16 The Saint Overboard

'Have you seen anyone swimming around here?'

And Murdoch's sullen answer: 'I did see someone—it was over that way.'

'Thanks.'

The voice of the tender's spokesman was the last one Simon heard. And then, after the very briefest pause, the engine was cut in again, and the tender began to slide smoothly back towards the Falkenberg, while the canoe went on its way to the shore. In that insignificant pause the only sound was a faint thud such as a man might have made in dumping a heavy weight on a hard floor. But Simon Templar knew, with absolute certainty, that the man who paddled the canoe on towards the shore was not the man who had been caught by the spotlight, and that the man who had been in the canoe was riding unconsciously in the speedboat as it turned back.

4

The tender slid in under the side of the Falkenberg, and the man on the foredeck who had been working the spotlight stood up and threw in the painter. Vogel himself caught the rope and made it fast. Under the natural pallor of his skin there was a curious rigidity, and the harsh black line of his brows over that great scythe of a nose was accentuated by the shadows that fell across his face as he leaned over the rail.

'Did you find anything?'

'No.' The man at the wheel answered, standing up in the cockpit. He looked up at Vogel intently as he spoke, and his right hand fingered a rug that seemed to have been thrown down in a rather large bundle on the seat beside him. His phlegmatic voice, with a thick guttural accent, boomed on very slowly and deliberately: 'We asked a man in a boat, but he had seen no­body.'

'I see,' answered Vogel quietly.

He straightened up with a slight shrug; and Professor Yule and Arnheim, on his right, turned away from the rail with him.

'That's a pity,' said Yule enthusiastically. 'But they can't have searched very far. Shall we go out and have another look?'

'I'm afraid we shouldn't be likely to have any more success, my dear Professor,' replied Vogel. 'There is plenty of room in the river for anyone to disappear quite quickly, and we were slow enough in starting after them.' He turned to Loretta. 'I'm very sorry—you must have had rather a shock, and you're more im­portant than catching a couple of harbour thieves.'

In some way the quality of his voice had altered—she could feel the change without being able to define it. She felt like somebody who has been watching a fuse smouldering away into a stack of lethal explosive under her feet, and who has seen the fuse miraculously flicker and go out. The sensation of limpness in her muscles was no longer the paralysis of nightmare; it was the relaxation of pure relief. She knew that for that night at least the ordeal was over. Vogel had shot his bolt. In a few hours he would be as balanced and dangerous as ever, his brain would be working with the same ruthless insistence and ice-cold de­ tachment; but for the moment he himself was suffering from a shock, intrinsically slight, and yet actual enough to have jarred the delicately calculated precision of his attack. Something told her that he realised what he had lost, and that he was too clever to waste any more effort on a spoiled opportunity.

'I'm perfectly all right,' she said; and her nerves were so steady again that she had to call on acting for the vestiges of trepidation which she felt were demanded.

'All the same, I expect you would like a drink.'

'That wouldn't do any of us any harm,' agreed Arnheim.

In his own way he had altered, although his broad flat face was as bland as ever, and his wet little red mouth was pursed up to the same enigmatic sensual bud that it had been all the eve­ning. He took it on himself to officiate with the decanter, and swallowed half a tumbler of neat whisky in two methodical gulps. Vogel took a very modest allowance with a liberal splash of soda, and sipped it with impenetrable restraint.

But even the artificial film of lightness had gone murky. Vo­gel's unshaken suavity, with Arnheim's solid co-operation, elimi­nated any embarrassing silences; but a curious heavy tenseness like the threat of thunder had crept into the atmosphere, a tense­ness so subtle and well concealed that at any other time she might have been persuaded that it was purely subjective to her own fatigue. When at last she said that she had had too many late nights already that week, and asked if they would excuse her, she detected a tenuous