16 The Saint Overboard

yet. Doesn't it tell you any­thing?'

Simon Templar sat back and let the electric tingles play up his vertebrae and toe-dance airily over the back of his scalp. His whole body felt the pulse of adventure in exactly the same way as a sensitively tuned instrument can detect sounds inaudible to the human ear. And to him the sounds were music.

In that short silence he had a vivid picture of all the far reaches of the sea on which the Corsair cushioned her light weight. He saw the lift of storms and the raw break of hungry rocks and death stealing out of the invisible to give the waters their treasure. He saw the green depths, the ultimate dim places under the spume and sapphire beauty; saw the vast whale-shapes of steel hulls sunk in the jade stillness, and the gaunt ribs of half-forgotten galleons reaching out of the fronds of weed. What unrecorded argosies might lie under those infinite waters, no one would ever know. But those that were known, those that the sea had claimed even in the last four hundred years . . . His imag­ination reeled at the thought. The Almirante Florencia, lost treasure?house of the Armada, foundering in Tobermory Bay with ?2,000,000 in plate and jewels. The Russian flagship Rurik, sunk on the Korean coast with two and a half million pounds in specie. The sixty-three ships of the Turkish Navy sent to the bottom of Navarino Bay in 1827 with ?10,000,000 between them. The Chalfont Castle, with her steering carried away and her plates sprung below the waterline in the great storm of that very year, drifting helplessly down on to the Casquets to the west of Alderney, and sinking in twenty fathoms with ?5,000,000 of bar gold in her strong-room. Odd names and figures that he had heard disinterestedly from time to time and practically forgotten crept back from the hinterlands of unconscious memory and staggered him . . . And he saw the only possible, the only plausible corollary: the ghost pirate stealing through grey dawns to drop her divers and her steel grabs, the unsuspected gangsters of the sea who had discovered the most pluperfect racket of all time.

He would have thought that he had heard every note in the register of crime, but he had never dreamed of anything like that. The plot to swindle the Bank of Italy by means of one million perfectly genuine 100-lire bills, for his share in which he was entitled to wear the pendant of the Order of the Annunziata in the unlikely event of his ever attending a State function, was mere petty pilfering beside it. Sir Hugo Renway's scheme for pillaging the cross-Channel gold routes was mere clumsy experi­ment in comparison. And yet he knew that the girl who sat look­ing at him was not romancing. She threw up the stark terse facts and left him to find the link; and the supernatural creep of his nerves told him where the link was.

Her grey eyes were on him, tempting and challenging as they had been when he first saw her with the lights striking gold in her hair and the sea's damp on her slim shoulders; and in his mind he had a vision of the black expressionless eyes of the hooknosed man who stood up in the boat and lied to him.

'Why?' he said, with a dreamy rapture in his slow deep breath. 'Why didn't I know all this before?'

'Perhaps you were too busy.'

'Anything else could have waited,' said the Saint, with pro­found conviction. 'Except perhaps the Bank of England. . . . And is that what you're detecting?'

She took a cigarette from his pack, and a light from the butt between his fingers.

'Yes. I work for the Ingerbeck Agency—we have a contract with Lloyd's, and we handle a lot of other insurance business. You see, where we work, there's no ordinary police force. Where a ship sinks, the wreck is nominally under the protection of the country that covers the water; but if the underwriters have paid out a total loss the salvage rights belong to them. Which means precisely nothing. In the last fifty years alone, the insurance companies have paid out millions of pounds on this kind of risk. Of course they hoped to get a lot of it back in salvage, but the amounts they've seen would make you laugh.'

'Is it always a loss?'

'Of course not. But we've known—they've known—for a long time, that there was some highly organised racket in the back­ground cheating them out of six figures or more a year. It's efficient. It's got to be. And yet it's easy. It has clever men, and the best equipment that money can buy. We went out to look for them.'

'You?'

'Oh, no. Ingerbeck's. They've been on it for the last five years. Some of their men went a long way. Three of them went too far—and didn't come back.' She met his eyes steadily. 'It's that sort of racket. . . . But one of them found a trail that led somewhere, out of hundreds that didn't; and it's been followed up.'

'To here?'