16 The Saint Overboard

away from the trunks, and the locks had been ripped away by the scientific application of a jemmy. One of them was already open, and the lid of the other lifted at a touch. Clearly the visitor had just been completing his investigations when the sound of the Saint's arrival had disturbed him.

'Which is all very festive and neighbourly,' reflected the Saint, as he surveyed the wreckage.

He strolled back to the saloon in a meditative frame of mind. There remained the problem of the investigator himself, who seemed destined to wake up with a sore head as well as a flattened face. The sore head might return to normal in twenty-four hours; even the flattened face might endear itself by a few years of devotion, and become as acceptable to its owner as the sym­metrical dial which perhaps it had once been; but the informa­tion which had been acquired during the same visit might prove to be more recalcitrant. It must not be allowed to take itself back to Vogel; but on the other hand it was doubtless keeping company with some useful information from the Vogel camp which might form a basis of fair exchange.

Simon Templar found himself warming to that idea on his return journey. He closed the door of the galley behind him and folded a wet towel which he had collected on his way, grinning at Orace rather dreamily.

'We might see if your boy friend feels talkative,' he said. 'And if he doesn't, you may be able to think of some way to thaw him out.'

He cleared a space on one of the settees and yanked the in­truder up on it. For a minute or so he applied the cold towel methodically. Then he felt the back of the man's head, looked closely into his face, and opened up his shirt. After which he moved away and finished his cigarette with contemplative de­liberation. For nothing was more certain than that the sleeping beauty had listened to the last lullaby of all.

VI.       HOW PROFESSOR YULE TESTED THE BATHYSTOL,

            AND KURT VOGEL MADE A PROPOSITION

DEFINITELY an uninvited complication, thought the Saint; although he admitted that it was the sort of accident that was always liable to happen when a man had an iron bar in his hand and good reason to be annoyed. Orace had had no cause to feel tenderhearted, and perhaps the deceased's cranium had been more fragile than the average. The Saint's attitude was sympathetic and broadminded. He did not feel that Orace was to be blamed; but he did feel that that momentary lapse had altered the situation somewhat drastically. Considering the point again in the placid light of the morning after, he could find no encouragement to revise his opinion. What he had no way of foreseeing was how drastic that alteration was destined to turn out.

He folded his arms on the rail of the Falkenberg, and frowned ruminatively at a flight of gulls wheeling over the blue water. Somewhere back under that same blue water, out in the channel between Guernsey and Herm, the unfortunate visitor lay in his long sleep, moored down to the sea bed by a couple of pigs of ballast. The Corsair had been cleaned up and tidied, and every record of his intrusion effaced.

Simon Templar had done that alone, before he went to sleep; but his own plans had kept him awake for longer.

'The balloon's gone up, anyway,' he had reasoned. 'When the search party doesn't come home, Vogel will start thinking until his head gets hot. What'll he decide? That the fellow rat­ted? ... One chance in fifty . . . That he's had an accident. then? That's the forty-nine to one certainty.'

He had thought round it from every angle that he could see, trying to put himself into Vogel's place, but there was no other conclusion he could come to. What then?

'Vogel won't talk to the police. For one thing, that would give him a hell of a tall story to think up, explaining how he knew anyone would be burgling my boat to-night. And to go on with, he doesn't want to draw the attention of the police any more than I do. And to put a lid on it, for all he may know up to this moment, I might be the police.'

There was still that thin and brittle straw of anonymity to clutch.

'What would I do? ... I'd come right over and have a look. But Vogel won't. He's pulled that one already; and he'd have a job to find another excuse to get shown over the boat for the second time in twenty-four hours. Besides, he knows he wouldn't find anything. If I'm police or if I'm just one of the idle rich, the burglar's already lodged in jail, and there's nothing he can do about it except try to bail him out in the morning when he hears the story. And if there's a chance that I'm police, he'd have to be damn careful how he went about that. On the other hand, if I'm in the racket too, I'd be waiting for something like that, and he'd expect to be walking into a reception if he did come over.'