Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"I trust you are feeling better," said Vogel.

"Much better," said the Saint. "And full of admiration. Oh, it was smooth, very smooth, Birdie — you don't mind if I call you Birdie, do you? It's so whimsical."

He sat in an armchair in the wheelhouse, with a brandy and soda in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Both of them had been provided by Kurt Vogel. He was not even tied up. But there the free hospitality ended, for Vogel kept one hand obtrusively in his jacket pocket, and so did Arnheim.

Simon Templar allowed himself a few more moments to digest the profound smoothness of the ambush. He had been fairly caught, and he admitted it — caught by a piece of machiavellian strategy that was ingenious enough to have netted even such a wary bird as himself without disgrace. Oh, it had been exceedingly smooth; a bait that flesh and blood and human feeling could scarcely have resisted. And the climax had supervened with an accuracy of co-ordination that could hardly have been slicker if it had been rehearsed — from which he deduced that it probably had. If he had been unprepared, the seaman with the belaying-pin would have got him; if he was warned, Arnheim had his chance…

"And the Professor?" he asked.

Vogel lifted his shoulders.

"Unfortunately the fault was traced too late, Mr Templar."

"So you knew," said the Saint softly.

The other's thin lips widened.

"Of course. When you were photographed in Dinard — you remember? I received the answer to my inquiry this morning. You were with us when I opened the telegram. That was when I knew that there would have to be an accident."

Naturally. When once the Saint was known, a man like Vogel would not have run the risk of letting the Professor be warned, or snatched out of his power. He had been ready in every detail for the emergency — was there anything he had not been ready for?… Simon had a moment's harrowing vision of that naive and kindly man gasping out his life down there in the cold gloom of the sea. and the steel frosted in his blue eyes…

He thought of something else. Loretta's piercing cry; the last voice he had heard before he was knocked down, still rang through his aching head. If he had been known since the morning, the stratagem had had no object in making him give himself away. But it had provided a subsidiary snare for Loretta while it was achieving the object of disarming him. And she also had been caught. Simon acknowledged every refinement of the conspiracy with inflexible resolution. Kurt Vogel had scooped the pool in one deal, with the most perfectly stacked deck of cards that the Saint had ever reviewed in a lifetime of going up against stacked decks.

He realised that Vogel was watching him, performing the simple task of following his thoughts; and smiled with unaltered coolness.

"So where," he murmured, "do you think we go from here?"

"That depends on you," said Vogel.

He put a match to his cigar and sat on the arm of a chair, leaning forward until the Saint was sitting under the shadow of his great eagle's beak. Looking at him with the same lazy smile still on his lips, Simon was aware of the vibration of the powerful engines, and saw out of the corner of his eye that a seaman was standing at the wheel, with his back to them, his eyes intent upon the compass card. Wherever they were going, at any rate they were already on their way…

"You have given me a good deal of trouble, Templar. Not by your childish interference — that would be hardly worth talking about — but by an accident for which it was responsible."

"You mean the Professor?" Simon suggested grittily.

Vogel snapped his fingers.

"No. That's nothing. Your presence merely caused me to get rid of him a little earlier than I should otherwise have done. He would have come to the same end, anyway, within the next few weeks. The accident I am referring to is the one which happened last night."

"Your amateur burglar?"

"My burglar. I should hardly call him an amateur — as a matter of fact he was one of the best safe-breakers in Europe. An invaluable man… And therefore I want him back."

The Saint sipped his brandy.

"Birdie," he said gently, "you're calling the wrong number. What you want is a spiritualist."

"You were telling the truth, then?"

"I always do. My Auntie Ethel used to say—"

"You killed him?"

"That's a crude way of putting it. If the Professor had an unfortunate accident this afternoon, so did your boy friend last night."

"And then you took him ashore?"

"No. That was the only part of my story where I wandered a little way from the truth. A bloke with my reputation can't afford to deliver dead bodies at police stations, even if they died of old age — not without wasting a lot of time and answering a lot of pointed questions. So we gave him a sailor's funeral. We rowed him out some way from the harbour and fed him to the fish."

The other's eyes bored into him like splinters of black marble, as if they were trying to split open his brain and impale the first fragment of a lie; but Simon met them with the untroubled steadiness of a clear conscience. And at last Vogel drew back a little.

"I believe you. I suspected that there was some truth in your story when you first told it. That is why you are alive now."

"You're too generous, Birdie."

"But how long you will remain alive is another matter."

"I knew there was a catch in it somewhere," said the Saint, and inhaled thoughtfully from his cigarette.

Vogel got up and walked over to one of the broad windows; and Simon transferred his contemplative regard to Otto Arnheim, estimating how long it might take him to bridge the distance between them. While Vogel and the man at the wheel both had their backs turned to the room, could a very agile man…?

And Simon knew that he couldn't. Reclining as he was in the depths of one of those luxuriously streamlined armchairs, he couldn't even hope to get up on his feet before he was filled full of lead. He tried hauling himself up experimentally, as if in search of an ashtray, and Arnheim had a gun thrusting out at him before he was even sitting upright. The Saint dropped his ash on the carpet and lay back again, scratching his leg ruminatively. At least the knife strapped to his calf was still there — if it came to a pinch and the opportunity offered, he might do something with that. But even while he knew that his life would be a speculative buy at ten cents in the open market, he was being seized with an overpowering curiosity to know why Vogel had left it even that nominal value.

After about a minute Vogel turned round and came back.

"You are responsible for the loss of one of my best men," he said with peremptory directness. "It will be difficult to replace him, and it may take considerable time. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to wait. But fortunately, I have you here instead."

"So we can still play cut-throat," drawled the Saint.

Vogel stood looking down at him impassively, the cigar glowing evenly between his teeth.

"Just now you wanted to know where we were going, Templar. The answer is that we are going to a point a little way southwest of the Casquet Lighthouse. When we stop again there, we shall be directly over the wreck of the Chalfont Castle — you will remember the ship that sank there in March. There are five million pounds' worth of bullion in her strong-room which I intend to remove before the official salvage operations are begun. The only difficulty is that your clumsiness has deprived me of the only member of my crew who could have been relied upon to open the strong-room. I'm hoping that that is where your interference will prove to have its compensations. I said that the man you killed was one of the best safe-breakers in Europe. But I have heard that the Saint is one of the greatest experts in the world."