Salvage for the Saint

1

The Marseille harbourmaster was regretful but definite.

“No, Monsieur. There has been no such vessel in the Marina here during the last two months.” He stabbed a broad sunburned hand at the record-book that lay open on his desk. “You see — in July, she left her berth here, without disclosing any destination.” He shrugged. “We have no powers to require that, you understand. Perhaps Cannes, or Nice, or San Tropez. I am sorry, but the yacht Phoenix is nowhere in the port of Marseille.”

It had been Simon’s idea to get out of the way while Arabella was completing her re-sanitisation in the hotel. During the latter part of the drive from the haras after their hurried escape, she had already sketched in the missing details for him, as much as she had gleaned from the solicitor. That included her current financial status and absolute need to sell a yacht whose existence she had hitherto never even suspected. And the obvious first step for the Saint had been to go out and find that yacht, the more so as he had also been told about Charles Tatenor’s twice-yearly disappearances followed by periods of evident renewed solvency. Fairly obviously, there might well be a link between the Phoenix and those regular and lucrative vanishing acts.

The immediate problem now was to locate the Phoenix. And that was a task which the harbourmaster’s negative news did nothing to simplify.

Simon Templar’s mind was thoughtfully absorbed with this new and unforeseen problem as he made his way back to the hotel, and he had parked his car and almost reached the hotel entrance before he saw Arabella’s MG. It was at the kerbside behind a police car, and Arabella herself was standing beside it looking decidedly fetching in some of her new clothes. She was not alone; there were three men with her. One was instantly recognisable as a uniformed policeman, and the other two were just as instantly recognisable as plainclothes policemen. The taller of these possessed a shock of white hair and the shorter an air of relative seniority. Some photographs were spread out on the low roof of Arabella’s car, and the senior-looking policeman was speaking.

“... and all of these five men, Madame, including your husband, were involved in the theft of valuable cargo passing from Marseille to Morocco...”

“About five million dollars’ worth of gold bars, wasn’t it?” said the Saint chattily as he ambled up to join the group.

The speaker turned, and looked at Simon with almost transparent fishlike grey-green eyes in a face that was alert yet slightly pudgy. His mouth had that peculiarly Gallic impassivity which, it is said, is conferred only by long years of drinking pastis and pretending to like it.

“I am Inspector Gerard Lebec,” he said rapidly. “And you — you would be Monsieur Simon Templar — who has travelled here with this lady to find that gold.”

“No!” Arabella protested. “We didn’t even travel together. And we don’t know about any gold. At least, I don’t...”

Her voice trailed off, and Lebec pounced on the note of uncertainty.

“You perhaps do not, Madame. But Mr Templar knows — oh yes, he knows! Are you aware, Madame Tatenor, that there was a sixth man in the stealing of that gold?”

Arabella shook her head slowly.

“I didn’t even know there were five... I mean until recently I’d never heard of the robbery at all.”

“Ah, but yes.” Lebec turned the cold transparent eyes on the Saint again while continuing to address his remarks ostensibly to Arabella. “He was, it is said, a man working on the Moroccan side, and known only to your husband.”

“Yes, Inspector,” Simon said with good-humoured patience. “I have been to Morocco.”

“And would it not be this man number six,” Lebec persisted, “who murdered your husband at the boat race... supposing it to have been murder?”

“Yes, Inspector,” the Saint put in, “I was in that boat race.”

Arabella glanced from Simon to Lebec and back to Simon.

“This is nonsense — isn’t it?” she said to Simon. And then to Lebec: “I happen to admire and trust Mr Templar very much... At least, I think I do.”

Lebec’s lips curled in contempt, as again he looked at Simon but spoke to Arabella.

“Your own Scotland Yard does not share your confidence. Nor do we, nor Interpol nor half the police forces of the world.”

Simon smiled his most impudent police-baiting smile.

“With my first conviction coming here and now, I take it?”

At that Lebec’s manner froze over completely. He made a point of bowing curtly to Arabella and not looking further at the Saint.

“I may wish to interview you again,” he told her. “Meanwhile you will both please not to depart Marseille without my permission. Au revoir, Madame.”

He gestured to his tall white-haired colleague and the uniformed man with a crisp “Allons” and they drove off in the police car, leaving Arabella looking decidedly thoughtful.

It was clear that Lebec’s words had refuelled her uncertainties, if not exactly suspicions, about the Saint’s own interest in the affair of the gold — which, infuriatingly to her, everyone seemed to know about with the exception of herself.

She told him that the police had found her car abandoned on the main road outside the village, and that the papers they found in it had eventually enabled them to trace her through the hotel registration. Then she asked, almost absent-mindedly:

“Did you find the Phoenix?”

Simon told her the harbourmaster’s bad news. But it had less impact on her than expected. She had been through enough of a shock to her way of life recently, he supposed; she was almost resigned to expecting that things would go wrong at every turn.

“But it has to be there,” she said without much conviction. “I mean, that’s the only reason I’m... Anyway, how do you know all about the bullion and these men, and Charles, and all?”

“I have a friend in high places,” he said. “And that’s the truth.”

Later, more from a need of breathing-space than in any positive hope of locating the elusive Phoenix, they wandered along by the magnificent private-yacht harbour in the dying sunshine of a matchless September evening.

“I don’t even know what she looks like,” Arabella lamented. “It seems quite hopeless, doesn’t it? Anyway, we can surely believe the harbourmaster if he says she’s not here. Or is he involved too?” She eyed the Saint quizzically. “Maybe you think he’s the sixth man.”

“Stranger things have happened,” said the Saint, whose thoughts at the time, if the truth be told, were mostly preoccupied with the logistics of making himself and Arabella vanish at the right moment from the sight of the tall white-haired shadow who had been lurking at a not quite discreet enough distance behind them since the start of the evening’s expedition.

It was not that Simon Templar had any immediate plans to get up to anything nefarious, or which he would otherwise not wish Inspector Lebec or one of Lebec’s men to observe. But the Saint did have a rooted dislike of being followed about.

Doubtless there exists, in some shadier nook or cranny of Whitehall’s less public departments, or their equivalents in other countries, an official but restricted manual codifying the various available manoeuvres for shaking off a professional shadow; and it may be that item 17.3 b/l therein treats of the timely interposition of visually obstructive obstacles and of making a rapid alteration of pedestrian course under cover of such an obstacle. But to the Saint’s thought processes, which dealt with the world in as direct and tangible a way as they could, it was a simple, enjoyable and uncluttered matter. You waited till something got in the way between you and the shadow, and then you dodged off niftily in the opposite direction. Ideally, to complete the enjoyment you then found a vantage point from which you could watch the shadow stumble around scratching his head, wondering where on earth you had vanished to.

In this instance, a longish sailing-craft which was being slowly pushed along the wharf on a dray supplied the obstacle. Simon chose his moment to place himself and Arabella on the opposite side of it from the white-haired detective, and then he cut rapidly back, dragging her into a narrow alleyway between wharf-side yacht chandleries, and thence via some steps to a tiny buvette, from a back window of which they had a good but discreet view below, and they watched Lebec’s man as he figuratively, if not actually, scratched his head for a while before he finally gave up and went away.

Later that night, after a leisurely dinner, they still had to admit that they were no farther forward with the problem of locating the Phoenix. As there seemed nothing constructive to do for the moment, a look at the nightlife, with some appropriate unwinding, seemed as good an idea as any. No doubt they would have the white-haired detective or his replacement trailing along behind; but that at least offered the optional entertainment of shaking him off again if all else proved tedious; though it might not be so easy next time. They drove to the Club Bidou, which was recommended by the hotel’s friendly reception staff.

Named after a traditional provencal bar-counter dice game, it was a drink-and-dance club where the decor was based on mirrors repeating every image to infinity, the style was excuse-me, and the table cloths were symbolically green-baize plastic. At the entrance there were shelves full of semitrans-parent plastic cubes with dice markings, large enough to fit over a reveller’s head and be kept in place by wire clips inside, providing complete anonymity from the neck up. Thus, unexpectedly, Simon Templar became for a time a blue “six” and Arabella a pink “three”.

Two drinks later, they were enjoying some energetic dancing when abruptly the music changed to a samba, and a buxom red “two” tapped the Saint on the shoulder and danced away with him. While he was trying to disengage himself with reasonable civility, Arabella found herself grabbed by a green “five.” She could see little of him in the dim lighting, but what was visible of his dark clothing below the mask made her uneasy, for no reason she could immediately put her finger on.

Then, as they moved around and the light glanced on his torso, she stifled a gasp. He was wearing a black shirt, open almost to the waist, and on his chest a gold chain glinted as it caught the light.

The green cube leaned close.

“Where is the gold?” hissed Bernadotti’s voice.

He tilted back his mask-helmet and stared hard at her in the half-light. The wolfish white teeth flashed briefly. She wrenched herself away, tried to run — only to find her way barred by a grotesque Tweedledum figure.

“Where is the gold?” whispered Descartes, raising his mask.

She turned to run the other way — and was promptly grabbed by a shorter man who tilted his cube to reveal the blubbery lips of Pancho Gomez. Frenzied, she somehow managed to tear herself from the nightmarish trio, who were trying to hem her in.

She slipped away under the outstretched arm of Bernadotti and almost threw herself upon a nearby blue “six.”

“Simon! Simon it’s them! They’re here!” The “six” said nothing, but leaned heavily against her.

“Simon, did you hear me? It’s...” Her voice tailed away as the “six” slumped forward, revealing a slim dagger buried between his shoulderblades.

2

Arabella gasped and jumped back. The “six” crashed to the ground and lay still. The dancers spread back, clearing a space around the fallen man. The music came, it seemed unwillingly, to a halt.

Then someone bent down and took off the “six” helmet. It was not the Saint. It was the white-haired detective. That was too much for Arabella. She fainted dead away — only to be deftly caught by a man who had pushed through the crowd from behind. He raised his “six” cube. It was the Saint. He patted her face to revive her, at the same time gazing intently around the room.

One of the dancers, a man, was sliding around the back of the crowd, making quietly for the exit.

Arabella opened her eyes.

“Welcome back,” Simon said as, supporting her, he hustled her after the man.

“Simon — I thought it was you!” she said weakly.

He nodded grimly.

“So did someone else.”

As they emerged into the street, a small blue van was just moving off some twenty or thirty yards away. In the available light it was impossible to get any view of the driver’s face, but within seconds they were following in the Hirondel.

The driver of the van had just a fraction too much of a start: he made turn after rapid turn, down ever narrower side-streets — a type of driving in which a car the size of the Hirondel could hardly be at its best, even with the formidable skill of a Simon Templar behind the wheel. Inevitably, there came a time when Simon had to come to a screeching halt for a party of inebriates crossing the road just after the van had sped around a corner ahead of them and out of sight; and then they lost it.

Simon drove on for a while, filling the air with half-silent objurgations. All he had left that was worth trying was to continue, not very hopefully, in the same rough general direction the van had taken so far. Working on that admittedly hit-or-miss principle, in due course they emerged into a wider street, a dimly lit dock service road of some kind. He drove on slowly for a minute or two, peering into the pools of darkness on either side. He was about to give it up as a bad job when Arabella suddenly tugged at his sleeve.

“Simon — look!”

He looked where she was pointing. In the light of the half-moon, they could just make out the shape of a small van, parked in a narrow side street alongside a high dock wall.

They got out, and approached the van cautiously. It was blue, and the engine felt warm, but nobody was inside. They looked around, their eyes becoming accustomed to the dark. On one side of the narrow bend was some waste ground strewn with rubble; on the other, the high dock fence, unbroken by any gate or opening, as far as could be seen. Then Simon spotted what might, at a stretch, have been called an opening — just a narrow vertical slot where one plank was missing.

He tested an adjacent plank and found it loose. He took it out, and they squeezed silently through the gap. Once through, they paused on the other side of the fence, listening. Ahead of them, nothing; behind, only a couple of car engines playing their gearbox tunes somewhere on the night air.

Simon led the way as they advanced stealthily down a path which in due course took them to a gap between two warehouse-like buildings. His acute hearing picked up a faint shuffling sound, and what might have been humming, from some distance ahead; and it was because he was concentrating on that more distant sound, and trying to analyse it, that he almost missed the nearer one until it was too late.

Near the gap between the two buildings was a pile of crates, just visible in the moonlight, and it was from the upper area of this heap of crates that the scraping, creaking sound came. A half second later, a huge crate came crashing down, almost on top of him. It was only that preliminary creaking, as the crate teetered on the brink before it fell, that saved him. It gave him the split second that was all his highly tuned reflexes needed, and he sprang back, and suffered nothing worse than a bruised toe as the big crate jarred against his foot on its way down.

For long moments the Saint stood stock still, and Arabella did likewise, while they listened for any sound following that tremendous crash. But they heard nothing from the immediate vicinity — only, from time to time, the strange shuffling and humming, or crooning, from some distance ahead, that Simon had heard before.

They went on warily, skirting the fallen crate, then passing between the buildings and circumnavigating various pieces of heavy marine equipment and fittings. The sounds were louder now, and there could be no doubt that the crooning, or babbling, was human. It was therefore no real surprise when, a little while after, as they neared a dark corrugated iron fence, the shuffling materialised out of the darkness as a man-shaped apparition that sang, if that is the word:

The confused singing trailed off into muttered unintelligible cursing as the man came to a shambling halt at the corrugated iron fence. For a minute or so he seemed at a loss to know what to make of the obstacle. Then a brilliant idea seemed to strike him, and he steadied himself against the fence with one hand while the other fumbled with something that jangled like a bunch of keys, that defeated his befuddled fingers for another minute or so. Then he apparently managed to select a key and, after further painfully protracted endeavours, opened a flush-fitting door in the fence. He lurched through, with the Saint and Arabella following at a distance. They saw him pause and take a long swig from a king-sized hip-flask. There followed an audible smacking of the lips, after which the slurred travesty of singing was resumed.

As the man stumbled on into the gloom, Simon and Arabella both pulled up dead at the same instant.

There on the left, looming above them, were the gleaming white bows of a luxury yacht. Even in that limited moonlight, the large gilt lettering of the name on her bow was unmistakable.

It was the Phoenix.

“Dry dock!” Simon said softly. “No wonder we couldn’t find her!”

“But she’s beautiful!” Arabella exclaimed in wonderment. There was a sudden rustle of sound behind them, and the Saint whirled as Inspector Lebec stepped through the doorway in the fence.

“She is indeed beautiful,” he agreed crisply. “But it may be many years, unfortunately, before either of you will be at liberty to enjoy her. Which should at least put an end to the activities of Monsieur Simon Templar!”

Lebec had an automatic levelled, and the two detectives who followed close behind him were similarly equipped, and appeared similarly in earnest.

“Hands raised!” Lebec commanded tautly. “Up! Behind the neck!”

They complied slowly, Simon sighing in-audibly as he did so at Lebec’s having so quickly lived up to his earlier promised nuisance value.

“May I enquire, Inspector,” he asked lazily, “what crime we are supposed to have committed? Is my car parked on a blue line, perhaps?”

“You are both under arrest for the murder of a police officer at the Club Bidou one half hour ago,” said Inspector Lebec.

3

The Marseille police headquarters building in those days was a monolithic grey-stone structure of undistinguished frontage. From the outside, the cells could be identified from their windows, which were smaller than the others and fitted with bars in the time-honoured fashion. There was, in short, nothing outwardly remarkable about the building, as police headquarters go. Nevertheless it had just earned a coveted distinction which few other such establishments had yet managed to achieve, despite keen international competition for the honour.

One of its cells had just housed Simon Templar overnight.

It was a point of pride with the Saint, as well as a mark of his care, foresight and resourcefulness, that he had never yet been convicted of any criminal offence in any country. Over the years, he had grown used to the efforts of zealous and overzealous policemen, most of whom dreamed of rectifying the omission and yearned obsessively to shut the notorious Saint away behind bars for a good long stretch. Every so often, one would manage to detain him for a while on some tenuous ground which owed more to desperate policemanly optimism than to any hard evidence of law-breaking on the part of the Saint. That Simon Templar frequently broke the law is, in a chronicle of strict truth, undeniable; but the circumstances in which he broke it, and his choice of victims upon whom to visit his sometimes violent notions of poetic justice, were such that no hard evidence could be mustered as a basis for holding him.

However, there were admittedly times when Simon Templar lost patience with the petty authoritarian behavior of some idiotic sergeant or inspector; and those were the occasions when he sometimes yielded to the temptation to pull strings in order to speed up his inevitable release. He had his powerful friends and contacts even in certain police forces around the world. For there had been times, and would continue to be times, when the aims of the Saint and those of the law were not incompatible; and many a police officer had cause to be grateful for Simon Templar’s timely intervention.

One such contact came to mind on this occasion. He was Pierre Duport, a high-ranking officer of the Sûreté in Nice, whose name was respected in police circles the length of the Riviera. Duport owed him at least a small favour in return for the Saint’s part, two years before, in the affair of a certain Corsican chemist found trussed up like a turkey outside Duport’s office, his shaven head branded indelibly with the descriptive words marchand de stupefiants.

But the Saint had hesitated — knowing Duport’s nocturnal inclinations — to attempt to trace him at two in the morning. Judging from Lebec’s manner, a night in the cells was in any case a certainty, come what might, for both him and Arabella.

In the morning, and before any formal charges had been laid, he had no hesitation in claiming his right to a telephone call and in using it to make contact with Duport. He outlined the problem tersely, and Duport immediately undertook to telephone Lebec’s superiors and explain to them in the strongest as well as the simplest terms that Monsieur Simon Templar, whatever else he might have done in his unorthodox life, did not kill policemen on such slender acquaintance.

The call must have had its effect; for less than an hour later the two of them were brought before a strangely subdued Lebec.

“I am very sorry your man is dead, Inspector,” Simon told him. “Unfortunately he was wearing a mask identical to mine, and we’re of similar height. Obviously someone thought he was me.”

“Indeed?” Lebec said without conviction. He returned to his previous practice of addressing himself primarily to Arabella. “Whether Monsieur Templar was the target intended, is perhaps open for debate, which I do not propose to enter. It is enough that there is confirmation of your story from several of the other dancers. Nobody observed the stabbing.” Lebec sniffed disdainfully, as if utterly unwilling to be convinced himself by what he was saying. “Therefore, nobody saw who wielded the knife. Therefore, I must release you both.” He bowed slightly to Arabella. “In your case, Madame, it is a pleasure. In the case of Monsieur Templar, a great regret.”

“I love you too, Gerard,” said the Saint.

Lebec got up from his chair and moved around on the desk to sit, less formally, on its edge.

“Madame — a few words of friendly advice. Already you have spent a night in the police cell. I regret any discomfort — which, I suggest, you would not have risked but for travelling with this notorious criminal Templar. Be very careful with this man, Madame. I have told you of the gold robbery — and of the sixth man. Your husband alone knew his identity.”

“Inspector Lebec,” Arabella said loyally. “I think you ought to stop intimating that Simon is that man.”

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Simon put in with a brief baring of the teeth. “That’s one I owe you. Don’t let me forget it.”

“But I put it to you, Madame,” Lebec persisted, “that if he is the sixth man, he will be as merciless with you as with the other three survivors who already seek the gold.”

Simon yawned elaborately and twiddled his thumbs.

“May we please go, Inspector? It really is very boring in here. Something to do with the conversation.”

Lebec nodded stiffly and showed them out, though not without repeating his earlier instruction that they were to report to him before leaving Marseille.

There was no need for them to discuss where they were going. Only breakfast might have stood between them and an exploration of the Phoenix; and breakfast, of a kind, they had been given at the police station.

One of Lebec’s men had nervously driven the Hirondel over from the dock area where it had been left, and now the Saint drove back there and found the orthodox entrance to the dry dock where they had seen the Phoenix.

During the drive, he was conscious of some sidelong and quizzical glances from his passenger. Lebec’s words, it seemed, had re-watered the small seed of doubt which had already threatened to burgeon into fullblown mistrust once before, after their first meeting with the Inspector. Arabella was turning over past events in her mind, comparing what she knew of Simon from personal acquaintance — in truth not a great deal — with the scenario Lebec had implied. But Simon said nothing; he knew that Arabella would surface with her own conclusions or questions, or challenges, when she was good and ready, and it would have gained him nothing to have broached the matter again himself there and then.

The Phoenix, to Arabella’s delight, was exactly as they had seen her. If anything she was even more impressive in daylight. She was a beautiful hundred-footer, her hull and superstructure gleaming with new white paint. For a minute or two Arabella just stood and gawped; then she walked up and down and gawped some more from several different angles for another minute or two. There was no one in sight.

“Well,” she said finally, “what are we waiting for? Let’s go aboard.”

There was silence as they crossed a gangway to the main deck. Simon kept his eyes skinned, and his muscles were alert for instant action. He hadn’t forgotten the fugitive of the night before, he who had driven the van; and neither had he forgotten the strange freak of chance — if that was what it was — that had caused a crate to fall at the very instant when he was about to walk under it.

There was no sign of anyone on deck. They opened the door to the main saloon and went in. It was lavishly appointed, with heavy ornate furniture and an apparently well-stocked bar; but dominating the room was a hugh oil painting on the far wall, a portrait of the familiar face of Charles Tatenor — an almost photographic likeness of the man, complete with yachting cap.

“Cha—” Arabella began in an automatic exclamation, but Simon put his finger to his lips warningly. His acute hearing had picked up the faintest susurration from somewhere within the accommodation. He led the way silently through a teak door in the after bulkhead, and then along a short passageway. The noise was louder there, and increased still more as they approached a door marked “Galley” at the end of the passageway.

Suddenly there was a crash from within. The Saint wrenched open the door — and almost tripped over an empty bottle.

It was a bottle that had held Irish whiskey.

And on his knees, and held upright only by the counterweight of one arm slung across the galley stove, was a middle-aged, very Irish-looking, very drunk-looking, dishevelled and unshaven man, who had yet managed somehow, through all that, to keep his gold-braided cap on.

“... second thoughts, I think I’ll rest in me cabin,” he muttered; and the voice was instantly recognisable as that of the tipsy crooner from the night before. He was now, if anything, drunker than he had been then. Even as they watched, his eyes glazed and he toppled over on his face.

Arabella looked at Simon, then at the inert figure, which had begun to snore, then back at Simon.

“What are we going to do with him?”

“I suppose,” Simon mused, “we’d better have a shot at bringing him round, so that we can try to figure out who he is and what he’s doing here. Do you suppose there’s any coffee in the place that isn’t eighty proof?”

It took an hour of repeated cold-water treatments, after the Saint had heaved him into a chair, before the man recovered enough to make any semblance of sense. Now half-awake, he spluttered through the black coffee that Arabella was pouring determinedly into his unwilling mouth.

“Every drop of it, Captain,” said the Saint, who had been thumbing through the ship’s log. “I take it you are what’s left of Captain William Finnegan?”

“Wha—...? How...? Who...? Where...?” He glowered at Simon. “None of your damn business. Get off me ship, the pair of yous.”

He grimaced at the taste of the coffee and clamped his jaws firmly shut against any further incursions of the vile non-alcoholic liquor.

To Arabella, the Saint said: “You can pour that coffee in or on him.” And to Finnegan. “Your choice, Cap’n. Now — we followed someone here last night driving a blue van. Do you drive a blue van?”

Finnegan tried unsteadily to rise to his feet. He was a big burly man, his dark hair flecked with grey, his eyes bloodshot.

“I’ll drive you right over the side, you—”

He never completed the appellation, because at that moment Arabella calmly poured most of a cup of hot coffee over his head. Finnegan howled and spluttered in inebriate rage, then sank back in his seat and stared up at Arabella with a kind of awestruck respect. She returned the stare with innocent aplomb. Finnegan continued, with an intermittent half-fearful glance in her direction.

“A van? I couldn’ta navigated a pram last night. I was after goin’ to a little drinkin’ party along the harbour a way, d’ye see.”

“Whose party?” Simon queried.

“Old Michael — Michael Jardine, the chandler fella. He’s the one stocked me up for the cruise. Only...”

“What about the cruise?”

“Aw — it’s off now. The owner died, you know. Mr Charles. Mr Charles Tatenor.”

“Go on.”

“Well — sure and I’m jest waitin’ for me instructions now. The lawyers, y’know.” He shook his head. “Sad business it is. We had some good times, Mr Charles and me. Coupla times a year, sailing away south, cruisin’ and all.”

“And all?” The Saint’s interest had hardened and he came close to fix the still-groggy Finnegan with a firm cynical eye. “Cruising and what?”

Finnegan took on a dreamy look.

“Cruisin’ and fishin’ — and kissin’ the girls. Great feller he was.”

“A couple of times a year, you say. Where did you go on these trips?”

“Kissing what girls?” Arabella put in before Finnegan could get focused on the Saint’s question.

“First stop was always Corsica. Same little bay, every time. Gem of an island, that.”

“What girls?” Arabella shouted; and Finnegan jumped up out of the chair in such alarm that he moved with almost sober alacrity.

“The woman’s mad, I tell you, mad. Get her off me ship this very minute!”

“Actually, Captain,” Simon told him, “it’s her ship. Captain Finnegan — Mrs Charles Tatenor.”

Finnegan digested this in stunned silence for a long minute. Then he got up, went close to her and inspected her at close quarters, with evident approval. Then he finally broke out with a broad grin, as if at a long-lost daughter.

“Well, if that isn’t...! Well, now! Mrs Charles indeed! And a fine tough-minded woman you are, m’dear.” An even broader grin now split his stubbed face from ear to ear. He extended his hand and pumped hers warmly.

“Captain,” said the Saint. “The logbook says the drydock work’s completed. How soon can you have her in the water?”

Finnegan was still concentrating his attention on Arabella, now with a warm and admiring deference.

“Missus,” he said in reply to Simon’s question, “you gimme t’ree hours after you pay them bloodsucking drydock book accountants, and I’ll have her bobbin’ on the waves.

After I pay—” Arabella gasped.

“Dry-dock charges will be paid today, Captain,” Simon told him calmly.

“They will?” said Arabella.

“We want to be under way by late afternoon. On the same course you would have taken with Charles Tatenor.”

4

When the Saint got back to the hotel that afternoon, he found Arabella with her red leather suitcase and matching vanity bag packed and waiting alongside his own luggage which he had seen to earlier.

He brandished a receipted bill.

“The Phoenix’ll be ready when we are.”

She eyed the receipt, moved up close to take it from him — and pecked him on the cheek.

“Simon,” she said seriously, “it’s incredibly generous of you to—” Her eyes grew wide and round as she read the amount. “Good Lord! Did they fix it or line it with— bullion? You paid this?”

Simon submitted to another kiss without protest.

“Be careful,” he told her. “I might get a taste for it... Your solicitor told you that Charles paid his bills after walking in with great lumps of money twice a year. Well, twice a year he took the Phoenix out with Finnegan. So, we go where they went.”

Arabella looked again at the bill.

“But at these prices — why, you have to be either very rich or... hoping to get very rich.”

“I was hoping for a little sea air, actually,” Simon told her innocently. And that light of Saintly mockery she had seen before glinted in his eyes again as he reached down for her luggage.

Arabella stopped him, and searched his features for a few moments with an intent seriousness.

“Simon, were you that sixth man? You could have been.”

“I could,” said the Saint. “But I wasn’t.”

“But it’s the way you live, the way you’ve lived for a long time, isn’t it? A gold bullion robbery — it’s something you easily could have been involved with. And don’t tell me you never worked with others. You used to have — a sort of gang, once, so I read.”

Simon laughed gently.

“Yes, but those were other days, and that was another Simon Templar.” For a moment the eyes of the maturer Simon Templar were clouded with recollections of those vanished years. “That was a long time ago,” he told her.

“Well, if you’re not the sixth man, why can’t you take me, and Inspector Lebec for that matter, into your confidence...? Well, okay, I guess I can see why you hold out on him. But I have a feeling you’re holding out on me too, damn it. You held out on me back on the island. Simon, I’ve trusted you. I am trusting you, or trying to.” She looked levelly at him. “Why can’t you trust me?”

“Because,” said the Saint, leaning closer and closer as she finished speaking, “you have... very... shifty eyes.”

And being now well within the accepted distance for such things, he kissed her gently.

Flippancy was the response that arose in him most immediately and automatically in the face of a question he was instinctively reluctant to explore in any serious depth. Had he been analytically inclined in these matters, Simon Templar might have had to confess to himself that perhaps he had needed to maintain some space between the two of them, figuratively speaking, because the simple fact was that she had affected him more than any other woman he had met in a long time; and the Saint was, by established professional habit, wary of any involvement that might carry even a hint of jeopardising the “free” in his freebootery.

He had not worked it out in so many words in the case of Arabella, but the fact was that freedom was an inseparable element of his life and character. He had been his own unique globetrotting blend of pirate and adventurer for enough years now to know that he would go on in the same freewheeling ways as long as there was still strength in his body and a new vista of ungodliness over the next hill.

That was how it was with the Saint, just as for others life might be inconceivable except as a doctor or chartered accountant or in any of a thousand other worthy and stable roles. The Saint saw the necessity for these, and was grateful that others wanted to occupy themselves thus, and to lead conventional and settled lives, leaving him to live out his own notions of buccaneering chivalry and justice for as long as it pleased him; to ride the high winds of adventure, changing little with the seasons or the years; here and there dipping into new valleys, fighting new battles, or fighting again the old ones under new skies; but always, and above all, remaining free.

He had the potential to settle to a humdrum existence like any other man; but it remained a potential, like that of a winged seed staying always aloft.

Those who had worked with him, that select handful of men, and one woman, who had shared his ideals all those long years ago — his “gang” as Arabella had called them — they had once been the same, and had floated as free. But one by one, when their time had come, they had ceased to float, and had dropped to the ground, and put down roots, and settled.

Once, such a precarious and fateful time of choice had come for Simon Templar also, when he found himself poised in the air, becalmed; and it was with a great emptiness, at the time, that he had chosen as he knew he had been fated to choose from the beginning, and had watched as the person for whom he would have given up anything but his destiny, and who understood that as well as he did himself, went on her golden way.

And so he had continued to follow his own star as the years had rolled on; and if he had his way he would be doing so still in as many more years hence. It seemed as likely that the earth might stop, as that there would one day cease to be villains abroad and booty to be won — or, as in the present case, bullion to be grabbed, if the gods were willing, from under the noses of the villains.

And it was because of all this, which was unspoken, that the Saint had covered a hiatus with a flippant comment, and had kissed Arabella Tatenor before picking up her luggage and taking it out of the hotel with his own.

They were met by Finnegan as they boarded the Phoenix. But this was a very different Finnegan from the one they had seen before. Here was a tough old sea-dog — flinty-eyed, observant, exuding competence from the peaked cap down. His expression was serious and businesslike.

“Welcome aboard to you both.” He shook hands warmly with them. “Got no other hands for you, though.”

The Saint nodded. At such short notice, they could hardly have expected otherwise.

“We’ll have to crew her between us, then. As you and Mr Tatenor used to do. Start her up, Cap’n. I’ll be your deckhand, and let’s hope Mrs Tatenor is a good cook.”

As Finnegan headed for the wheelhouse, Simon left the suitcases on deck and moved to the anchor winch.

In a few minutes they were under way, and he rejoined Arabella and picked up the bags.

“Right. Let’s get settled in.”

They were too far from Finnegan, at his station in the wheelhouse, to see his grim and unsmiling face as he watched them head for the yacht’s main saloon. But as soon as they opened the door of the saloon, they met the cause of that grim expression.

They stopped short in the doorway.

There in front of them, sitting comfortably with iced drinks at their elbows, were Jacques Descartes and Enrico Bernadotti.