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.