Loretta's desperate cry pealed in the Saint's ears with a frantic urgency that spun him round with his back to the deckhouse. He had a glimpse of a man springing at him with an upraised belaying-pin; and his finger was tightening on the trigger when Arnheim dragged down his wrist and struck him a terrific left-handed blow with a rubber truncheon. There was an instant when his brain seemed to rock inside his skull. Then darkness.
4
'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 proba bly 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 morn- . ing, 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.
