16 The Saint Overboard

Vogel snapped his fingers.

'No. That's nothing. Your presence merely caused me to get rid of him a little earlier than I should otherwise have done. He would have come to the same end, anyway, within the next few weeks. The accident I am referring to is the one which hap­pened last night.'

'Your amateur burglar?'

'My burglar. I should hardly call him an amateur—as a mat­ter of fact he was one of the best safe-breakers in Europe. An invaluable man . . . And therefore I want him back.'

The Saint sipped his brandy.

'Birdie,' he said gently, 'you're calling the wrong number. What you want is a spiritualist.'

'You were telling the truth, then?'

'I always do. My Auntie Ethel used to say——'

'You killed him?'

'That's a crude way of putting it. If the Professor had an unfortunate accident this afternoon, so did your boy friend last night.'

'And then you took him ashore?'

'No. That was the only part of my story where I wandered a little way from the truth. A bloke with my reputation can't afford to deliver dead bodies at police stations, even if they died of old age—not without wasting a lot of time and answering a lot of pointed questions. So we gave him a sailor's funeral. We rowed him out some way from the harbour and fed him to the fish.'

The other's eyes bored into him like splinters of black marble, as if they were trying to split open his brain and impale the first fragment of a lie; but Simon met them with the untroubled steadiness of a clear conscience. And at last Vogel drew back a little.

'I believe you. I suspected that there was some truth in your story when you first told it. That is why you are alive now.'

'You're too generous, Birdie.'

'But how long you will remain alive is another matter.'

'I knew there was a catch in it somewhere,' said the Saint, and inhaled thoughtfully from his cigarette.

Vogel got up and walked over to one of the broad windows; and Simon transferred his contemplative regard to Otto Arn­heim, estimating how long it might take him to bridge the dis­tance between them. While Vogel and the man at the wheel both had their backs turned to the room, could a very agile man . . .  ?

And Simon knew that he couldn't. Reclining as he was in the depths of one of those luxuriously streamlined armchairs, he couldn't even hope to get up on his feet before he was filled full of lead. He tried hauling himself up experimentally, as if in search of an ashtray, and Arnheim had a gun thrusting out at him before he was even sitting upright. The Saint dropped his ash on the carpet and lay back again, scratching his leg rumina­tively. At least the knife strapped to his calf was still there—if it came to a pinch and the opportunity offered, he might do some­thing with that. But even while he knew that his life would be a speculative buy at ten cents in the open market, he was being seized with an overpowering curiosity to know why Vogel had left it even that nominal value.

After about a minute Vogel turned round and came back.

'You are responsible for the loss of one of my best men,' he said with peremptory directness. 'It will be difficult to replace him, and it may take considerable time. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to wait. But fortunately, I have you here instead.'

'So we can still play cut-throat,' drawled the Saint.

Vogel stood looking down at him impassively, the cigar glow­ing evenly between his teeth.

'Just now you wanted to know where we were going, Templar. The answer is that we are going to a point a little way south­west of the Casquet Lighthouse. When we stop again there, we shall be directly over the wreck of the Chalfont Castle—you will remember the ship that sank there in March. There are five mil­lion pounds' worth of bullion in her strong-room which I intend to remove before the official salvage operations are begun. The only difficulty is that your clumsiness has deprived me of the only