16 The Saint Overboard

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.

2

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?'