Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

But nothing happened. Simon stood there like a statue while the seconds ticked into minutes on his drumming pulses, and the wetness drained down his legs and formed a pool around his feet, hardly breathing; but only the drone of conversation in the saloon, and a muffled guffaw from the crew's quarters under his feet, reached him out of the stillness.

At last he relaxed, and allowed himself to glance curiously at his surroundings. Over his head, the odd canvas-shrouded contrivance which he had observed from a distance reached out aft like an oversized boom — but there was no mast at the near end to account for it. The Falkenberg carried no sail. He stretched up and wriggled his fingers through a gap in the lacing, and felt something like a square steel girder with wire cables stretched inside it; and suddenly the square protuberance, likewise covered with tarpaulin, on which the after end of the boom rested took on a concrete significance. At the end up against the deckhouse he found wheels, and the wire cables turned over the wheels, and ran down close beside the bulkhead to vanish through plated eyes in the deck at his feet… He was exploring a nifty, well-oiled, and up-to-date ten-ton grab!

"Well, well, well," murmured the Saint admiringly, to his guardian angel.

And that curiously low flattened stern… It all fitted in. Divers could be dropped over that counter with the minimum of difficulty; and the grab could telescope out or swing round, and run its claw round to be steered on to whatever the divers offered it. While, forward of all those gadgets, there were a pair of high-speed engines and a super-stream-lined hull to facilitate a lightning getaway if an emergency emerged… Which, however priceless a conglomeration of assets, is not among the amenities usually advertised with luxurious pleasure cruisers.

A slow smile tugged at the Saint's lips; and he restrained himself with a certain effort from performing an impromptu hornpipe. The last lingering speck of doubt in his mind had been catastrophically obliterated in those few seconds. Loretta Page hadn't been pulling his leg, or raving, or leading him up the garden. He wasn't kidding himself to make the book read according to the blurb. That preposterous, princely, pluperfect racket did exist; and Kurt Vogel was in it. In it right up to the blue cornice of his neck.

If someone had been wearing a hat, he would have raised it in solemn salute to the benign deities of outlawry that had poured him into such a truly splendiferous tureen of soup.

And then a door opened further up the deck, and footsteps began to move down towards him. Where he was standing, there wasn't cover for a cat, except what was provided by the shadow of the deckhouse. In another second even that was taken from him, as a switch was clicked over somewhere and a pair of bulkhead lights behind frosted panels suddenly wiped out the darkness in. a glow of yellowish radiance.

The Saint's heart arrived in his mouth, as if it had soared up there in an express elevator; and for a moment his hand dropped to the gun in his belt.

And then he realised that the lights which had destroyed his hiding-place hadn't been switched on with that intention. They were simply a part of the general system of exterior illumination of the boat, and their kindling had doubtless been paralleled by the lighting up of other similar bulbs all around the deck. But the footsteps were drawing close to the corner where they would find him in full view, and he could hear Vogel discoursing proprietorially on the details of beam and draught.

Simon looked up speculatively, and his hands reached for the deckhouse roof. In another second he was up there, spread out flat on his stomach, peeping warily down over the edge.

All the evening Kurt Vogel had been studiously affable. The dinner had been perfectly cooked and perfectly served; the wine, presented with a charming suggestion of apology, just dulcet enough to flatter a feminine palate, without being too sweet for any taste. Vogel had set himself out to play the polished cosmopolitan host, and he filled the part brilliantly. The other guest, whom he called Otto and who had been introduced to Loretta as Mr Arnheim, a fat broad-faced man with small brown eyes and a moist red pursed-up mouth, fitted into the play with equal correctness. And yet the naïve joviality of Professor Yule, with his boyish laugh and his anecdotes and his ridiculously premature grey beard, was the only thing that had eased the strain on her nerves.

She knew that from the moment when she set foot on board she was being watched like a mouse cornered by two patient cats. She knew it, even without one single article of fact which she could have pointed out in support of her belief. There was nothing in the entertainment, not the slightest scintilla of a hint of an innuendo, to give her any material grounds for discomfort. The behaviour of Vogel and Arnheim was so punctilious that without their unfailing geniality it would have been almost embarrassingly formal.

The menace was not in anything they said or did. It was in their silences. Their smiles never reached their eyes. Their laughter went no deeper than their throats. All the time they were watching, waiting, analysing. Every movement she made, every turn of a glance, every inflection of her voice, came under their mental microscope — was wafered down, dissected, scrutinised in all its component parts until it had given up its last particle of meaning. And the fiendish cleverness of it was that a perfectly innocent woman in the role she had adopted wouldn't have been bothered at all.

She had realised halfway through the meal that that was the game they were playing. They were merely letting her own imagination work against her, while they looked on. Steadily, skilfully, remorselessly, they were goading her own brain against her, keying her millimetre by millimetre to the tension of self-consciousness where she would make one false step that would be sufficient for their purpose. And all the time they were smiling, talking flatteringly to her, respecting her with their words, so cunningly that an outside observer like Professor Yule could have seen nothing to give her the slightest offence.

She had clung to the Professor as the one infallible lodestar on the tricky course she had to steer, even while she had realised completely what Vogel's patronage of scientific exploration meant. Yule's spontaneous innocence was the one pattern which she had been able to hold to; and when he remained behind in the saloon she felt a cold emptiness that was not exactly fear.

Arnheim had engineered it, with a single sentence of irreproachable and unarguable tact, when Vogel suggested showing her over the ship.

"We'll stay and look after the port," he said, and there was not even the suspicion of a smirk in his eyes when he spoke.

She looked at staterooms, bathrooms, galleys, engines, and refrigerators, listening to his explanations and interjecting the right expressions of admiration and delight, steeling herself against the hypnotic monotone of his voice. She wondered whether he would kiss her in one of the rooms, and felt as if she had been let out of prison when they came out on deck under the open sky.

His hand slid through her arm. It was the first time he had touched her, and even then the touch had no more than an avuncular familiarity.

"…This open piece of deck is rather pleasant for sitting out when it's hot. We rig an awning over that boom if the sun's too strong."

"It must be marvellous to own a boat like this," she said.

They stood at the rail, looking down the river. Somewhere among the lights in the broadening of the estuary was the Corsair, but there was nothing by which she could pick it out.

"To be able to have you here — this is pleasant," he said. "At other times it can be a very lonely ownership."