaps it had once been; but the informa
tion which had been acquired during the same visit might prove
to be more recalcitrant. It must not be allowed to
take itself
back to Vogel; but on
the other hand it was doubtless keeping
company with some useful information from the Vogel camp
which might form a basis of fair exchange.

Simon Templar found himself warming to that
idea on his
return
journey. He closed the door of the galley behind him and
folded a wet towel which he had collected on his
way, grinning at O
race rather
dreamily.

“We might see if your boy friend feels
talkative,” he said. “And if he doesn’t, you may be able to think of
some way to
thaw
him out.”

He cleared a space on one of the settees and
yanked the in
truder up on it. For a minute or so he applied the cold
towel methodically. Then he felt the back of the man’s head, looked
closely
into his face, and opened up his shirt. After which he
moved away and
finished his cigarette with contemplative de
liberation. For nothing was more certain
than that the sleeping
beauty had listened
to the last lullaby of all.

VI.
      
HOW PROFESSOR YULE TESTED
THE BATHYSTOL,

AND KURT VOGEL MADE A
PROPOSITION

DEFINITELY an uninvited complication, thought the Saint;
although he
admitted that it was the sort of accident that was
always liable to happen when a man had an
iron bar in his hand
and good reason to be
annoyed. Orace had had no cause to feel
tenderhearted, and perhaps the deceased’s cranium had been
more fragile than the average. The Saint’s attitude
was sym
pathetic and broadminded. He
did not feel that Orace was to be
blamed;
but he did feel that that momentary lapse had altered
the situation somewhat drastically. Considering
the point again in
the placid light of the morning after, he could find
no encourage
ment to revise his opinion. What
he had no way of foreseeing
was how drastic that alteration was destined
to turn out.

He folded his arms on the rail of the
Falkenberg,
and frowned
ruminatively at a flight of gulls wheeling over the blue
water.
Somewhere back under that same blue water, out in the channel
between
Guernsey and Herm, the unfortunate visitor lay in his
long sleep, moored down to the sea bed by
a couple of pigs of ballast. The
Corsair
had been cleaned up and tidied,
and every
record of his intrusion effaced.

Simon Templar had done that alone, before he went to sleep;
but his own plans had kept him awake for longer.

“The balloon’s gone up, anyway,”
he had reasoned. “When the
search party doesn’t come home, Vogel will
start thinking until
his head gets hot. What’ll he decide? That
the fellow rat
ted?
…
One chance in fifty … That he’s
had an accident.
then? That’s the forty-nine to one certainty.”

He had thought round it from every angle that
he could see,
trying to put himself into Vogel’s place, but there was
no other
conclusion he could come to. What then?

“Vogel won’t talk to the police. For
one thing, that would give
him a hell of a tall story to think up,
explaining how he knew anyone would be burgling my boat to-night. And to go on
with,
he doesn’t want to draw the attention of the police any more
than I
do. And to put a lid on it, for all he may know up to this moment, I might
be
the police.”

There was still that thin and brittle straw
of anonymity to
clutch.

“What would I do?
…
I’d come
right over and have a look.
But Vogel won’t. He’s pulled that one already;
and he’d have a job to find another excuse to get shown over the boat for the
second
time in twenty-four hours. Besides, he knows he wouldn’t
find
anything. If I’m police or if I’m just one of the idle rich, the
burglar’s
already lodged in jail, and there’s nothing he can do
about it except try to bail him out in the
morning when he hears
the story. And if
there’s a chance that I’m police, he’d have to
be damn careful how he went about that. On the other hand, if
I’m
in the racket too, I’d be waiting for something like that, and
he’d expect to be walking into a reception if he
did come over.”

That seemed the most unlikely chance of all. The Saint mod
estly reckoned himself to be something unique in
his profession;
and there was a sober
possibility that Vogel would not think of
his peculiar brand of
interference at all—unless he had already
been
identified. Simon slept with his hand on his gun and this
debatable chance in mind; but he woke for the
first time in the
early morning. Yet
this uninterrupted sleep gave him nothing more definite to work on. It was
still possible that Vogel had
stayed
away for fear of being expected.