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:
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral,
“Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loi-ee,
“Too-Ra-Loo-La... Roo-Ra... Roora...”
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.
Ooh-ver in... Kill-llarney,
Many-y yea-rrs a-gooh,
Me moddh-horr sang dhis...
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 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.