Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

There, facing him, anchored to the sea bed close up against the side of the boat, was the answer to the question which had been echoing in his brain: Where was Bernadotti?

The man’s black hair waved lazily in the currents set up by the swing of the loaded net, and his eyes bulged in the rigid stare of death.

“Come on, come on, wake up!” shouted Inspector Lebec impatiently.

Captain William Finnegan began to stir uneasily out of his deep dream of peace; and then someone sloshed another bucketful of cold sea-water over him, none too gently.

Finnegan, flat on his back on the deck of the Phoenix, twitched three or four times, then spluttered, gasped, coughed, and finally opened his eyes. He looked up at the impassive form of Lebec framed against the fading blue and white of the evening sky.

“Wha—?” said Finnegan, and shut his eyes again.

Another bucket of water sloshed over him.

“Wha—?” said Finnegan, more loudly.

He tried to get up on one elbow, but fell back.

“Come on — wake up!” Lebec repeated.

Arabella shook her head dubiously.

“What’s the use? He couldn’t have done it,” she said. “Not in that condition.”

Lebec stood for a while, chewing his lower lip reflectively as he looked down at the groggily blinking Finnegan. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

“I agree. It is difficult to imagine that he could be capable of anything but sleep. And his condition was no better when we discovered him earlier, in the storage room.” Lebec glanced at his watch. “The next load will soon be due. Once we have dealt with it, we will lock him away until he becomes sober.”

Arabella looked around at the gold that lay spread out in shallow stacks on the deck. She could still hardly believe it all. It seemed incredible that in the space of two and a half days she could have been through so many experiences of a kind that had never touched her life before. She had been rescued from death in a bull-ring; she had been chased through a swamp and charged with a lance; she had been threatened by grotesquely dice-helmeted characters in a night club and had a man murdered almost in her arms, had been locked up in a police cell, and finally run down by her own yacht. It was quite incredible that all these things had actually happened to her; and it was equally hard to believe in the reality of all that gold.

But there it was before her eyes, gleaming in the rays of the setting sun — the magical sight of real gold in the gold of the sunset. There would be four million dollars’ worth, or so, and Lebec had told her that the ten percent reward would go half to her and half to the Saint.

Arabella had to confess to herself that the division seemed more than fair to her. True, without her yacht the gold wouldn’t have been found, and her equipment was being used to recover it. But she could hardly forget that it was her husband who had stolen it in the first place; and more than once since Lebec’s mention of the reward she had wondered whether as the thief’s widow she could not be debarred from taking a share in it.

“How many loads more?” she asked Lebec.

“Your friend Monsieur Templar thought two. One is due now. Then it will be the last.”

She indicated the gold on the deck.

“How much so far?”

Lebec fired off the question in French at the crewman from the launch, who was sitting lugubriously by the spare winch they had been using. He was waiting now for the next twitch on the rope, like a bored fisherman waiting for a bite. He consulted the careful record he had been keeping as he and Lebec counted the gold aboard.

“Cent soixantecinq,” he said, without turning his head.

“One hundred and sixty-five,” Lebec translated. “So, we shall have perhaps two hundred bars, a weight of two thousand kilograms.”

Presently there was a tug on the line, and the lugubrious crewman started the winch to haul the penultimate load up and aboard.

“Monsieur Templar has done well,” Lebec conceded. “It is hard work, I think.”

Simon Templar would have been the first to agree. All the long afternoon he had laboured steadily on the sea bed, loading the gold into the net, bar by bar, jerking the rope each time he had filled and secured it, gradually emptying the boat of its weighty treasure. Four times he had surfaced — once, after the first loading, to report the discovery of Bernadotti’s anchored corpse, and three times to renew the air cylinders on his back. And then he had gone down one more time into the deepening green silence, for the last consignment of ingots he intended to send up. The bottom layer he had decided to leave where it was, all for himself, to be collected at some future date.

He glanced at his air gauge as the net came down on its last trip. Fifteen minutes left. It would be enough, and with several minutes to spare. He steered the net into the cabin and began loading.

The discovery of a thoroughly irrigated Bernadotti had unquestionably solved the immediate mystery of his whereabouts, but the other questions still crowded Simon’s mind. The enigma of Finnegan was deeper than ever, with things looking blacker for him, by the Saint’s previous reasoning. Except that it was all somehow lacking in neatness; it had the untidiness of a theory which the facts would only fit if they were wrenched into shape with Procrustean efforts. And there was now one other loose scrap of fact which suddenly exploded into his consciousness.

Bernadotti’s body had manifestly been anchored where it was by someone; and that led by ineluctable logic to the conclusion that there must be another diver somewhere, or at least there must have been another diver.

And that deduction reminded him of something which had only half-registered on his attention when he was getting the one remaining scuba outfit from the store-room to being the work of the afternoon.

That was it. The one remaining scuba outfit. There had originally been three — the Saint was sure of that. And one, or most of one, had been lost in the incident with the dinghy.

When he had surfaced that afternoon for the first time, he had gone to the store-room and checked again. There was definitely and positively no sign of the third scuba outfit; and although he had not previously counted the spare air tanks he was fairly certain that some of them, too, had gone.

Not being a believer in the ability of diving gear to grow little legs and wander off on its own, any more than in that of corpses to tie themselves to the sea bed, Simon was obliged to believe, by the logic aforesaid, that somebody must have removed the scuba equipment and used it while conveying Bernadotti’s body down to its watery burial place.

Which meant, the same logic went on to tell him, that somewhere somebody must still be at large, lurking and hiding, with the gold still his objective.

So they would need to have all their wits about them when they were back on the Phoenix.

Who was the Somebody? Simon’s thoughts swung back to Finnegan. If the mystery of how he might have come to be locked in the store-room could be allowed to pass for the moment — and Simon decided that for the sake of making some mental headway it could — then all the rest was not quite impossible, even including the trick of taking Bernadotti’s body down to the bottom of the sea.

The Saint went over the events which had followed on that unguarded moment when the dinghy had been capsized. He pictured it all vividly, in a kind of action replay, with an imaginary stopwatch going in the background. First the collision; then the short period, a minute perhaps, when they had bobbed up and down in the sea, watching the Phoenix plough on; then the brief swim; then the pickup by Lebec in the launch; the hauling aboard of Descartes’ mangled body; and finally the warily circuitous approach to the Phoenix, where she lay at anchor near the sunken boat. In all, perhaps fifteen minutes — twenty at the outside. That could have been enough. Finnegan could have slung the body of Bernadotti overboard, suitably weighted; he could have followed it down, secured it beside the boat, and got back on board and out of his diving gear — all within ten or twelve minutes.