Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

Corsair herself and all his other outward tokens of unlimited wealth, and which made certain persons think it so epically absurd that he should go about with the nickname of the Saint. Only for that sublimely lawless curiosity, a variegated assortment of people whose habitats ranged from the gutters of Paris to the high spots of Broadway, from the beaches of the South Pacific to the most sanctified offices of Scotland Yard, could see no just reason why he should be taking a millionaire's holiday at Dinard instead of sewing mail-bags in Larkstone Prison or resting in a nice quiet cemetery with a stomachful of lead to digest. But the roots of that outlaw vigilance were too deep for cure, even if he had wished to cure them; and out there in the vaporous twilight something odd was happening of which he had to know more. Wherefore he listened, and heard the outboard chuffing around in the murk, and the swimmer coming closer.

And then he saw her. A shift of the air moved the mist-curtains capriciously at the very limit of his vision, and he saw her suddenly in the down-seeping nimbus of his riding lights.

Her.

It was that realisation of sex, guessed rather than positively asserted by the dimly-seen contour of her features and the glistening curve of a green bathing cap, which sent a skin-deep tingle of intuition plunging into profound and utter certainty. If it had been a man, he would not have lost interest; but he could have produced half a dozen commonplace theories to assimilate that final fact, with a regretful premonition that the adventure would not be likely to run for long. But a girl swimming stealthily through a fogbound sea at three o'clock in the morning could not be associated with yells and shooting in the dark by any prosaic theory; and his pulses, which up to that moment had been ticking over as steadily as clockwork, throbbed a shade faster at the knowledge. Somewhere out there in the leaden haze big medicine was seething up, and inevitably it was ordained that he must dip his spoon in the brew.

He was standing so motionless, half cloaked by the deep shadow of the deckhouse, that she had taken three more long strokes towards the ketch before she saw him. She stopped swimming abruptly, and stared up — he could almost read the wild thought tearing through her mind that she was caught in a trap, that in such a situation he could not help challenging her. And then, as the monotonous chugging of the outboard circled round and came closer, he caught in her upturned eyes a frantic forlorn-hope appeal, a desperate voiceless entreaty that placed the ultimate seal on his destiny in that adventure.

He leaned over the side and grasped her wrist; and her first revelation of his steel-wire strength was the amazing ease with which he lifted her inboard with one hand. Without a word he pushed her down on the floor of the cockpit and unhitched a fender, dipping it in the water to repeat the faint splash she had made as she came out.

At that moment the outboard loomed up through the mist and coughed itself to silence. Dropping the fender to water level once again, so that there should be no doubt left in any interested minds about the origin of whatever noise had been heard from that quarter, he adjusted it under the gunwale of his dinghy and made it fast to the stanchion from which he had slipped it. The other boat was gliding up under its own momentum while he did so, and he was able to make a swift summary of its occupants.

There were three of them. Two, in rough seamen's jerseys, sat in the sternsheets, one of them holding the tiller and the other rewinding the starter lanyard. The third man was sitting on one of the thwarts forward, but as the boat slid nearer he rose to his feet.

Simon Templar studied him with an interest that never appeared more than casual. From his position in the boat, his well-cut reefer jacket and white trousers, and the way he stood up, he was obviously the leader of the party. A tallish well-built man with one hand resting rather limply in his coat pocket — a typical wealthy yachtsman going about his own mysterious business. And yet, to the Saint, who had in his time walked out alive from the bright twisted places where men who keep one hand in a side pocket are a phenomenon that commands lightning alertness, there was something in the well-groomed impassivity of him as he rose there to his full height that touched the night with a new tingling chill that was nevertheless a kind of unlawful ecstasy. For a couple of seconds the Saint saw his face as the dinghy hissed under the lee of the Corsair, a long swarthy black-browed face with a great eagle's beak of a nose.

Then the beam of a powerful flashlight blazed from the man's free hand, blotting out his face behind its dazzling attack. For a moment it dwelt on Simon's straightening figure, and he knew that in that moment the dryness of his hair and his pyjamas were methodically noted and reduced to their apparent place in the scheme of things. Then the light swept on, surveyed the lines of the ketch from stern to bow, rested for another moment on the name lettered there, and went flickering over the surrounding water.

"Lost something?" Simon inquired genially; and the light came back to him.

"Not exactly." The voice was clear and dispassionate, almost lackadaisical in its complete emptiness of expression. "Have you seen anyone swimming around here?"

"A few unemployed fish," murmured the Saint pleasantly. "Or are you looking for the latest Channel swimmer? They usually hit the beach further east, towards Calais."

There was a barely perceptible pause before the man chuckled; but even then, to the Saint's abnormally sensitive ears, there was no natural good humour in the sound. It was simply an efficient adaptation to circumstances, a suave getout from a situation that bristled with question marks.

"No — nothing like that. Just one of our party took on a silly bet. I expect he's gone back."

And with that, for Simon Templar, a flag somewhere among the ghostly armadas of adventure was irrevocably nailed to the mast. The mystery had crept out of the night and caught him. For the tall hooknosed man's reply presumed that he hadn't heard any of the other sounds associated with the swimmer; and, presuming that, it stepped carefully into the pitfall of its own surpassing smoothness. More — it attempted deliberately to lead him astray. A swim on a foggy night that included gun-play and.the peculiar kind of shout that had awakened him belonged to a species of silly bet which the Saint had still to meet; and he couldn't help being struck by the fact that it disposed so adequately of the obvious theory of an ordinary harbour theft, and the hue and cry which should have arisen from such an explanation. Even without the glaring error of sex in the last sentence, that would have been almost enough.

He stood and watched the search party vanishing on their way into the fog, the flashlight in the hooknosed man's hand blinking through the mist until it was lost to sight; and then he turned and slid down the companion into the saloon, switching on the lights as he did so. He heard the girl follow him down, but he drew the curtains over the portholes before he turned to look at her.

She had pulled off the green bathing cap, and her hair had tumbled to her shoulders in,a soft disorder of chestnut rippled with spun gold. Her red mouth seemed to be of the quality that triumphs even over salt water; and the purely perfunctory covering of her attenuated bathing costume left room for no deception about the perfection of her slender sun-gilt figure. Her steady grey eyes held a tentative gleam of mischief, soberly checked at that moment and yet incorrigibly seeking for natural expression, which for one fleeting instant worked unpardonable magic on his breathing.

Читать дальше