Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"Dead?" Arnheim repeated at last, in a strained voice.

The Saint nodded.

"Orace must have underestimated his strength, or something — I suppose it's quite understandable, as we were fighting all over the place. He'd bashed the devil's skull right in."

"But — but won't you be arrested?" faltered Loretta.

"Oh, no. They call it accidental death. It was the fellow's own fault for being a burglar. Still, it's rather a gruesome sort of thing to have on your conscience."

Vogel put up a hand and stroked the side of his chin. His passionless eyes, hard and unwinking as discs of jet, were fastened on the Saint with a terrible brightness of concentration. For the first time since they had been talking there seemed to be something frozen and mechanical about his tight-lipped smile.

"Of course it must be," he agreed. "But as you say, the man brought it on himself. You mustn't let it worry you too much."

"What's worrying him?"

The Professor came ambling along, with his rosy cheeks beaming and his premature grey beard fluttering in the breeze, and the story had to be started over again. While it was being repeated, a seaman came up and handed Vogel a telegram. Vogel opened it with a slow measured stroke of his thumb-nail: while he read it, and during the conclusion of the second telling of the adventure, he seemed to regain complete command of himself with a mental struggle that showed only in the almost imperceptibly whitened pallor of his face.

He buttoned his jacket and glanced along the deck as Yule added his hearty voice to the general vote of exoneration.

"We're ready to sail," he said. "Will you excuse me if I go and attend to it?"

And in that way the big moment had touched its climax and gone on its incalculable trajectory, leaving Simon Templar to consider where it left him.

The Saint lighted a cigarette in the shield of his cupped hands, and stared thoughtfully over the sun-sprinkled ripple of the sea towards the blue-pencilled line of the horizon. An impenitent ripple of the same sunlight glinted at the back of his eyes and fidgeted impudently with the fine-drawn corners of his mouth. He had always been mad, by the Grace of God. He still was. Obviously.

Roger, Peter, and Orace were back in St Peter Port; and though they knew where he had gone, they could do nothing to help him. And there he was, with Loretta, racing through the broad waters of the Channel on the Falkenberg while Vogel and Arnheim thought him over. In addition to whom, there was a crew of at least ten more of Vogel's deep-water gangsters, whom he personally had inspected, also on board; and presumably none of them would be afflicted with any more suburban scruples than their master. Out there on the unrecording water, as he had realised to the full when Loretta was the only passenger, anything could happen: a shot could be fired that no unsuspected witnesses would hear, a cry for help could waste itself in the vast emptiness of the air, an unfortunate accident could be registered in the log which no investigations on shore could disprove. There were no prying busybodies peeping from behind curtains of seaweed to come forward later and upset a well-constructed story. The sea kept its secrets — only a few hours ago he had availed himself of that inviolable silence… Verily, he was an accredited member of the company of divine lunatics.

Wherefore the Saint allowed that twinkle of sublime recklessness to play at the back of his eyes, and drew sea air and smoke into his lungs with the seraphic zest which he had always found in the fierce tang of danger.

The deep-voiced hum of the engines died away suddenly to a soft murmur, and the curling bow wave sank down and shortened to a feather of ripples along the side. Simon looked about him and turned to the Professor, who was puffing a stubby briar at his side.

"Is this where you take your dip?"

Yule nodded. Vogel was in the wheelhouse with Loretta, and Arnheim had moved out of the sun to spread his perspiring bulk in a deck chair.

"This should be it. We went over the chart last night, and the deepest sounding we could find was ninety-four fathoms. It isn't much, but it'll do for the preliminary test."

Simon gazed out to sea with his eyebrows drawn down against the glare. Under them his set blue eyes momentarily gave up their carefree twinkle. He realised that there was a third person in the same danger as himself, about whom he had forgotten to worry very much before.

"Have you known Vogel long?" he asked casually.

"About six months now. He came to me after my first descent and offered to help, and I was very glad to accept his offer. He's been a kind of fairy godmother to me. And all I've been able to do in return was to name a new deep-water fish that I discovered after him — Bathyphasma vogeli!" The Professor chuckled in his refreshingly boyish way.

"You haven't started to think about the commercial possibilities of your invention yet?"

"No. No. I'm afraid it's just a scientific toy." Yule's eyes widened a little. "Are there any commercial possibilities?"

The Saint hesitated. In the face of that child-like unworldliness he didn't know where to begin. And he knew that to be caught in the middle of an argument, into which Vogel or Arnheim might be drawn, would be more surely fatal than to keep silence.

"I was only thinking—" he began slowly; and then he heard footsteps behind him, and turned his head to see Vogel and Loretta coming out on to the deck. He shrugged vaguely, and said goodbye to the lost chance with a grim question in his mind of whether it had ever really come within his reach. "For instance, could you take movies down there? They'd be something quite new in travelogues."

"I don't know," said Yule seriously. "What do you think, Mr Vogel?"

"We must ask someone with more technical knowledge." Vogel's bland glance touched on the Saint for a moment with a puzzling dryness, and returned to his protegee. "Would you like to check over the gear before lunch?"

The Professor knocked out his pipe, and they moved aft. Arnheim stayed in his chair in the shade, with his mouth half open and his hat tilted over his eyes.

Simon fell in beside Loretta and followed the procession. It was the first time that day that he had had a chance to speak to her alone — Vogel had kept her close beside him from the moment they left the harbour, and Arnheim had gone puffing after her with some conversational excuse or other if she had ever moved more than a couple of yards away. The Saint dropped his cigarette, and glanced back as he picked it up. Arnheim had not moved, and his round stomach was distending and relaxing with peaceful regularity… Simon rejoined the girl, and slackened his stride.

"Perhaps you heard how I'd been thinking," he said.

His hand brushed hers as they walked, and he took her fingers and held her back.

"Is this safe?" she asked, hardly moving her lips.

"As safe as anything on this suicides' picnic. It'd be more suspicious if I didn't try to speak to you at all." He pointed back towards the turreted fortress of the Casquet lighthouse rising from its plinth of rocks to the south, as if he were making some remark about it, and said quietly: "There's one person who may be sitting on the same volcano as we are; but he doesn't know it."

"Professor Yule?"

"Yes. Have you thought about him?"

"Quite a lot."

"It's more than I've done. Until just now. Where does he come in — or go out?"

"I'd like to know."

"I wish I could tell you. We know Birdie isn't interested in scientific toys. When this new bathystol is passed okay, he'll 've had all he wants out of Yule. Then he'll get rid of him. But how? And how soon?"

He turned away from the lighthouse and they walked on again. Vogel was watching them. The Saint laughed as if at some trivial flippancy, and said in the same sober undertone: "I'm worried. You can't help liking the old boy. If anything sticky happened to him, I'd feel I had a share in it. If you got a chance you might manage to talk to him. God knows how."