She saw him as if he had fallen miraculously out of the sky, which was more or less what he did—with one foot knocking down the automatic and the other striking flat-soled at the side of Vogel’s head. The gun went off with a crash that echoed back and forth across the estuary, and Vogel staggered against the rail and fell to his knees.
Simon fell across the rail, caught it with his hands, and hung on for a moment. Down at the after end of the deck, the shape that had been lurking there detached itself from the shadows and scurried across the narrow strip of light to clamber over the rail and drop hectically downwards.
Loretta Page stared across six feet of Breton twilight at the miracle—half incredulously, with the breathlessness of indescribable relief choking in her throat. She saw the flash of white teeth in a familiar smile, saw him put his fingers to his lips and kiss them out to her with a debonair flourish that defied comparison, and then, as Vogel began to drag himself up and around with the gun still clutched in his right hand, she saw the Saint launch himself up with a ripple of brown muscles to curve over with hardly a splash into the sea.
He went down in a long shallow dive, and swam out of the Falkenberg’s circle of light before he rose. He had judged his timing and his angle so well that the canoe flashed past his eyes as he broke the surface. He put up one hand and caught the gunnel as it went by, nearly upsetting the craft until the man in it leaned out to the other side and balanced it.
“I thought I told you to say goodbye to France,” said the Saint.
“I thought I told you I didn’t take your orders,” said the other grimly.
“They were Loretta’s orders, Steve.”
Murdoch dug in the paddle and dragged the canoe round the stern of another yacht moored in the river.
“She’s crazy, too,” he snarled. “Because you’ve got around her with your gigolo line doesn’t mean I don’t know what she’ll say when she comes to her senses. I’m staying where I like.”
“And getting shot where you like, I hope,” murmured Simon. “I won’t interfere in the next bonehead play you make. I only butted in this time to save Loretta. Next time, you can take your own curtain.”
“I will,” said Murdoch prophetically. “Let go this boat.” Simon let go rather slowly, resisting the temptation to release his hold with a deft jerk that would have capsized the canoe and damped the pugnaciousness of its ungrateful occupant. He wondered whether Murdoch’s aggressiveness was founded on sheer blind ignorance of what might have been the result of his clumsy intrusion, or whether it was put up to bluff away the knowledge of having made an egregious mistake, and most of all he wondered what else would come of the insubordinations of that tough inflexible personality.
One of those questions was partly answered for him very quickly.
He sculled back with his hands, under the side of the yacht near which they had parted company, listening to the low sonorous purr of a powerful engine that had awoken in the darkness. There were no lights visible through any of the portholes, and he concluded that the crew were all on shore. He was on the side away from the Falkenberg, temporarily screened even from the most lynx-eyed searcher. The purr of the engine grew louder, and with a quick decision he grasped a stanchion, drew himself up, and rolled over into the tiny after cockpit.
He reached it only a second before the beam of a young searchlight swept over the ship, wiping a bar of brilliant illumination across the deck in its passing. The throb of the engine droned right up to him, and he hitched a very cautious eye over the edge of the cockpit, and saw the Falkenberg’s speed tender churning around his refuge, so close that he could have touched it with a boathook. A seaman crouched up on the foredeck, swinging the powerful spotlight that was mounted there; two other men stood up beside the wheel, following the path of the beam with their eyes. Its long finger danced on the water, touched luminously on the hulls of other craft at their anchorages, stretched faintly out to the more distant banks of the estuary…fastened suddenly on the shape of a canoe that sprang up out of the dark as if from nowhere, skimming towards the bathing pool at the end of the Plage du Prieuré. The canoe veered like a startled gull, shooting up parallel with the rocky foreshore, but the beam clung to it like a magnetised bar of light, linking it with the tender as if it were held by intangible cables. At the same time the murmur of the tender’s engine deepened its note: the bows lifted a little, and a white streamer of foam lengthened away from the stern as the link-bar of light between the two craft shortened.
The canoe turned once more, and headed south again, the man in it paddling with unhurried strokes again, as if he was trying to undo the first impression he had given of taking flight. The Falkenberg’s tender turned and drifted up alongside him as the engine was shut off, and at that moment the spotlight was switched out.
Simon heard the voices clearly across the water. “Have you seen anyone swimming around here?”
And Murdoch’s sullen answer: “I did see someone—it was over that way.”
“Thanks.”
The voice of the tender’s spokesman was the last one Simon heard. And then, after the very briefest pause, the engine was cut in again, and the tender began to slide smoothly back towards the Falkenberg, while the canoe went on its way to the shore. In that insignificant pause the only sound was a faint thud such as a man might have made in dumping a heavy weight on a hard floor. But Simon Templar knew, with absolute certainty, that the man who paddled the canoe on towards the shore was not the man who had been caught by the spotlight, and that the man who had been in the canoe was riding unconsciously in the speedboat as it turned back.
4
The tender slid in under the side of the Falkenberg, and the man on the foredeck who had been working the spotlight stood up and threw in the painter. Vogel himself caught the rope and made it fast. Under the natural pallor of his skin there was a curious rigidity, and the harsh black line of his brows over that great scythe of a nose was accentuated by the shadows that fell across his face as he leaned over the rail.
“Did you find anything?”
“No.” The man at the wheel answered, standing up in the cockpit. He looked up at Vogel intently as he spoke, and his right hand fingered a rug that seemed to have been thrown down in a rather large bundle on the seat beside him. His phlegmatic voice, with a thick guttural accent, boomed on very slowly and deliberately: “We asked a man in a boat, but he had seen nobody.”
“I see,” answered Vogel quietly.
He straightened up with a slight shrug, and Professor Yule and Arnheim, on his right, turned away from the rail with him.
“That’s a pity,” said Yule enthusiastically. “But they can’t have searched very far. Shall we go out and have another look?”
“I’m afraid we shouldn’t be likely to have any more success, my dear Professor,” replied Vogel. “There is plenty of room in the river for anyone to disappear quite quickly, and we were slow enough in starting after them.” He turned to Loretta. “I’m very sorry—you must have had rather a shock, and you’re more important than catching a couple of harbour thieves.”
In some way the quality of his voice had altered—she could feel the change without being able to define it. She felt like somebody who has been watching a fuse smouldering away into a stack of lethal explosives under her feet, and who has seen the fuse miraculously flicker and go out. The sensation of limpness in her muscles was no longer the paralysis of nightmare; it was the relaxation of pure relief. She knew that for that night at least the ordeal was over. Vogel had shot his bolt. In a few hours he would be as balanced and dangerous as ever, his brain would be working with the same ruthless insistence and ice-cold detachment, but for the moment he himself was suffering from a shock, intrinsically slight, and yet actual enough to have jarred the delicately calculated precision of his attack. Something told her that he realised what he had lost, and that he was too clever to waste any more effort on a spoiled opportunity.
“I’m perfectly all right,” sh
e said, and her nerves were so steady again that she had to call on acting for the vestiges of trepidation which she felt were demanded. “All the same, I expect you would like a drink.”
“That wouldn’t do any of us any harm,” agreed Arnheim.
In his own way he had altered, although his broad flat face was as bland as ever, and his wet little red mouth was pursed up to the same enigmatic sensual bud that it had been all the evening. He took it on himself to officiate with the decanter, and swallowed half a tumbler of neat whisky in two methodical gulps. Vogel took a very modest allowance with a liberal splash of soda, and sipped it with impenetrable restraint.
But even the artificial film of lightness had gone murky. Vogel’s unshaken suavity, with Arnheim’s solid co-operation, eliminated any embarrassing silences, but a curious heavy tenseness like the threat of thunder had crept into the atmosphere, a tenseness so subtle and well concealed that at any other time she might have been persuaded that it was purely subjective to her own fatigue. When at last she said that she had had too many late nights already that week, and asked if they would excuse her, she detected a tenuous undercurrent of relief in their protestations.
“I’m sorry all this should have happened to upset the evening,” said Vogel, as they left the saloon.
She laid her hand on his arm.
“Honestly, it hasn’t upset me,” she said. “It’s been quite an adventure. I’m just rather tired. Do you understand?”
In that at least she was perfectly truthful. A reaction had set in that had made her feel mentally and physically bruised, as if her mind and body had been crushed together through machine rollers. Sitting beside him again in the cockpit of the speed tender, with a light sea breeze stirring refreshingly through her hair, it seemed as if a whole week of ceaseless effort had gone by since she set out to keep that dangerous appointment.
She felt his arm behind her shoulders and his hand on her knee, and steeled herself to be still.
“Will you come with us tomorrow?”
She shook her head, with a little despairing breath.
“I’ve been through too much tonight…You don’t give a girl a chance to think, do you?”
“But there is so little time. We go tomorrow—”
“I know. But does that make it any easier for me? It’s my life you want to buy. It mayn’t seem very much to you, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”
“But you will come.”
“I don’t know. You take so much for granted—”
“You will come.”
His hand on her shoulder was weighting into her flesh. The deep toneless hypnotic command of his voice reverberated into her ears like an iron bell tolling in a resonant abyss, but it was not his command which scarred itself into her awareness and told her that she would have to go. There had been danger, ordeal, respite, but nothing accomplished. She would still have to go.
“Oh, yes…I’ll come.” She turned her face in to his shoulder, and then she broke away. “No, don’t touch me again now.”
He left her alone, and she sat in the far corner of the cockpit and stared out over the dark water while the tender came in alongside the quay. He walked up to her hotel with her in the same silence, and she wondered what kind of superhumanly immobilised exaltation was pent up in his obedience. She turned at the door, and held out her hand.
“Goodnight.”
“Will half-past ten be too early? I could send a steward down before that to do your packing.”
“No. I can be ready.”
He put her fingers to his lips, and went back to the jetty. On the return journey he took the wheel himself, and sent the speedboat creaming through the dark with her graceful bows lifting and the searchlight blazing a clear pathway over the water. The man who had been in charge of the hunt a little while before stood beside him.
“Where did you put him, Ivaloff?” Vogel asked quietly.
“In No. 9 cabin,” answered the man in his sullen throaty voice. “He is tied up and gagged, but I think he will sleep for a little while.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“I have not seen him before. Perhaps one of the men who has been watching on shore will know him.”
Vogel said nothing. Even if the captive was a stranger, it would be possible to find out who he was. If he carried no papers that would identify him, he would be made to talk. It never occurred to him that the prisoner might be innocent: Ivaloff made no mistakes, and Vogel himself had seen the canoe’s significant swerve and first instinctive attempt to dodge the searchlight. He threw the engine into neutral and then into reverse, bringing the tender neatly up to the companion, and went across the deck to the wheelhouse.
Professor Yule was there. He glanced up from a newspaper.
“I wish I knew what these gold mining shares were going to do,” he remarked casually. “I could sell now and take a profit, but I’d like to see another rise first.”
“You should ask Otto about it—he is an expert,” said Vogel. “By the way, where is he?”
“I don’t know. He went out to look for part of a broken cuff-link. Didn’t you see him on deck?”
Vogel shook his head.
“Probably he was on the other side of the ship. Do you hold very many of these shares?”
He selected a cigar from a cedar wood cabinet and pierced it carefully while Yule talked. So Arnheim hadn’t been able to wait more than a few minutes before he tried to find out something about the man they had captured. Otto had always been impatient—his brain lacked that last infinitesimal milligram of poise which gave a man the power to possess himself indefinitely and imperturbably. He should have waited until Yule went to bed.
Not that it was vitally important. The Professor was as unsuspecting as a child, and No. 9 cabin was the dungeon of the ship—a room so scientifically soundproofed that a gun fired in it would have been inaudible where they were. Vogel drew steadily at his cigar and discussed the gold market with unruffled composure for a quarter of an hour, until Yule picked himself up and decided to retire.
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 ashtray, 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 wheel-house by the door at the after end. Between him and the saloon a companion ran down to the lower deck. He went aft along the alleyway 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 his 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 continuation 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 fingertips, and bent down to touch the carp
et. That also was damp; so were the treads of the companion.
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 instantaneously 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.
CHAPTER FOUR:
HOW STEVE MURDOCH REMAINED OBSTINATE AND SIMON TEMPLAR RENDERED FIRST AID
1
If the quality of surprise had ever been a part of Orace’s emotional 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 pardonable 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 stubborn. He’s tried to die once before tonight, and he didn’t thank me when I stopped him.”
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 9
