“I regret it because when you give a woman even the smallest corner of your mind, you give her the power to take more. You are no longer in supreme command of your destiny. The building of a lifetime can be betrayed and broken for a moment’s foolishness.”
She smiled.
“You’re too cynical—you sound as if you’d been disappointed in love.”
“I have never been in love—”
The last word was bitten off, as if it had not been intended to be the last. It gave the sentence a curiously persistent quality, so that it seemed to reverberate in the air, repeating itself in ghostly echoes after the actual sound was gone.
She half turned towards him, in a natural quest for the conclusion of that unfinished utterance. Instead she found his hands pinning her to the rail on either side, his great predatory nose thrust down towards her face, his wide lipless mouth working under a torrent of low-pitched quivering words.
“You have tempted me to be foolish. For years I shut all women out of my life, so that none of them could hurt me. And yet what does wealth give without women? I knew that you wanted to come and see my boat. For you it might only have been a nice boat to look at, part of your holiday’s amusement; for me it was a beginning. I broke the rule of a lifetime to bring you here. Now I don’t want you to go back.”
“You’ll change your mind again in the morning.” Somehow she tore her gaze away, and broke through his arms. “Besides, you wouldn’t forget a poor girl’s honour—”
She was walking along the deck, swinging her wrap with an affectation of sophisticated composure, finding a moment’s escape in movement. He walked beside her, speaking of emotion in that terrifying unemotional voice.
“Honour is the virtue of inferior people who can’t afford to dispense with it. I have enough money to ignore whatever anyone may think or anyone may say. If you shared it with me, nothing need hurt you.”
“Only myself.”
“No, no. Don’t be conventional. That isn’t worthy of you. It’s my business to understand people. You are the kind of woman who can stand aside and look at facts, without being deluded by any fogs of sentimentality. We speak the same language. That’s why I talk to you like this.”
His hand went across and gripped her shoulder, so that she had to stop and turn.
“You are the kind of woman with whom I could forget to be cold.”
He drew her towards him, and she closed her eyes before he kissed her. His mouth was hard, with a kind of rubbery smoothness that chilled her so that she shivered. After a long time he released her. His eyes burned on her like hot coals.
“You’ll stay, Loretta?” he said hoarsely.
“No.” She swayed away from him. She felt queerly sick, and the air had become heavy and oppressive. “I don’t know. You’re too quick…Ask me again tomorrow. Please.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“You are?”
“We’re going to St Peter Port. I hoped you would come with us.”
“Give me a cigarette.”
He felt in his pockets. The commonplace distraction, thrust at him like that, blunted the edge of his attack.
“I’m afraid I left my case inside. Shall we go in?”
He opened the door, and her hand rested on his arm for a moment as she passed him into the wheelhouse. He passed her a lacquer box and offered her a light.
“You didn’t show me this,” she said, glancing round the room.
Besides being the wheelhouse, it also contrived to be one of the most attractive living-rooms on the ship. At the after end there were shelves of books, half a dozen deep long armchairs invited idleness, a rich carpet covered the floor. Long straight windows ran the length of the beam sides, and the forward end was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the structure. There were flowers in chromium wall brackets, and concealed lights built into the ceiling. The wheel and instrument panel up in one corner, the binnacle in front of it and the littered chart table filling the forward bay, looked almost like property fittings, as if a millionaire’s whim had played with the idea of decorating a den in an ordinary house to look like the interior of a yacht.
“We were coming here,” said Vogel.
He did not smoke, and he had an actor’s mastery over his unoccupied hands which in him seemed to be only the index of an inhuman restraint. She thought he was gathering himself to recover the mood of a moment ago, but before he spoke again there was a knock on the door.
“What is it?” he demanded sharply—it was the first time she had seen a crack in the glassy veneer of his self-possession.
“Excuse me, sir.”
The steward who had served dinner stood at the door, his saturnine face mask-like and yet obsequiously expressive. He stood there and waited, and Vogel turned to Loretta with an apologetic shrug.
“I’m so sorry—will you wait for me a moment?”
The door closed on the two men, and she relaxed against the back of a chair. The cigarette between her fingers was held quite steadily—there wasn’t a crease or an indentation in the white oval paper to level a mute accusation at the mauling of unsteadied fingers. She regarded it with an odd detached interest. There was even a full half-inch of ash built out unbroken from the end of it—a visible reassurance that she hadn’t once exposed the nervous strain that had keyed up inside her almost to breaking pitch.
She dragged herself off the chair-back and moved across the room. This was the first time she had been left alone since she came on board. It was the chance which had forced her through the ordeal of dinner, the one faint hope of finding a shred of evidence to mark progress on the job, without which anything she suffered would have been wasted—and would have to be gone through again.
She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. There was no definite thing to find. She could only search around with an almost frantic expectancy for any scrap of something that might be added to the slowly mounting compilation of what was known about Kurt Vogel—for something that might perhaps miraculously prove to be the last pointer in the long paper-chase. Others had worked like that before, teasing out fragments of knowledge with infinite patience and at infinite risk. Fragments that had been built up over many months into the single clue that had brought her there.
She ran her eyes over the titles of the books in the cases. There were books on philosophy, books on engineering and navigation, books on national and international law in various languages. There were works on criminology, memoirs of espionage, a very few novels of the highly mathematical detective type. They didn’t look like dummies. She pulled out a couple at random and flicked the pages. They were real, but it would have taken twenty minutes to try them all.
Her fingers curled up and tightened. Nothing in the books. The littered chart table, perhaps…She crossed the room quickly, startled by the loud swish of her dress as she moved, her heart throbbing at a speed which surprised her even more. Funny, she thought. Three weeks ago she would have sworn she didn’t possess a heart—or nerves. A week ago. A day ago. Or a century.
She was staring down at the table, at a general chart of the Channel Islands and the adjacent coast of France, spread out on the polished teak. But what was there in a chart? A course had been ruled out from Dinard to St Peter Port, with a dog’s-leg bend in it to clear the western end of the Minquiers. There was a jotted note of bearings and distances by the angle of the thin pencilled lines. Nothing in that…Her glance wandered helplessly over the scattered smudges of red which stood for lighthouses and buoys.
And then she was looking at a red mark that wasn’t quite the same as the other red marks. It was a distinct circle drawn in red ink around a dot of black marked to the east of Sark. Beside it, also in red ink, neat tiny figures recorded the exact bearing.
The figures jumbled themselves before her eyes. She gripped on her bag, trying to stifle the absurd pulse of excitement that was beginning to work under her ribs. Just like that. So easy, so plain. Perhaps the
last due, the fabulous open sesame that had been tormenting her imagination. Whatever those red marks meant—and others would soon find that out.
There was a pencil lying on the table, and she had opened her bag before she remembered that she had nothing in it to write on. Lipstick on a handkerchief, then…but there were a dozen scraps of torn-up paper in an ashtray beside the pencil, and a square inch of paper would be enough.
Her hand moved out.
Suddenly she felt cold all over. There was a feeling of nightmare limpness in her knees, and when she breathed again it was in a queer little shuddering sigh. But she put her hand into her bag quite steadily and took out a powder box. Quite steadily she dabbed at her nose, and quite steadily she walked away to another table and stood there turning the pages of a magazine—with the thrum of a hundred demented dynamos pounding through her body and roaring sickeningly in her brain.
Those scraps of inviting paper. The pencil ready to be picked up at the first dawn of an idea. The chart left out, with the red bearing marked on it. The excuse for Vogel to leave the room. The ordeal on the deck, before that, which had sabotaged her self-control to the point where the finest edge of her vigilance was dulled…to the point where her own aching nerves had tempted her on to the very brink of a trap from which only the shrieked protest of some indefinable sixth sense had held her back…
She stood there shivering inside, although her hand was quite steady—scanning a meaningless succession of pictures which printed themselves on her retinas without ever reaching her brain. For several seconds she hadn’t the strength to move again.
She fought back towards mastery of herself. After an eternity that could scarcely have lasted a quarter of a minute, she let the magazine fall shut on the table and strolled idly back to the chair from which she had started. She sat down. She could feel that her movements were smooth and unhurried, her face calm and untroubled in spite of the tumult within her. Before that, her face and hands might have betrayed her—it only depended on the angle from which she must have been watched. But when Vogel came back, the smile with which she looked up to greet him was serene and artless.
He nodded.
“Please excuse me.”
The smile with which he answered her was perfunctory and preoccupied—he didn’t even make the mistake of looking closely at her. He went straight across to a folding bureau built into the panelling on one side of the room, and pulled out a drawer.
“I don’t want you to be alarmed,” he said in his cold even voice, “but I should like you to stay here a few minutes longer.”
She felt the creep of her skin up towards the nape of her neck, and searched for the voice that had once been her own.
“I’m quite comfortable,” she said.
“I think you’d better stay,” he said, and turned round as he slipped the jacket of a big blued automatic in his hand. “The stewards have seen someone prowling about the ship again, just like that mysterious person I told you about who was here last night. But this time he isn’t going to get away so easily.”
3
Something as intangible as air and as vicious as a machine-gun began hammering at the pit of Loretta’s stomach. The cohort of ghostly dynamos sang in her ears again, blotting out her precarious instant of hard-won peace in a din that was twice as bad as anything before it. She felt the blood draining down from her head until only a dab of powder and the sea-tan on her skin were left to save her from ultimate disaster.
“Not really?” she said.
Her voice seemed to come from four or five miles away, a mere hollow echo of itself. She knew that by some miracle of will-power she had kept the smile steady on her face, but even that wasn’t enough. The disaster was not dispelled—it was barely checked.
A queer glimpse of desperate humour was the only thing she could ding to. She, who had met case-hardened men on their own ground, who had faced death as often as dishonour, and with the same poised contempt and unfaltering alertness—she, Loretta Page, who was ranked at Ingerbeck’s as the coolest head on a roster of frost-bitten intellects which operated in the perpetual bleakness of temperatures below zero—was being slowly and inevitably broken up. The rasps of a third degree more subtle and deadly than anything she had ever dreamed of were achieving what mere violence and crude terrorism could never have achieved. They were working away as implacably and untiringly as fate, turning her own self into her bitterest enemy.
Vogel’s jet-black eyes were fixed on her now. They had moved on to her face like the poles of a magnet from which she would have had to struggle transparently to get away, and yet his aquiline features were still without positive expression.
“You’ve nothing to worry about,” he said, in a purr of caressing reassurance.
“But I’m thrilled.” She met his gaze unflinchingly, with the same smile of friendly innocence. “What is it that makes you so popular?”
He shrugged.
“They’re probably just some common harbour thieves who think the boat looks as if she might have some valuables on board. We shall find out.”
“Let me come with you.”
“My dear—”
“I’m not a bit frightened. Not while you’ve got that gun. And I’ll be awfully quiet. But I couldn’t bear to miss anything so exciting. Please—would you mind?”
He hesitated for a moment only, and then opened the door on the starboard side.
“All right. Will you keep behind me?”
He switched out the lights, and she followed him out on to the deck. Under the dim glow of the masthead light she caught sight of his broad back moving forward, and stepped after him. In the first shock of transition from the bright illumination of the wheelhouse there was no difference in quality between the blackness of the air and the sea, so that the night seemed to lie all around them, above and below, as if the Falkenberg was suspended in a vast bowl of darkness sprinkled with tiny twinkling lights. Vogel was almost invisible in his black evening clothes as he tiptoed round in the half-solid shadow to the other side of the deck, and when he halted she could hardly have been a pace behind him—his shape swam up before her eyes so suddenly that she touched him as she stopped.
“He’s still there.”
His voice touched her eardrums as a mere bass vibration in the stillness. From where she stood she could look down the whole length of the deck, a grey pathway stencilled with the yellow windows of the saloon where Yule and Arnheim were still presumably discussing the port. The deckhouse profiled itself in black and slanted black banks of shadow across the open space. Away aft there was another shadow merging into the rest, a thing that distinguished itself only by its shorter and sharper carves from the long cubist lines of the others—something that her eyes found and froze on.
Vogel lifted his automatic.
Her left hand gripped the weather-rail. She was trembling, although her mind was working with a clarity that seemed outside herself. That psychological third degree had accomplished its purpose.
Vogel had got her. Even if she had bluffed him all the evening, even if she had betrayed nothing in that paralysed moment of realisation at the chart table, even if she had kept the mask unmoved on her face when he came back—he had got her now. The story of a man prowling on the ship might be a lie. She might be imagining the shadow out of her own guilty fear; or it might only be a member of the crew put out to play the part and build up the deception—to be aimed at and perhaps shot at by Vogel with a blank cartridge. But she didn’t know. There was no way for her to know. She had to choose between letting the Saint be shot down without warning, or—
A dozen crazy thoughts crashed through her head. She might throw a noisy fit of maidenly hysterics. She might sneeze, or cough, or faint on his shoulder. But she knew that that was just what he was waiting for her to do. The first hint of interference that she gave would brand her for all time. He would have no more doubts.
She stared at him in a kind of chilled hopeless agony. She could see his arm extend
ed against the lighter grey of the deck, the dull gleam of the automatic held rigidly at the end of it, his black deep-set eyes lined unwinkingly along the sights. Something in the nerveless immobility of his position shouted at her that he was a man to whom the thought of missing had never occurred. She saw the great hungry crook of his nose, the ends of his mouth drawn back so that the thin lips rolled under and vanished into two parallel lines that were as vicious and pitiless as the smile of a cobra would have been. Her own words thundered through her head in a strident mocking chorus: “When you join Ingerbeck’s, you don’t sign on for a cocktail party…You take an oath…to do your job…keep your mouth shut…take the consequences…” She had to choose.
So had the Saint.
Moving along the deckhouse roof as silently as a ghost, he had followed everything that happened outside; lying spread-eagled over the wheelhouse, he had leaned out at a perilous angle until he could peer down through one of the windows and see what was happening inside. He had bunched his muscles in a spasm of impotent exasperation when he saw Loretta’s hand going out to touch the pencil and spring the trap, and had breathed again when she drew back. Everything that she had endured he had felt sympathetically within himself, and when Vogel came back and took out his automatic, Simon had heard what was said and had understood that also.
Now, gathering his limbs stealthily under him, so close above Loretta’s head that he could almost have reached down and touched her, he understood much more. The first mention of a man prowling about the deck had prickled a row of nerve centres all along his spine; then he had disbelieved; then he had seen the shadow that Loretta was staring at, and had remembered the dark speeding canoe which had nearly run him down on his way there. But Loretta hadn’t seen that, and he knew what she must be thinking. He could read what was in her mind, could suffer everything she was suffering, as if by some clairvoyant affinity that transcended reason he was identified with her in the stress of that satanically conceived ordeal, and there was a queer exaltation in his heart as he stepped off the wheelhouse roof, out into space over her head.
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 8
