Free Saint Overboard by Leslie Charteris Page A

swim, and sipped a glass of sherry, and dined on one of
Orace’s superlative meals. The speed tender had set out again from the Falkenberg and returned about half-past
seven with Vogel, in evening dress, sitting
beside Loretta. Through the binoculars, from one of the saloon portholes, he had seen Vogel smiling and talking, his great nose profiled against the
water.
    He sat out, with a cigarette clipped and
half-forgotten between his lips and his eyes creased against the
smoke, as motionless as a bronze Indian, while the water turned to
dark glass and then to burnished steel. There was no fog that
night. The river ran blue- black under the wooded rocks of the Vicomt é and the ramparts and granite headland of St Malo. Lights
sprang up, multiplying, on the island, and were mirrored in St Servan and
Dinard, and spread luminous rapiers across
the river. The hulls of the craft anchored
in the Ranee sank back into the gloom until the night swallowed them, and only
their winking lights remained on the water.
The lighthouses of the inlet were awake, green and red flashes stabbing irregularly across the bay and
twinkling down from Grand Larron. A drift of music from one of the Casinos lingered
across the estuary; and the anchorage where the Falkenberg should
be was a constellation of lights.
    Loretta was there; but Simon saw no need for
her to be alone.
    The idea grew with him as the dark deepened
and his imagina tion
worked through it. In his own way he was afraid, impatient with his enforced helplessness… . Presently he
sent another cigarette spinning like a glow-worm through the blackness,
and went below to take off his clothes. He
tested the working of his automatic,
brought a greased cartridge into the breech, secured the safety-catch, and
fastened the gun to the belt of his trunks. The dark water received him without a sound.
    Curiously enough, it was during that stealthy
swim that he had a sudden electric remembrance of a news photographer
who had been so unusually blind to the presence of all celebrities save one.
Perhaps it was because his mind had been unconsciously revolving the subject
of Vogel’s amazing thoroughness. But he had a startlingly
vivid picture of a camera aiming towards him— fully as much towards
him as towards Professor Yule—and a sudden reckless smile moved his lips
as he slid through the water.
    If that news photographer was not a real news
photographer, and the picture had been developed and printed and rushed across to England by air that evening, a correspondent could show it
around in certain circles in London with the virtual cer tainty of
having it identified within forty-eight hours … And if the
result of that investigation was cabled to Kurt Vogel at St Peter Port, a good
many interrogation marks might be wiped out with deadly speed.

III.        HOW    KURT   VOGEL   WAS    NOT    SO    CALM,   AND
    OTTO ARNHEIM   ACQUIRED   A     HEADACHE
     
    A CEILING of cloud had formed over the sky,
curtaining off the moon and leaving no natural light to relieve the
blackness. Out in the river it was practically pitch dark, except where the riding
lights of anchored craft sprang their small fragments of scattered
luminance out of the gloom.
    The Saint slid through the water without sound, without leav ing so much as a ripple behind him. All of the
rhythmic swing of his arms and legs
was beneath the surface, and only his head broke the oily film of the still
water; so that not even as much as the pit-pat of two drops of water could have
betrayed his passing to anyone a
yard away. He was as inconspicuous and unassertive
as a clump of sea-weed drifting up swiftly and si lently with the tide.
    He was concentrating so much on silence that
he nearly al lowed himself to be run down by some nocturnal sportsman
who came skimming by in a canoe when he was only a stone’s throw from the Falkenberg. The boat leapt at him out of the darkness so unexpectedly that
he almost shouted the warning