Salvage for the Saint

1

Simon Templar swam head-first into the cabin below; and he would have been the first to admit that the hands with which he began to scrape at the sand had lost some of their accustomed steadiness.

Almost as soon as his fingers began to burrow, they came up against something more solid. He pushed some of the sand aside, and shone the light full on the area he had partially cleared.

And between the grains of sands he saw the fabulous glistening gleam of gold.

He scraped some more sand away; and almost in a dream he saw them. Brick upon brick, or bar upon bar — the terminology was the least important thing at that moment — they were piled up inside the sunken launch, under that mere sprinkling of sand.

And even though the Saint had been at least half expecting it, still the actual discovery of all that gold was a wonder and a marvel now that it lay there before him in tangible reality. Its permanent brightness had always been the prime attraction of that malleable yellow metal upon which the fates of nations had risen and fallen. Too soft to share many practical uses with humbler metals, it had become sought after not only for its rarity but also for that very chemical inertness which had preserved the hoard under his hands from the normally corrosive sea.

No naturally occurring substance will make so much as a chemical dent in gold: that is why, almost alone among metals, it is found in the free state as gleaming nuggets or dust of the pure element. Only aqua regia, a mixture of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids in the “royal” proportions, can attack it. And that is why gold has been so prized by almost every civilisation and pre-civilised society that ever was.

In every country where it has been found, people had made religious artefacts from it. They had fashioned art and jewellery of it; craftsmen had given their lives to working with it; armies had been raised for it, wars started for it and stopped for it. Loves were traditionally sealed with it; it was the bedrock of currencies and economies; generations of men and women had schemed and lied and cheated and stolen and killed for it.

And Simon Templar was looking at maybe eight million dollars’ worth of it at current values.

It was not the first gold he had seen in bulk, and if the fates gave him half a chance it would not be the last. There had even been a time, years before, when he had gazed upon another underwater hoard of gold, and had played his part in bringing it to the surface, and finally in consigning its possessor to the deep in its place. But that was another adventure, one that had passed into memory with so much else; and this was a new sea, and there were new villains to do battle with, and a new heroine, and the gold of here and now.

He lifted one of the ingots to test its underwater weight, and then he let it fall back.

It was not easy to heave a deep sigh from within the respiratory encumbrances of a scuba-diving mask, mouthpiece and other paraphernalia. But the Saint, who could do many things that were not easy, managed to heave one, in spirit at least. The sigh that he heaved was profoundly heartfelt, the sigh of a man deliciously tantalised, a sigh of high aspiration and rich romantic yearning. To be confronted with such a splendiferous superabundance of boodle, which moreover must have been long given up for lost by its rightful owners, and to have no immediately available means of appropriating it for his own use, was almost more than a red-blooded freelance buccaneer could bear. Even such a seasoned practitioner of free-booting as himself, with all his experience of mouthwatering loot in every conceivable form and denomination, could hardly be blase about such a prodigious heap of solid swag as that.

His mind reviewed the situation objectively, once again, as he shifted a few of the ingots to check his estimate of their depth in the cargo hold, and their number.

Up above, Descartes would be waiting — waiting and wondering, with the automatic on his knee and Arabella beside him. Obviously the Saint had to go back to the dinghy, and just as obviously his prudent policy of saving their skins for as long as possible would dictate that he tell Descartes about the gold, even if not all about it...

He spent only a short while longer inside the boat; then, leaving the hatch open, he glided back and upwards through the lightening green, to break surface beside the dinghy. As he climbed aboard, blinking at the glare of the sun and pushing back his face-mask, Descartes leaned forward eagerly, with the automatic held loosely in his hand.

“Anything?”

Simon slipped out of the tanks, and took off his flippers expressionlessly.

“Well?” Arabella insisted.

Simon towelled calmly, as if he had just returned from a purely recreational swim.

“Well?” Descartes demanded. “Is it down there?”

In reply the Saint picked up an orange marker-buoy and dropped it overboard, throwing its anchor after it.

Descartes’ eyes widened with delighted realisation.

“Yes? Is it really there? The gold is there?”

“I’d say a good four, maybe five million dollars’ worth.” The Saint halved his own estimate with a straight face. “It’s certainly going to mean a fortune for somebody.”

“Magnifique!”

Simon looked steadily at him.

“We’re in luck, aren’t we, partner.”

Descartes hesitated; and then a broad and cunning smile, rich with gold of its own, spread across his face.

“Well done — partner,” he agreed.

The Saint was under no illusions about that, of course. He was quite sure that Descartes was going along with the implications of partnership for one reason only, which was a simple and practical one. The gold was still at the bottom of the sea, and the physical task of bringing it up remained. Whatever system they might manage to rig for getting it aboard, a diver would be needed. It might take a dozen dives or more; but somebody would have to go down there. And that somebody was certainly not going to be Jacques Descartes.

And once again, it suited the Saint to be useful.

He stood up and stretched.

“Well,” he said, “why don’t we go and fetch the Phoenix — and get to work?”

There was no dissent to that suggestion; and as he started up the dinghy and turned it around to head back the way they had come, he told them briefly about the sunken boat.

“One of those coastguard shells must have hit it,” he said. “The boat must have been sinking as he came around the headland here.”

“The luck of the man!” Descartes exclaimed. “He could have done it no better if he had planned it. To finish with such a cache which only he could find again!”

The Saint nodded.

“It was perfect. And the gold he left there was even earning a dividend, in a way.”

“A dividend? How do you mean?” Arabella’s brow creased.

“The value of gold fluctuates,” Simon said. “But it’s usually risen in the long run, and by more than the cost of living. So in real terms the gold he kept was an appreciating asset, year by year.”

Descartes leaned over with narrowed eyes, and tugged reflectively at his moustache.

“Then how does it happen, Monsieur Templar,” he said with a slow intentness of curiosity, “that the gold was worth five million dollars eleven years ago, and is now, according to your estimate, worth less?”

“That’s easy,” said the Saint, without batting an eyelid. “Our Karl was spending it. Maybe he was greedy. Or maybe he took a risk in the beginning, and cashed a big slice of it in, right away. Maybe he’s got a few million stashed away in numbered Swiss bank accounts that we’ll never know about. Maybe he did keep it all as gold, but moved some elsewhere. Maybe he was nervous about keeping all his golden eggs in one basket. Maybe—”

The Saint’s glibly assured string of “maybes” stopped in mid-air, not because his fertile brain had run out of postulated reasons why the quality of gold eventually brought up might be less by a hefty margin than Descartes might like, but because, as they approached the headland, they had just caught sight of the Phoenix coming around it towards them.

“Enrico, the fool! What is that suspicious idiot doing?” Descartes shouted.

He glared, jumped up off-centre in the dinghy, and again very nearly capsized it. For a moment he teetered comically, and then he sat heavily down.

The Phoenix was perhaps three or four hundred yards away and making good speed as she came towards them. Descartes had gone as red as the proverbial lobster at the thought that Bernadotti had taken it upon himself to bring the Phoenix around the point ahead of time, or had had Finnegan do it, in defiance of his instructions; but to Simon it seemed a fairly unimportant piece of self-assertion. Within seconds, he had adjusted his mind to the minor change of plan, and it was in that adaptive frame of mind that he throttled back the engine of the dinghy and began a leisurely turn to retrace their tracks towards the orange marker, which was presumably the yacht’s destination also, now that it was within sight. As he did so, he let his mind dwell on the practical task ahead. He had already assessed the number of gold bars — weighing exactly one kilogram each on dry land — that lay down there in the cargo hold under the sea; and now he occupied himself for a few seconds with some mental arithmetic.

There had been many moments in his adventure-crammed life when he had smelt danger ahead of time — when some seventh sense had tipped him off while there was yet a tissue-thin margin of milliseconds remaining — before the ground fell away as a sheer cliff-edge, or the bomb burst, or someone squeezed a trigger behind him or opened a trap-door to oblivion in front of him. But there were also times when, since he was human too, that early-warning system simply failed to operate — or operated only in the very last scintilla of time, when there was no space for considered action or decision, but only the autonomic “flight or fight” reaction of instinct to a threat too sudden to allow the intervention of anything as slow as thought.

And it was something like that for Simon Templar now, as his mind busied itself with thoughts of the gold bars awaiting collection, and of the means to be employed for that collection and of the number of dives he might have to make... while the Phoenix turned slightly so as to continue bearing down directly on the small rubber dinghy.

He had her in his field of vision the whole time, but his full attention was aroused only when Descartes and Arabella let out strangled yells at the same moment; and then the bows of the Phoenix were almost upon them.

Before he realised what he had done, Simon had grabbed Arabella’s hand and yanked her over the side with him in a double dive that took them some five feet under.

They surfaced, with Arabella spluttering and coughing from the water she had inhaled, and looked around. The Phoenix had tossed the little dinghy aside like a cork, and they could see it still bobbing about, now upside down on the sea, but holed and sinking fast, as the yacht continued on her course. But of Descartes there was no sign.

Simon duck-dived as the stern of the Phoenix passed them, perhaps twenty feet away. And under the waves he saw the great gross form of Jacques Descartes being drawn inexorably into the churning propellers.

There was absolutely nothing that anyone could have done at this point. Simon surfaced again and waited for Descartes’ body to appear, which it did after a few seconds, with a blood-red stain spreading around it, as the Phoenix ploughed on away from them.

2

Whatever else this new and totally unforseen development might mean, for the Saint and Arabella it certainly meant that their business with Jacques Descartes had been concluded in the most dramatic and final way possible. But it was by no means clear to either of them that their new situation represented an improvement over the uneasy bond of necessity which they — or at any rate Simon on behalf of them both — had had with the not totally dislikeable Frenchman whose gross and mangled body now floated belly-down on the surface of the sea.

Whoever was at the helm of the Phoenix had inexorably staked his own claim to the gold, and had demonstrated at the same time, with the chilling clarity of ice, his attitude to any competing claims. He had simply and efficiently mown the three of them down; and that he had not bothered to stop to see whether they were alive or dead was evidence of a singlemindedness which made even Simon Templar catch his breath.

It had not escaped him, however, that he was lucky to have breath to catch, after having allowed himself to be caught so thoroughly off his guard by the Phoenix on her deliberate collision course. And it had not escaped either him or Arabella that on an immediate practical level the options now open to them were starkly limited. Either they could stay where they were, treading water until they eventually drowned, or they could start swimming for the shore.

They started swimming.

But they had swum no more than a hundred yards when they heard the drumming of another boat’s engines behind them. They turned, and waved and splashed and shouted, but clearly they had already been seen.

The boat was a motor launch bearing the markings of the French coastguard; and as it came towards them they recognised the slightly pudgy form of Inspector Gerard Lebec.

“Thanks,” Simon said as they were helped aboard. “Small world, isn’t it?”

Lebec’s pale green eyes looked expressionlessly at the Saint. He nodded, then barked an order in French to the man at the helm. The man gunned the motor briefly and took the launch around in a tight turn to where the body of Descartes floated on the waves.

After Simon had helped him to fish the body out of the sea and lift it aboard, Lebec said: “So — you receive police hospitality once more, Monsieur Templar.”

“I’ll admit, I never thought I’d be glad to see you, Inspector,” the Saint said easily. “Very lucky, the way you just happened along like that.”

“I have been following behind you since Marseille,” Lebec said shortly, and turned to Arabella. “It was very wise of you, Madame, to telephone me before your departure.”

That was no real surprise to Simon. He had suspected something of the sort as a possibility after he had first observed that they had company; and he had regarded Arabella’s brief foray into private-enterprise distress signalling as more or less clinching evidence.

He cocked a quizzical and challenging eye at her. For a while she tried rather awkwardly and shamefacedly to avoid his direct gaze, but he was remorseless in searching out her eyes; and finally she turned and looked at him defiantly.

“Well — it is lucky he was here to pick us up out of the sea,” she said. “And all I did was follow police instructions by reporting that we were leaving Marseilles.”

The Saint nodded, his thoughts working to accommodate all the new factors that had suddenly entered the picture. Descartes had gone, abruptly; and just as abruptly, Lebec had appeared. And there was now the mystery of the Phoenix, and of who had been at the helm a few minutes ago. But whatever the changes in principal actors, there was one central focus of interest in that picture, and that was what Simon hung on to. Just across the water was a fabulous hoard of gold, lying only forty feet down; and he wanted a good proportion of it to finish up in his own personal coffers.

“Inspector Lebec,” he said pleasantly. “Would you like me to tell you where there’s four million dollars’ worth of gold bars?”

Lebec gestured towards the now stationary Phoenix.

“I think I can guess that, Monsieur Templar.”

The Phoenix lay at anchor, her engines stopped. She was still, silent, and devoid of any sign of life. They had taken a wide circular line in the launch, and approached from her bows, not knowing quite what they might find. The wheelhouse, and the decks, were apparently deserted. At a signal from Lebec the helmsman brought the launch close in alongside.

“There may be some trouble, Madame,” Lebec said. “You will please remain here.” He turned to the Saint. “And you — you will accompany me, Monsieur Templar.”

Simon followed Lebec, making something between a long pace and a short jump from the roof of the launch’s cabin to the deck of the Phoenix.

The Saint could have recalled many occasions in his life when tension-filled minutes had seemed to drag into interminable hours.

Those were the times when he had been most vulnerable, for one reason or another, and the enemy had been at his most inscrutably and dangerously unpredictable. But of all that array of nerve-stretchingly unen-joyable situations, there were few in which he had felt so helplessly, fleshcrawlingly exposed, so wide open to the whim or mercy of someone unknown, as he did now, prowling watchfully around the Phoenix’s decks and accommodation. Lebec was at least armed. The Saint wasn’t; and the comfort that he was able to draw from the presence of an automatic in the detective’s hand was realistically limited compared with the comfort it would have given him to have one in his own... Over and above which, he had reasons enough, from his point of view, for feeling uncomfortable about any degree of personal dependence on Lebec.

Lebec led the way cautiously into the saloon. There was no one there. The wheel-house, likewise, was deserted. So were the staterooms the Saint and Arabella had used. And so was the Captain’s cabin. There was no sign of anybody on board.

“It seems that we have on our hands a ghost ship,” Lebec said.

And then, right on cue as it seemed, they heard a sound which caused the hairs on the back of Simon Templar’s neck to stand up as if in response to the caress of an icy feather.

It was a weird strangled gurgling sound, a plangent wail with all the evil-laden menace of an unseen tomcat sending its persistent yowling threats into the night.

They stood still and listened, Lebec with his automatic poised.

And then the note of the caterwauling changed, and Simon heard in that sound a timbre, a quality of deeper resonance, which he knew he had heard somewhere before. He listened again, with his head on one side. It seemed to be coming from not far away. And as he listened he began to hear some distinguishable component noises, almost like syllables, in that dreadful bloodcurdling wailing. It began to sound, so it seemed to him, something like “Toorooroo-roro — loorarroo...”

Then suddenly it came to him; and with his heart dropping through his stomach with helpless dizzy laughter and relief, he turned the key in the locked door of the storeroom, the only place where they had not looked, and opened the door to reveal, prone among the paint cans and paraffin, one standard pie-eyed Finnegan, complete with bottle. Finnegan sang.

He broke off, squinting vaguely at the Saint and Lebec. Then his eyes rolled happily.

“Good afternoon, Captain,” said the Saint kindly. “No point in asking how you are. We can see you’re very well. But, Captain — somebody locked you in here. Did you see who? Was it Bernadotti?”

He might as well have put the question in Serbo-Croat to a deaf Chinese hedgehog. Finnegan snored blissfully.

Simon and Lebec carried him to his cabin, laid him on his bunk, and went back on deck.

“What now?” asked the Saint. “He didn’t lock himself in there, that’s for sure.”

Lebec stroked his chin thoughtfully for a moment.

“The gold must be recovered. You, as its finder, will qualify for the reward offered by the Government of France. I will support your claim, Monsieur Templar. But I require your services as diver.”

Simon could not have hoped for a better opening.

“Agreed,” he said. “Ten percent?”

The Saint had made a preliminary shallow dive to guide Lebec in bringing the Phoenix as near as possible directly over the sunken hoard, and he was ready to go down and load up for the first time. He had remembered the tough nylon net he had seen in the store room, and had tied it to a strong length of rope in such a way that it could be made secure after loading, so that Lebec, using the spare winch, could bring the loaded net up without risk of spilling any of its contents.

By the Saint’s estimate there were possibly six or seven hundred of the gold ingots to be brought up. That made six or seven hundred kilograms, or getting on for three-quarters of a ton of gold to be retrieved, using a net intended for fishing. There was no point in taking a risk of overloading the net, and Simon judged that sixty bars would be the most they could safely try to bring up in a single load. That meant he would have ten or twelve dives to make.

While he was getting all that exercise, there would be plenty to occupy his mind. As he began to take the net down for the first time, he found himself coming back again to a fantastically improbable notion which he hadn’t yet found a way of entirely dismissing from his thoughts.

It was the notion that Finnegan might not be all that he seemed; that his drunkenness was a pretence and a blind, merely the product of brilliantly convincing acting; that the seemingly innocent Irishman had after all done all those things of which the Saint had previously judged him incapable.

Simon swam down into the sunken cruiser, spread out the net on top of the golden hoard, and began loading it for the first time, with his mind still following that same corridor of thought — or was it a blind alley? Could Finnegan have been the shadowy man in the Bidou Club after all? Had he escaped in the blue van, only to reappear a few minutes later, stumbling about and carolling squiffily? Could Finnegan have “forced the strangulation” of Pancho, as Descartes had put it? And had Finnegan been the man at the helm, perhaps even humming a little ditty, when the Phoenix rammed the dinghy?

He had to admit to himself that it was just about possible. Finnegan could have done all these things. But had he? If he had, it was an acting achievement to stagger the imagination, a tour de force rivalling or surpassing the best the Saint had ever seen — and the Saint had seen some.

And again, if Finnegan had done all those things, there was still the toppling crate to be explained. There was still no way, as far as Simon could see, that the Irishman could have been responsible for that. Of course, it could conceivably have been a genuine accident; but wasn’t that stretching the theory too far — piling coincidence on top of fantasy?

And then there was the question of how Finnegan could have managed that last mind-boggling feat of locking himself in the store-room and leaving the key on the outside of the door.

The Saint’s mind continued to work at the problem as he steadily transferred the first clutch of gold to the net. Perhaps Bernadotti had locked Finnegan in? Perhaps he had realised what Finnegan was really up to, and had put him away to immobilise him while... While what? And in that case, where had Bernadotti vanished to? That question was the one that continued to echo most persistently through his thoughts.

In any case, where was Bernadotti?

But to pile puzzle upon puzzle, there was another missing party — one who, on an earlier hypothesis, would have been expected to show up before now. And that was Tranchier.

The idea that Tranchier was still alive and anxious to grab all the swag for himself had once seemed reasonable enough, but now the Saint was no longer so sure. If Tranchier was alive and knew that the Phoenix held the secret of the gold, why hadn’t the fish-faced Frenchman shown his phizzog?

Finnegan, Bernadotti, perhaps Tranchier... two dead bodies... and the gold of Schwarzkopf-Tatenor. As Simon added the final few gold bars to complete the first load, he stepped off that carousel of thought and speculation and back on again, with the same question ringing in his head like a refrain.

Where was Bernadotti?

He tried a different tack, turning the reasoning around the other way. If Finnegan was as innocent as he appeared, why wasn’t Bernadotti there on the Phoenix?

There seemed to be only two reasonable explanations. The first was that Bernadotti was deliberately keeping himself hidden, and the second was that he had been got rid of.

The Saint couldn’t put it to himself any more neatly than that. If it was the former, it was hard to see that Bernadotti would have had time to hide anywhere except on the ship; but he had not been found there, and Simon was confident that no hiding place had been overlooked. And if it was the latter — if somebody had got rid of Bernadotti — well, at least his body could have been dumped in the other bay... And then, things would look decidedly black for Finnegan.

With the first quota of bars loaded, Simon fastened the net securely at the top and tugged sharply on the rope to signal Lebec and his crewmen to start hauling. He steadied the net as it began to move; but the pull up was not quite vertical — perhaps the repositioning of the Phoenix above had been slightly out, or perhaps a tide was dragging the heavy load. At any rate, as soon as the loaded net had been pulled up far enough to clear the hatchway, it swung a distance of seven or eight feet through the water, pushing the Saint ahead of it.

And as he came through the water and clear of the rail on the side of the sunken boat which had been blind to him while he was working, he saw a sight that made his scalp tingle electrically with the march of ghostly insects, and his heart almost stopped as if a cold hand had clutched it.

There, facing him, anchored to the sea bed close up against the side of the boat, was the answer to the question which had been echoing in his brain: Where was Bernadotti?

The man’s black hair waved lazily in the currents set up by the swing of the loaded net, and his eyes bulged in the rigid stare of death.

3

“Come on, come on, wake up!” shouted Inspector Lebec impatiently.

Captain William Finnegan began to stir uneasily out of his deep dream of peace; and then someone sloshed another bucketful of cold sea-water over him, none too gently.

Finnegan, flat on his back on the deck of the Phoenix, twitched three or four times, then spluttered, gasped, coughed, and finally opened his eyes. He looked up at the impassive form of Lebec framed against the fading blue and white of the evening sky.

“Wha—?” said Finnegan, and shut his eyes again.

Another bucket of water sloshed over him.

“Wha—?” said Finnegan, more loudly.

He tried to get up on one elbow, but fell back.

“Come on — wake up!” Lebec repeated.

Arabella shook her head dubiously.

“What’s the use? He couldn’t have done it,” she said. “Not in that condition.”

Lebec stood for a while, chewing his lower lip reflectively as he looked down at the groggily blinking Finnegan. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

“I agree. It is difficult to imagine that he could be capable of anything but sleep. And his condition was no better when we discovered him earlier, in the storage room.” Lebec glanced at his watch. “The next load will soon be due. Once we have dealt with it, we will lock him away until he becomes sober.”

Arabella looked around at the gold that lay spread out in shallow stacks on the deck. She could still hardly believe it all. It seemed incredible that in the space of two and a half days she could have been through so many experiences of a kind that had never touched her life before. She had been rescued from death in a bull-ring; she had been chased through a swamp and charged with a lance; she had been threatened by grotesquely dice-helmeted characters in a night club and had a man murdered almost in her arms, had been locked up in a police cell, and finally run down by her own yacht. It was quite incredible that all these things had actually happened to her; and it was equally hard to believe in the reality of all that gold.

But there it was before her eyes, gleaming in the rays of the setting sun — the magical sight of real gold in the gold of the sunset. There would be four million dollars’ worth, or so, and Lebec had told her that the ten percent reward would go half to her and half to the Saint.

Arabella had to confess to herself that the division seemed more than fair to her. True, without her yacht the gold wouldn’t have been found, and her equipment was being used to recover it. But she could hardly forget that it was her husband who had stolen it in the first place; and more than once since Lebec’s mention of the reward she had wondered whether as the thief’s widow she could not be debarred from taking a share in it.

“How many loads more?” she asked Lebec.

“Your friend Monsieur Templar thought two. One is due now. Then it will be the last.”

She indicated the gold on the deck.

“How much so far?”

Lebec fired off the question in French at the crewman from the launch, who was sitting lugubriously by the spare winch they had been using. He was waiting now for the next twitch on the rope, like a bored fisherman waiting for a bite. He consulted the careful record he had been keeping as he and Lebec counted the gold aboard.

“Cent soixantecinq,” he said, without turning his head.

“One hundred and sixty-five,” Lebec translated. “So, we shall have perhaps two hundred bars, a weight of two thousand kilograms.”

Presently there was a tug on the line, and the lugubrious crewman started the winch to haul the penultimate load up and aboard.

“Monsieur Templar has done well,” Lebec conceded. “It is hard work, I think.”

Simon Templar would have been the first to agree. All the long afternoon he had laboured steadily on the sea bed, loading the gold into the net, bar by bar, jerking the rope each time he had filled and secured it, gradually emptying the boat of its weighty treasure. Four times he had surfaced — once, after the first loading, to report the discovery of Bernadotti’s anchored corpse, and three times to renew the air cylinders on his back. And then he had gone down one more time into the deepening green silence, for the last consignment of ingots he intended to send up. The bottom layer he had decided to leave where it was, all for himself, to be collected at some future date.

He glanced at his air gauge as the net came down on its last trip. Fifteen minutes left. It would be enough, and with several minutes to spare. He steered the net into the cabin and began loading.

The discovery of a thoroughly irrigated Bernadotti had unquestionably solved the immediate mystery of his whereabouts, but the other questions still crowded Simon’s mind. The enigma of Finnegan was deeper than ever, with things looking blacker for him, by the Saint’s previous reasoning. Except that it was all somehow lacking in neatness; it had the untidiness of a theory which the facts would only fit if they were wrenched into shape with Procrustean efforts. And there was now one other loose scrap of fact which suddenly exploded into his consciousness.

Bernadotti’s body had manifestly been anchored where it was by someone; and that led by ineluctable logic to the conclusion that there must be another diver somewhere, or at least there must have been another diver.

And that deduction reminded him of something which had only half-registered on his attention when he was getting the one remaining scuba outfit from the store-room to being the work of the afternoon.

That was it. The one remaining scuba outfit. There had originally been three — the Saint was sure of that. And one, or most of one, had been lost in the incident with the dinghy.

When he had surfaced that afternoon for the first time, he had gone to the store-room and checked again. There was definitely and positively no sign of the third scuba outfit; and although he had not previously counted the spare air tanks he was fairly certain that some of them, too, had gone.

Not being a believer in the ability of diving gear to grow little legs and wander off on its own, any more than in that of corpses to tie themselves to the sea bed, Simon was obliged to believe, by the logic aforesaid, that somebody must have removed the scuba equipment and used it while conveying Bernadotti’s body down to its watery burial place.

Which meant, the same logic went on to tell him, that somewhere somebody must still be at large, lurking and hiding, with the gold still his objective.

So they would need to have all their wits about them when they were back on the Phoenix.

Who was the Somebody? Simon’s thoughts swung back to Finnegan. If the mystery of how he might have come to be locked in the store-room could be allowed to pass for the moment — and Simon decided that for the sake of making some mental headway it could — then all the rest was not quite impossible, even including the trick of taking Bernadotti’s body down to the bottom of the sea.

The Saint went over the events which had followed on that unguarded moment when the dinghy had been capsized. He pictured it all vividly, in a kind of action replay, with an imaginary stopwatch going in the background. First the collision; then the short period, a minute perhaps, when they had bobbed up and down in the sea, watching the Phoenix plough on; then the brief swim; then the pickup by Lebec in the launch; the hauling aboard of Descartes’ mangled body; and finally the warily circuitous approach to the Phoenix, where she lay at anchor near the sunken boat. In all, perhaps fifteen minutes — twenty at the outside. That could have been enough. Finnegan could have slung the body of Bernadotti overboard, suitably weighted; he could have followed it down, secured it beside the boat, and got back on board and out of his diving gear — all within ten or twelve minutes.

Finnegan could have done it — in theory. The case against him might have been strengthened, but it remained unproved. One point in his favour, although a small point, was that the third set of scuba gear hadn’t been found on board. The Captain might yet turn out to be an innocently genuine toper.

In which case, the continuing logic told Simon, there must be someone else at large with the diving gear — perhaps lurking about underwater somewhere nearby.

Simon continued to chew it over as he completed the loading of the net. He gazed up for a moment through the deepening emerald gloom to where the pale underbellies of the two boats hung down below the surface. Nearest him, the Phoenix’s big white keel projected down perhaps ten feet, and on the far side of her the much smaller shape of the coastguard launch was tucked in close beside it like a small daughter whale sheltering in her cetacean mother’s lee. There was just one place in the immediate area of the two vessels where a diver could feasibly be hiding, or have stayed hidden for any length of time. On the far side of the launch there was a narrow wedge of water, extending a few feet down from the surface, that was invisible both from the Saint’s viewpoint on the sea bed, and also from the decks of the Phoenix; and that was where Simon intended to look before he finally surfaced.

He had already made a careful inspection all around the sunken wreck itself, with his fingers alert on the hilt of the knife tucked into his weight-belt. He had not seriously expected to find anyone lurking there, figuring that the enemy, whoever that was, would not make his move until the gold had all been loaded aboard.

Therefore the Saint had shelved the problem of the diver, and where he might be concealed, and had simply got on with doing what had to be done. The diver might have gone ashore — the nearest point of land being no more than a hundred yards off — or, as Simon had now realised, he just might be skulking on the blind side of the launch.

The Saint glanced at his air gauge again as he secured the net and tugged on the rope for the last load to be hauled up. He had five minutes left, perhaps six; and that would be enough. Enough to close the hatch, and to investigate that wedge of blind water on his way up.

It was not the first time that Simon Templar had underestimated the opposition; nor was it the first time his calculating of an opponent’s next move had been incomplete in some small but potentially disastrous particular. He had reasoned that the enemy would make his move only after the gold had been secured; but he should have realised that the enemy could make up his own mind about when enough gold for his plans had been hauled up.

Of course, when it was all over, it was absurdly obvious. But when foresight was needed, he had missed it.

He had not seen the other diver who slid silently along the sea bed from the shore a few minutes before; neither did he see that diver now, emerging from a thicket of the viridescent weed nearby to take up silent station by the sunken boat’s stern, as the Saint steadied the load from deep inside.

Simon saw the laden net clear the hatchway above him; he saw it swing to one side, as each load before it had done; he saw it begin to recede upwards, off-centre in the greenish rectangle of light framed by the hatchway. And then he saw, with a dumbstruck horror such as he had seldom known in his life before, that rectangle of light suddenly shrink and narrow to a slit, and then to nothing, as the hatch was closed on him from above.

4

In the Stygian blackness of his underwater dungeon, Simon Templar heard the sound that must surely seal his fate. He heard the grinding and scraping of the heavy locking mechanism as someone secured the hatch above him; and in that instant he could hardly avoid the conviction that destiny must surely have come to claim him at last.

Death had started towards him often enough before, and perhaps half a dozen times had come close enough for him to have felt that his chances of survival were worse than even. But somehow, by a happy combination of luck and resourcefulness, he had always won through, even in circumstances where his prospects looked about as good as those of a three-legged donkey in the Grand National. But never until now had he had to give himself up for dead. On those other occasions, he had always had some reserve of his own, however tenuous, which he might somehow press into service, or some human support in the background to give at least a glimmer of hope; but this time he could think of nothing that would ever get him out.

In the first few seconds, as he realised with that sickening numbness what had happened and would happen yet, he tried, with the desperate strength of three men, to force open the locked hatch. But the attempt was useless. There was nothing for him to brace himself against while he kicked at the hatch, and he could get no real power behind the effort against the resistance of the water.

Perhaps it had been written in the stars, from the very beginning, that this was where his life was to end. He had long known that he could not go on blithely cheating death for ever and a day. That was in the nature of his hazardous trade, which he had chosen freely; and if his nemesis had caught up with him at last, he had no right now to bewail his lot. He had played the game gladly, and won gladly; and now, he had lost. It was as simple as that. There at the bottom of the sea he was alone with his ultimate fate, with not the remotest prospect of the cavalry appearing over the hill at the last minute... nor of any other miracle.

In real life there were no miracles; and real life for the Saint had dwindled down into perhaps two hundred cubic feet of underwater blackness, and a couple of minutes of breathing before his air ran out. And then the cabin would become his water tomb, and he would pass out of the living legend and into the historic. And so there was nothing left but to resign himself to the inevitable.

Above the hull, the other diver had continued swiftly and decisively with the execution of his plan. Silently, he surfaced in the blind water on the far side of the launch. He climbed aboard and released an extra length of the boat’s anchor rope. He dived again, following the rope to the anchor itself. He dragged it along the sea bed, passed the rope twice around the rail of the sunken cruiser, and then silently swam back to surface again beside the launch. Lebec, Arabella, and the crewmen were busy unloading the gold on to the Phoenix’s deck; there was no reason for them to turn to the launch, and they did not see the diver stealthily setting fire to the cushions in its cabin, before he silently slipped back into and under the water.

A minute or so later Lebec suddenly stood still and sniffed the air like a pointer dog. He turned towards the source of the acrid smoke.

“My ship! Vile!” he bellowed.

He grabbed a bucket and leapt across to the launch. The crewman followed with a second bucket, and after a momentary hesitation Arabella joined them.

While they were preoccupied with trying to douse the flames, the diver resurfaced between the two boats to proceed to the next stage of his plan. He cut the rope with which Lebec had tied the launch close up to the Phoenix. Then he braced himself against the bigger boat, and with his feet he pushed the launch well clear. He boarded the Phoenix, and made for the wheelhouse.

Lebec felt the movement of the launch, shouted, then turned in rage and astonishment as the Phoenix’s engines came to throbbing life. And the Phoenix began to pull away, with someone visible at the wheel who, from that distance, could be recognisable only as a man wearing a diver’s wet-suit and mask.

“Templar!” Lebec roared. “Stop! As a police officer I command you to stop!”

The error was pardonable, as Lebec had no way of knowing that the Saint was still at the bottom of the sea.

The seat cushions on the launch were still smouldering, but the fire had done no serious damage. Lebec barked a new order at his crewman; and as the man complied the diesel engines of the launch awoke to drumming life.

“Allez! Vite!” Lebec snapped, stabbing an outraged finger in the direction of the Phoenix as she headed for the open sea. “After him! Templar shall not get away with the gold!”

He flung himself on the anchor cable and hauled. At first the rope began to come easily aboard as Lebec took up the slack; then the rope tautened, stretched, and held fast.

With a string of Gallic profanities Lebec shouted another order. The man said something back, and Lebec took over the helm and opened the throttle. The launch’s propeller churned the water into a froth; and its nose tilted up as it strained against the creaking wet rope that tethered it. But it remained tethered; and the enraged Lebec frantically piled on more power as he watched the Phoenix heading out to sea.

Down below, in what he had accepted would soon become his sodden sepulchre, Simon Templar had heard the last hiss of air released by his tanks. Then there was nothing left but to re-breathe what remained in the tubes and in his face mask.

A stubborn instinctive will to live compelled him to try to make it last as long as possible by controlled shallow breathing, even though common sense told him that it could only postpone oblivion by a few futile minutes.

His ribs ached, and a kind of merciful red mist came up before his eyes to distance him from what was happening in the final seconds...

As the red mist darkened, somewhere above him a man at the helm of a boat switched to reverse gear and crammed on full power again, and held the throttle wide open while the turbulent water boiled around the boat with a frustrated churning of the screws, and a suffocating fog of diesel fumes engulfed it.

Simon Templar did not hear the straining of the stretched anchor rope, nor the slow sucking and splintering and rending sound made by the rotten timbers of the sunken wreck as the sustained traction on the tethered cable pulled it apart. Nor was he conscious enough to see clearly the gaping aperture of greenish light that opened up like a heaven above his head as the stern-rail and a torn-off section of deck were dragged slowly upward. It could only have been by blind reflexes that he groped his way out and up towards that light, strengthened by some reawakened spark of hope which had defiantly survived in him.

And then, as he broke surface, the feel of air on his skin must have brought consciousness briefly back to him. At any rate, something told him to tear off his face mask and take two great gulping gasping breaths, as hands reached down from the launch to bring him aboard, before the mist came up in front of his eyes again and became an infinite and engulfing black void.