Saint Overboard (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Loretta was there, but Simon saw no need for her to be alone.

  The idea grew with him as the dark deepened and his imagination worked through it. In his own way he was afraid, impatient with his enforced helplessness…Presently he sent another cigarette spinning like a glow-worm through the blackness, and went below to take off his clothes. He tested the working of his automatic, brought a greased cartridge into the breech, secured the safety-catch, and fastened the gun to the belt of his trunks. The dark water received him without a sound.

  Curiously enough, it was during that stealthy swim that he had a sudden electric remembrance of a news photographer who had been so unusually blind to the presence of all celebrities save one. Perhaps it was because his mind had been unconsciously revolving the subject of Vogel’s amazing thoroughness. But he had a startlingly vivid picture of a camera aiming towards him—fully as much towards him as towards Professor Yule—and a sudden reckless smile moved his lips as he slid through the water.

  If that news photographer was not a real news photographer, and the picture had been developed and printed and rushed across to England by air that evening, a correspondent could show it around in certain circles in London with the virtual certainty of having it identified within forty-eight hours…And if the result of that investigation was cabled to Kurt Vogel at St Peter Port, a good many interrogation marks might be wiped out with deadly speed.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  HOW KURT VOGEL WAS NOT SO CALM AND OTTO ARNHEIM ACQUIRED A HEADACHE

  1

  A ceiling of cloud had formed over the sky, curtaining off the moon and leaving no natural light to relieve the blackness. Out in the river it was practically pitch dark, except where the riding lights of anchored craft sprang their small fragments of scattered luminance out of the gloom.

  The Saint slid through the water without sound, without leaving so much as a ripple behind him. All of the rhythmic swing of his arms and legs was beneath the surface, and only his head broke the oily film of the still water; so that not even as much as the pit-pat of two drops of water could have betrayed his passing to anyone a yard away. He was as inconspicuous and unassertive as a clump of sea-weed drifting up swiftly and silently with the tide.

  He was concentrating so much on silence that he nearly allowed himself to be run down by some nocturnal sportsman who came skimming by in a canoe when he was only a stone’s throw from the Falkenberg. The boat leapt at him out of the darkness so unexpectedly that he almost shouted the warning that came instinctively to his lips; the prow brushed his hair, and he submerged himself a fraction of a second before the paddle speared down at him. When he came up again the canoe had vanished as silently as it had come. He caught a glimpse of it again as it arrowed across the reflected lights of the Casino de la Vicomté, and sent a string of inaudible profanities sizzling across the water at the unknown pilot, apparently without causing him to drop dead by remote control.

  Then the hull of the Falkenberg loomed up for undivided attention. At the very edge of the circle of visibility shed by its lights, he paused to draw a deep breath, and then even his head disappeared under the water, and his hands touched the side before he let himself float gently up again and open his lungs.

  He rose under the stern, and trod water while he listened for any sound that would betray the presence of a watcher on the deck. Above the undertones of the harbour he heard the murmur of voices coming through open portholes in two different directions, the dull creak of metal and the seep of the tide making under the hull, but there was no trace of the sharper sound that would have been made by a man out in the open, the rustle of cloth or the incautious easing of a cramped limb. For a full three minutes the Saint stayed there, waiting for the least faint disturbance of the ether that would indicate the wakefulness of a reception committee prepared to welcome any such unauthorised prowler as himself. And he didn’t hear any such thing.

  The Saint dipped a hand to his belt and brought it carefully out of the water with a mask which he had tucked in there before he left the Corsair. It was made of black rubber, as thin and supple as the material of a toy balloon, and when he pulled it on over his head it covered every inch of his face from the end of his nose upwards, and held itself in place by its own gentle elasticity. If by any miscalculation he was to be seen by any member of the crew, there was no need for him to be recognised.

  Then he set off again to work himself round the boat. There were three lighted portholes aft, and he stopped by the first of them to find a finger-hold. When he had got it he hauled himself up out of the water, inch by inch, till he could bend one modest eye over the rim.

  He looked into a large cabin running the whole width of the vessel. A treble tier of bunks lined two of the three sides which he could see, and seemed to be repeated on the side from which he was looking in. On two of them half-dressed men were stretched out, reading and smoking. At a table in the centre four others, miscellaneously attired in shirtsleeves, jerseys, and singlets, were playing a game of cards, while a fifth was trying to poach enough space out of one side to write a letter. Simon absorbed their faces in a travelling glance that dwelt on each one in turn, and mentally ranked them for as tough a harvest of hard-case sea stiffs as anyone could hope to glean from the scouring of the seven seas. They came up to his expectations in every single respect, and two thin fighting lines creased themselves into the corners of his mouth as he lowered himself back into the river as stealthily as he had pulled himself out of it.

  The third porthole lighted a separate smaller cabin with only four bunks, and when he looked in he had to peer between the legs of a man who was reclining on the upper berth across the porthole. By the light brick-red hosiery at the ends of the legs he identified the sleuth who had trailed him that afternoon, and on the opposite side of the cabin the man who had been busily doing nothing in the foyer of the Hotel de la Mer, with one shoe off and the other un-laced, was intent on filling his pipe.

  He couldn’t look into any of the principal rooms without actually climbing out on to the deck, but from the scraps of conversation that floated out through the windows he gathered that that was where the entertainment of Loretta Page was still proceeding. Professor Yule appeared to be concluding some anecdote about his submarine experiences.

  “…and when he squashed his nose against the glass, he just stayed there and stared. I never imagined a fish could get so much indignation into its face.”

  There was a general laugh, out of which rose Vogel’s smooth toneless suavity: “Wouldn’t even that tempt you to go down, Otto?”

  “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 companion 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 inspection 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 arable up for a breath of fresh air. But even if that was the ex
planation, 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 superstructure.

  Again he waited. If any petrified watcher had escaped detection 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 unmistakably 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 contrivance 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-streamlined hull to facilitate a lightning getaway if an emergency emerged…Which, however priceless a conglomeration of assets, is not among the amenities usually advertised with luxurious pleasure cruisers.

  A slow smile tugged at the Saint’s lips, and he restrained himself with a certain effort from performing an impromptu hornpipe. 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 according 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 Simon 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 bulkhead lights behind frosted panels suddenly wiped out the darkness 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 cosmopolitan 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 naive 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 embarrassingly 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 watered down, dissected, scrutinised in all its component parts until it had given up its last particle 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 imagination work against her, while they looked on. Steadily, skilfully, remorselessly, they were goading her own brain against her, keying her millimetre by millimetre to the tension of self-consciousness 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 irreproachable 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 avuncular 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 Corsair, 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.”

  His black eyes sought her face with a burning intensity. She realised with a thrill of fantastic horror that he was absolutely sincere. In that cold passionless iron-toned voice he was making Love to her, as if the performance was dragged out of him against his will. He was still watching her, but within that inflexible vigilance there was a grotesque hunger for illusion that was an added terror.