“Ah, yes! You enjoyed our little evening?”
“And the bed-time story.”
Vogel lifted his dark eyebrows in tolerant puzzlement—and the Saint could just imagine how well that gesture of polite perplexity must have been rehearsed.
Simon smiled.
“There must be something catching about this harbour thief business,” he explained, with the air of a man in the street who is simply bursting with his little adventure and is trying to appear blasé about it. “I had a caller myself last night.”
“My dear Mr Tombs! Did you lose anything valuable?”
“Nothing at all,” said the Saint smugly. “We caught him.”
“Then you were luckier than we were,” said Arnheim, with his round flabby face full of admiration and interest. “Did he put up a fight?”
“He didn’t have a chance—”
Simon looked up as Loretta came towards them along the deck. He had felt the beat of his heart when he saw her, had seemed to discover an absurd lightening of the perfect morning as if a screen had been taken away from before the sun. Vogel took her arm.
“My dear, Mr Tombs has been telling us what happened after he left us last night. He had one of those harbour thieves on board his own boat—and caught him!”
“But how exciting.” She was smiling coolly, but her eyes were steady with questions. “How did you do it?”
“He came along to my bloke, Orace, and said I wanted him—it must have been while we were at the hotel. Orace was a bit suspicious and wanted to know more about it, and then this fellow hit him over the head with something. Orace came to again before the burglar had gone, and he went on with the fight. They were still at it when I got back.
The burglar had a gun and everything, but it had misfired.”
“What happened?”
Vogel had asked the question, with his face as calm as stone, and the Saint had known that his answer would mark the sharp pinnacle of the moment which he had deliberately courted. He had allowed himself time to light a cigarette before he replied.
“Well, we were wrestling all over the saloon trying to get his gun away from him, and Orace grabbed hold of a stanchion that he’d brought down to clean and hit him over the head. Then we tied him up and took him ashore and lugged him along to the police station. But when they tried to give him first aid, they found he was—sort of dead.”
For a little while there was an absolute silence. Even in the most humdrum circumstances, a revelation like that would naturally have taken a few seconds to establish itself in the minds of the audience, but the Saint had been waiting for a more pregnant silence than that. It was while he was actually on his way over to the Falkenberg that he had finally decided to bring his story as close to the truth as possible. If he had said that the burglar was lodged alive in jail, and Vogel’s ingenuity had been equal to devising a way of putting through an inquiry, the fiction could have been exposed in an hour or two. But the truth would offer an obvious inducement to wait for confirmation in a newspaper story which could not appear for another twenty-four hours, and it might well dispose of direct inquiries by making their prospects manifestly unprofitable, and, as Simon had told it, it had a ring of authenticity which an invention might not have had.
Simon had been waiting for a pregnant silence, and he was not disappointed. Yet even he did not know until later how much that silence had contained.
“Dead?” Arnheim repeated at last, in a strained voice.
The Saint nodded.
“Orace must have underestimated his strength, or something—I suppose it’s quite understandable, as we were fighting all over the place. He’d bashed the devil’s skull right in.”
“But—but won’t you be arrested?” faltered Loretta.
“Oh, no. They call it accidental death. It was the fellow’s own fault for being a burglar. Still, it’s rather a gruesome sort of thing to have on your conscience.”
Vogel put up a hand and stroked the side of his chin. His passionless eyes, hard and unwinking as discs of jet, were fastened on the Saint with a terrible brightness of concentration. For the first time since they had been talking there seemed to be something frozen and mechanical about his tight-lipped smile.
“Of course it must be,” he agreed. “But as you say, the man brought it on himself. You mustn’t let it worry you too much.”
“What’s worrying him?”
The Professor came ambling along, with his rosy cheeks beaming and his premature grey beard fluttering in the breeze, and the story had to be started over again. While it was being repeated, a seaman came up and handed Vogel a telegram. Vogel opened it with a slow measured stroke of his thumb-nail; while he read it, and during the conclusion of the second telling of the adventure, he seemed to regain complete command of himself with a mental struggle that showed only in the almost imperceptibly whitened pallor of his face.
He buttoned his jacket and glanced along the deck as Yule added his hearty voice to the general vote of exoneration.
“We’re ready to sail,” he said. “Will you excuse me if I go and attend to it?”
And in that way the big moment had touched its climax and gone on its incalculable trajectory, leaving Simon Templar to consider where it left him.
2
The Saint lighted a cigarette in the shield of his cupped hands, and stared thoughtfully over the sun-sprinkled ripple of the sea towards the blue-pencilled line of the horizon. An impenitent ripple of the same sunlight glinted at the back of his eyes and fidgeted impudently with the fine-drawn corners of his mouth. He had always been mad, by the Grace of God. He still was. Obviously.
Roger, Peter, and Orace were back in St Peter Port, and though they knew where he had gone, they could do nothing to help him. And there he was, with Loretta, racing through the broad waters of the Channel on the Falkenberg while Vogel and Arnheim thought him over. In addition to whom, there was a crew of at least ten more of Vogel’s deep-water gangsters, whom he personally had inspected, also on board, and presumably none of them would be afflicted with any more suburban scruples than their master. Out there on the unrecording water, as he had realised to the full when Loretta was the only passenger, anything could happen: a shot could be fired that no unsuspected witnesses would hear, a cry for help could waste itself in the vast emptiness of the air, an unfortunate accident could be registered in the log which no investigations on shore could disprove. There were no prying busybodies peeping from behind curtains of seaweed to come forward later and upset a well-constructed story. The sea kept its secrets—only a few hours ago he had availed himself of that inviolable silence…Verily, he was an accredited member of the company of divine lunatics.
Wherefore the Saint allowed that twinkle of sublime recklessness to play at the back of his eyes, and drew sea air and smoke into his lungs with the seraphic zest which he had always found in the fierce tang of danger.
The deep-voiced hum of the engines died away suddenly to a soft murmur, and the curling bow wave sank down and shortened to a feather of ripples along the side, Simon looked about him and turned to the Professor, who was puffing a stubby briar at his side.
“Is this where you take your dip?”
Yule nodded. Vogel was in the wheelhouse with Loretta, and Arnheim had moved out of the sun to spread his perspiring bulk in a deck chair.
“This should be it. We went over the chart last night, and the deepest sounding we could find was ninety-four fathoms. It isn’t much, but it’ll do for the preliminary test.”
Simon gazed out to sea with his eyebrows drawn down against the glare. Under them his set blue eyes momentarily gave up their carefree twinkle. He realised that there was a third person in the same danger as himself, about whom he had forgotten to worry very much before.
“Have you known Vogel long?’’ he asked casually.
“About six months now. He came to me after my first descent and offered to help, and I was very glad to accept his offer. He’s been a kind of fair
y godmother to me. And all I’ve been able to do in return was to name a new deep-water fish that I discovered after him—Bathyphasma vogeli!” The Professor chuckled in his refreshingly boyish way.
“You haven’t started to think about the commercial possibilities of your invention yet?”
“No. No. I’m afraid it’s just a scientific toy.” Yule’s eyes widened a little.
“Are there any commercial possibilities?”
The Saint hesitated. In the face of that child-like unworldliness he didn’t know where to begin. And he knew that to be caught in the middle of an argument, into which Vogel or Arnheim might be drawn, would be more surely fatal than to keep silence.
“I was only thinking…” he began slowly, and then he heard footsteps behind him, and turned his head to see Vogel and Loretta coming out on to the deck. He shrugged vaguely, and said goodbye to the lost chance with a grim question in his mind of whether it had ever really come within his reach. “For instance, could you take movies down there? They’d be something quite new in travelogues.”
“I don’t know,” said Yule seriously, “What do you think, Mr Vogel?”
“We must ask someone with more technical knowledge.” Vogel’s bland glance touched on the Saint for a moment with a puzzling dryness, and returned to his protégée. “Would you like to check over the gear before lunch?”
The Professor knocked out his pipe, and they moved aft. Arnheim stayed in his chair in the shade, with his mouth half open and his hat tilted over his eyes.
Simon fell in beside Loretta and followed the procession. It was the first time that day that he had had a chance to speak to her alone—Vogel had kept her close beside him from the moment they left the harbour, and Arnheim had gone puffing after her with some conversational excuse or other if she had ever moved more than a couple of yards away. The Saint dropped his cigarette and glanced back as he picked it up. Arnheim had not moved, and his round stomach was distending and relaxing with peaceful regularity…Simon rejoined the girl, and slackened his stride.
“Perhaps you heard how I’d been thinking,” he said.
His hand brushed hers as they walked, and he took her fingers and held her back. “Is this safe?” she asked, hardly moving her lips.
“As safe as anything on this suicides’ picnic. It’d be more suspicious if I didn’t try to speak to you at all.” He pointed back towards the turreted fortress of the Casquet lighthouse rising from its plinth of rocks to the south, as if he were making some remark about it, and said quietly, “There’s one person who may be sitting on the same volcano as we are, but he doesn’t know it.”
“Professor Yule?”
“Yes. Have you thought about him?”
“Quite a lot.”
“It’s more than I’ve done. Until just now. Where does he come in—or go out?”
“I’d like to know.”
“I wish I could tell you. We know Birdie isn’t interested in scientific toys. When this new bathystol is passed okay, he’ll’ve had all he wants out of Yule. Then he’ll get rid of him. But how? And how soon?”
He turned away from the lighthouse and they walked on again. Vogel was watching them. The Saint laughed as if at some trivial flippancy, and said in the same sober undertone: “I’m worried. You can’t help liking the old boy. If anything sticky happened to him, I’d feel I had a share in it. If you got a chance you might manage to talk to him. God knows how.”
“I’ll try.” She smiled back at him, and went on in her natural voice as they came within earshot of Vogel: “But it must be hard for the lighthouse-keeper’s wife.”
“I expect it is, if she’s attractive.”
Simon came to a lazy halt in front of the apparatus which three seamen were manoeuvring out on to the deck—a creation like some sort of weird Martian robot drawn by an imaginative artist. The upper part of it combined torso and head in one great sphere of shining metal, from the sides of which projected arms that looked like strings of huge gleaming beads socketing together and terminating in steel pincers. It balanced on two short bulbous legs of similar construction. The spherical trunk was studded with circular quartz windows like multiple eyes, and tubes of flexible metal coiled round it from various points and connected with a six-foot drum of insulated cable on the deck.
“Is this the new regulation swim suit?” asked the Saint interestedly. “But it doesn’t look as if you could move about in it.”
“It’s fairly hard work,” Yule admitted. “But it looks a great deal heavier than it is. Of course, the air inside helps to take off quite a lot of the weight when it’s under water. And then, the whole value of the bathystol is its light construction. Dr Beebe went down more than three thousand feet in his bathysphere in 1934, but he was shut up in a steel ball that half a dozen men couldn’t have lifted. I set out with the idea of achieving strength by internal bracing on scientific principles instead of solid bulk, and this new metal helped me by reducing the weight by nearly seventy-five per cent. You need something pretty strong for this job.”
“I suppose you do,” said the Saint mildly. “I don’t know what sort of pressures you meet down there—”
“At three thousand feet it’s more than half a ton to the square inch. If you lowered a man in an ordinary diving suit to that depth, he’d be crushed into a shapeless pulp by nothing more solid than this water we’ve been cruising on.” The Professor grinned cheerfully. “But in the bathystol I’m nearly as comfortable as I am now. You can go down in it yourself if you like, and prove it.”
The Saint shook his head.
“Thanks very much,” he murmured hastily. “But nothing could make me feel less like a hero. I’ll take your word for it.”
He stood aside and watched the preparations for a shallow test dive. The ten-ton grab on the after deck, which he had discovered on his nocturnal exploration, had been stripped of its tarpaulin and telescoped out over the stern, but the claw mechanism had been dismantled and stowed away somewhere out of sight. All that was visible now was a sort of steel derrick with an ordinary hook dangling from its cable.
The hook was hitched into a length of chain welded to what might have been the shoulders of the bathystol, the nuts were tightened up on the circular door through which
Yule would lower himself into the apparatus when he went down in it, one of the engineers touched the controls of the electric winch, and the cumbersome contrivance dragged along the deck and rose sluggishly towards the end of the boom. For a moment or two it hung there, turning slowly like a monstrous futuristic doll, and then it went down with the cable whirring and vanished under the water. Again the engineer checked it, while Yule fussed round like an excited urchin, and the telescopic boom shortened on its runners like the horn of a snail until the wire cable came within the grasp of a man stationed at the stern. Three other men picked up the insulated electric cable and passed it along as it unreeled from the drum, and the man at the stern fastened it to the supporting cable at intervals with a deft twist of rope as the bathystol descended.
“That’s enough.”
At last the Professor was satisfied. He stepped back, mopping his forehead like a temperamental impresario who has finally obtained a rehearsal to his satisfaction, with his hair and beard awry and his eyes gleaming happily. The engineer reversed the winch, and the cable spooled back on to the drum with a deepening purr until the bathystol pushed its outlandish head above the surface and rose clear to swing again at the nose of the derrick.
“Five hundred feet,” muttered Yule proudly. “And I’d hardly even call that a trial run.” He put his handkerchief away, and watched anxiously while the bathystol was lowered on to the deck and two men with wrenches and hammers stepped up to unfasten the door. As soon as it was open he pushed them away, climbed up on a chair, and hauled out the humidity recorder. He frowned at it for a moment, and looked up grinning. “Not a sign of a leak, either. Now if I can walk about in it better than I could in the old one—”
“I take
it there is no serious doubt of that?” said Vogel, with latent solicitude.
“Bless you, no. I’m not in the least worried. But this new jointing system has got to be tested in practice. It ought to make walking much easier, unless the packing won’t stand up to the job. But it will.”
“Then we shall have to try and find something special for lunch.”
Vogel took the Professor’s arm, and Yule allowed himself to be torn reluctantly away from his toys. Simon caught Loretta’s eye with a gaze of thoughtful consideration. It would have said all that he could find to say without the utterance of a single word, but as they strolled on he spoke without shaping his mouth.
“A smile on the face of the tiger.”
She glanced over the turquoise spread of the water, and said, “After we’ve been to Madeira.”
“I suppose so.”
The sunlight slanting across his face deepened the twin wrinkles of cold contemplation above his nose. After the Falkenberg had been to Madeira…presumably. There was deep water there, within easy reach. The Monaco Deep, if Yule wanted a good preliminary canter. The Cape Verde Basin, which the Professor had already mentioned, if he felt ambitious and they cruised further south. Enough water, at any rate, to establish the potentialities of the bathystol beyond any shadow of doubt. Which was unquestionably what Vogel wanted…But long before then, if the photographer in Dinard hadn’t fogged his plates, and Vogel’s intelligence service was anything like as efficient as his other departments, the Saint’s own alibi of apologetically intruding innocence would have been blown sky-high, and there would be nothing to stop the joyride terminating according to the old Nigerian precedent. Unless Vogel himself had been disposed of by that time, which would have been the Saint’s own optimistic prophecy…And yet the indefensible apprehension stayed with him through the theatrically perfect service of luncheon, to sour the lobster cocktail and embitter the exquisitely melting perfection of the quails in aspic.
He put it aside—thrust it away into the remoter shelves of his mind. Just then there seemed to be more urgent dangers to be met halfway. It was one of those mental sideslips which taunt the fallibility of human concentration.
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 16