16 The Saint Overboard

strip of light to clamber over the rail and drop hectically downwards.

Loretta Page stared across six feet of Breton twilight at the miracle—half incredulously, with the breathlessness of inde­scribable relief choking in her throat. She saw the flash of white teeth in a familiar smile, saw him put his fingers to his lips and kiss them out to her with a debonair flourish that defied compar­ison; and then, as Vogel began to drag himself up and around with the gun still clutched in his right hand, she saw the Saint launch himself up with a ripple of brown muscles to curve over with hardly a splash into the sea.

He went down in a long shallow dive, and swam out of the Falkenberg's circle of light before he rose. He had judged his timing and his angle so well that the canoe flashed past his eyes as he broke the surface. He put up one hand and caught the gunnel as it went by, nearly upsetting the craft until the man in it leaned out to the other side and balanced it.

'I thought I told you to say goodbye to France,' said the Saint.

'I thought I told you I didn't take your orders,' said the other grimly.

'They were Loretta's orders, Steve.'

Murdoch dug in the paddle and dragged the canoe round the stern of another yacht moored in the river.

'She's crazy, too,' he snarled. 'Because you've got around her with your gigolo line doesn't mean I don't know what she'll say when she comes to her senses. I'm staying where I like.'

'And getting shot where you like, I hope,' murmured Simon. 'I won't interfere in the next bonehead play you make. I only butted in this time to save Loretta. Next time, you can take your own curtain.'

'I will,' said Murdoch prophetically. 'Let go this boat.'

Simon let go rather slowly, resisting the temptation to release his hold with a deft jerk that would have capsized the canoe and damped the pugnaciousness of its ungrateful occupant. He won­dered whether Murdoch's aggressiveness was founded on sheer blind ignorance of what might have been the result of his clumsy intrusion, or whether it was put up to bluff away the knowledge of having made an egregious mistake; and most of all he won­dered what else would come of the insubordinations of that tough inflexible personality.

One of those questions was partly answered for him very quickly.

He sculled back with his hands, under the side of the yacht near which they had parted company, listening to the low sono­rous purr of a powerful engine that had awoken in the darkness. There were no lights visible through any of the portholes, and he concluded that the crew were all on shore. He was on the side away from the Falkenberg, temporarily screened even from the most lynx-eyed searcher. The purr of the engine grew louder; and with a quick decision he grasped a stanchion, drew himself up, and rolled over into the tiny after cockpit.

He reached it only a second before the beam of a young searchlight swept over the ship, wiping a bar of brilliant illu­mination across the deck in its passing. The throb of the engine droned right up to him; and he hitched a very cautious eye over the edge of the cockpit, and saw the Falkenberg's speed tender churning around his refuge, so close that he could have touched it with a boathook. A seaman crouched up on the foredeck, swinging the powerful spotlight that was mounted there; two other men stood up beside the wheel, following the path of the beam with their eyes. Its long finger danced on the water, touched luminously on the hulls of other craft at their anchor­ages, stretched faintly out to the more distant banks of the es­tuary . . . fastened suddenly on the shape of a canoe that sprang up out of the dark as if from nowhere, skimming towards the bathing pool at the end of the Plage du Prieure. The canoe veered like a startled gull, shooting up parallel with the rocky foreshore; but the beam clung to it like a magnetised bar of light, linking it with the tender as if it were held by intangible cables. At the same time the murmur of the tender's engine deepened its note: the bows lifted a little, and a white streamer of foam lengthened away from the stern as the link-bar of light between the two craft shortened.

The canoe turned once more, and headed south again, the man in it paddling with unhurried strokes again, as if he was trying to undo the first impression he had given of taking flight. The Falk­enberg's tender turned and drifted up alongside him as the en­gine was shut off; and at that moment the spotlight was switched out.

Simon heard the voices clearly across the water.