He touched the gun on his hip, but that might be too noisy. His left hand was still grasping the stanchion by which he had been letting himself down, and with a silent twist he slipped it out of its socket. Then he took a long breath and stepped out across the door of the saloon, squarely into the light.
He looked down the companion into a room through which a young cyclone seemed to have passed. The bunks had been opened and the bedding taken apart; lockers had been forced open and their contents scattered on the floor; books had been taken from their shelves and thrown down anywhere. The carpet had been ripped up and rolled back, and a section of panelling had been torn bodily away from the bulkhead. The Saint saw all this at once, as he would have taken in the broad features of any background, but his gaze was fixed on the crumpled shape of a man who lay on the floor—who was trying, with set teeth and pain-wrinkled face, to drag himself up on to his hands and knees. The man whose hiss of convulsive breathing had shocked him out of his sleep-walking a minute ago. Orace.
Simon put a hand on the rail of the companion and dropped into the saloon. He left his stanchion on the floor and hoisted Orace up on to one of the disordered couches.
“What’s the matter?”
Orace’s fierce eyes stared at him brightly, while he clutched his chest with one rough hand, and Simon saw that the breast of his shirt was red with blood. The man’s voice came with a hoarse effort.
“Ain’t nothink. Look out…”
“Well, let’s have a look at you, old son—”
The other pushed him away with a sudden access of strength. Orace’s head was turned towards the half-closed door at the forward end of the saloon, and his jaw was clamped up under the pelmet of his moustache with the same savage doggedness that had been carved into it when Simon had seen him making that heroic fight to get himself up from the floor. And at the same moment, beyond the communicating door, Simon heard the faint click of a latch and the creak of a board under a stealthy foot…
A slight dreamy smile edged itself on to the Saint’s mouth as he stooped in swift silence to recover his stanchion. Clubbed in his left hand, an eighteen-inch length of slender iron, it formed a weapon that was capable of impressing the toughest skull with a sense of painful inferiority, and the thought that the sportsman who had turned his cabin upside down and done an unascertained amount of damage to Orace was still on board, and might come within reach of a shrewd smack on the side of the head, brought a comforting warmth of grim contentment into his veins.
“Steady, me lad. We must get this coat off to see what the trouble is…I never thought you’d go and hit the bottle directly I was out of sight, Orace. And I suppose the cap blew off the ginger ale when you weren’t looking…There we are. Now if we just change the cut of this beautiful shin of yours…”
He burbled on, as if he were still attending to the patient, while he picked his way soundlessly over the littered floor. His eyes were fixed on the door into the galley, and they were not smiling.
And then he stopped.
He stopped because the half-open door had suddenly jerked wide open. Beyond it, the further end of the alleyway was in darkness, but in the shadowy space between the light of the saloon and the darkness beyond he could see the black configuration of a man, and the gun in the man’s hand was held well forward so that the light of the saloon laid dull bluish gleams along the barrel.
“Don’t come any closer,” said the shadow.
The Saint relaxed slowly, rising from the slight crouch to which his cautious advance had unconsciously reduced him. The man facing him seemed to be of medium height, square and thickset; his voice had a throaty accent which was unfamiliar.
“Hullo, old cockroach.” Simon greeted him in the gentlest of drawls, with the stanchion swinging loosely and rather speculatively in his hand. “Come in and make yourself at home. Oh, but you have. Never mind. There’s still some of the bulkhead you haven’t pulled to pieces—”
“I’ll finish that in a minute. Turn round.”
“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 irresistibly. 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 ahaht ’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 r
ight 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. Mustve knocked ’im arf silly, becos I nearly got me ’ands on ’im, but I ’adn’t got me legs back so much as I though 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 flattened 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 symmetrical dial which perhaps it had once been, but the information 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 Orace rather dreamily.
“We might see if your boyfriend 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 intruder 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 shin. After which he moved away and finished his cigarette with contemplative deliberation. For nothing was more certain than that the sleeping beauty had listened to the last lullaby of all.
CHAPTER SIX:
HOW PROFESSOR YULE TESTED THE BATHYSTOL AND KURT VOGEL MADE A PROPOSITION
1
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 tender-hearted, and perhaps the deceased’s cranium had been more fragile than the average. The Saint’s attitude was sympathetic 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 encouragement 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 ratted?…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 tonight. 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 modestly 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.
Over breakfast he had had to make his own decision, and his crew glared at him incredulously.
“Yer must be barmy,” was Orace’s outspoken comment.
“Maybe I am,” admitted the Saint. “But I’ve got to do it. If I don’t keep that date this morning, I’m branded. An innocent man would keep it, even if he had caught a burglar during the night. Even a policeman would keep it—and that card may be worth holding for another few hours, though it won’t last much longer.”
“It’s that perishin’ girl,” said Orace morosely.
Simon paused in the act of fastening a strap around his leg just below the knee—a strap which supported the sheath of the slim razor-sharp knife, Belle, which in his hands was almost as deadly as any firearm. He looked up at Orace sardonically, then ruefully, and he smiled.
“She’s not perishing, Orace. Not while I’m still on my feet.”
“Yer won’t be on yer feet fer long, any’ow,” said Orace, as if the thought gave him a certain gloomy satisfaction. “And wot the ’ell ’appens to my job when yer feedin’ the shrimps lik
e that bloke I ’it last night?” he added, practically.
“I expect you could always go back to your old job as an artist’s model,” said the Saint.
He straightened his sock and stood up, smiling that curiously aimless and lazy smile which only came to him when he was shaking the dice to throw double or quits with death. His hand dropped on Orace’s shoulder.
“But it won’t be so bad as that. I’ll put the cards in the porthole for Mr Conway or Mr Quentin to look you up during the day, and they’ll see you don’t starve. And I’ll be having the time of my life. I’ll bet Birdie is just hoping and praying that I’ll plant myself by not showing up. Instead of which, it’ll take all the wind out of their sails when I step on board, bright and beautiful as a spring morning, as if I hadn’t one little egg of a wicked thought on my mind. It ought to be a great moment.”
In its way, it had been quite a great moment, but it had suffered from the inherent brevity of its description.
Simon watched the play of light on the water, the swiftly-changing lace of the foam patterns swirling and spawning along the side, and recalled the moment for what it was worth. It was the first time he had found any of the signs of human strain on Vogel’s face. Even so, his practised eyes had to search for them, but they were there. A fractionally more than ordinary glaze of the waxen skin, as if it had been drawn a shade tighter over the high prominent cheekbones. An extra trace of shadow under the black deep-set eyes. Nothing else. Vogel was as spotlessly turned out as usual, his handshake was just as cold and firm, his geniality no less smooth-flowing and urbane.
“A perfect morning, Mr Tombs.”
“A lovely morning after a gorgeous night before,” murmured the Saint.
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 15
