Descartes’ deep chuckle floated across the water as they pushed the dinghy off.
“Dear Enrico! Be relaxed. This boat can scarcely contain even its present loading.” He patted his stomach significantly. “It is far too small for much gold. We will have to come back for the yacht. Somebody has to remain here to keep observation on Finnegan.”
The Saint had already put on his wet-suit and weight-belt. Now he yanked the T-cord to whip the outboard into puttering life, and pointed the stubby nose of the dinghy obliquely out to sea. For two hundred yards or so he took the dinghy out in almost exactly the direction from which the Phoenix had only recently arrived; and his keen eyesight did not fail to note that the tiny dark smudge was still on the horizon, and at the distance it had maintained since he had first spotted it early that morning while the Phoenix was still under way.
And if Jacques Descartes had been watching the Saint’s features very closely, and had known how to read the signs on that lean tanned face, he might have seen, faintly and evanescently, the merest shadow of a ghostly smile playing at the corners of Simon’s mouth as he took the dinghy up to speed and turned round the narrow verdant headland that formed the little bay’s northern margin.
A few minutes later, with the headland behind them, he slacked the throttle right off and let the engine idle for a minute while he (quite literally) got his bearings.
They were in the next bay. Small and blue like the one they had just left, this was the bay where the pencil marks had been made on the chart — the bay, presumably, where Charles Tatenor had “spearfished” while the headland conveniently blocked Finnegan’s view from the Phoenix. Simon checked with the compact but finely graduated compass they had found in the false-bottomed fishing basket, sighting on a white villa near the beach. Then he opened the throttle briefly to take the boat a few yards farther across the bay.
“Seventy-three degrees to the white villa,” he announced. “Spot on.” He turned his attention to the lighthouse on the next headland. “Three hundred and forty-eight we want, three hundred and fifty-six we’ve got. So we’re a fraction too far out. If we head straight for the villa...”
A few minutes later he raised a thumb in the air to indicate success, and slung the anchor overboard.
“Bon!” said Descartes.
In his impatience and obvious excitement he peered at the sea on both sides of the dinghy as if he expected to see clearly through the wavelets and the forty feet of water to the sea bed beneath.
“Thanks — partner,” said the Saint sardonically, as he put on his flippers.
Arabella helped strap the scuba tanks on his back, with their breathing-tubes and mouthpiece. He donned the face mask, sat on the side of the boat, put in the mouthpiece, and back-flipped into the sea.
It was some time since he had done any diving, but to him it was one of those physical activities that had a unique feel which the body never forgot; like swimming itself.
Here, according to the chart, the water was some six to seven fathoms deep — comfortably within the range of scuba equipment. Yet all diving, no matter how straightforward, brought with it something of the same eerie sense of otherworldly adventure. The wonder began with the first moment, when the water closed over his mask, and years fell away as if they had never been, as though he had made his last dive only the day before. In an instant he crossed from the ordinary and familiar world of light into that other and very different world, the ultimate dim green world of the undersea. All the eye-aching brightness above was replaced at once by a cool trans-lucence of fluid jade. And with that came the ecstasy of weightlessness, the dream-like ability to move in three dimensions almost without effort.
With a few lazy kicks of his flippers, he sent himself gliding down towards the sea bed. At a depth of about fifteen feet, he stopped to look back at the sea’s surface. It was like a vast ceiling of liquid glass, wrinkling and rolling in long undulations, with the underside of the dinghy projecting down through it and partaking in its rhythmical movement.
The Saint went down into the deepening green. A school of hundreds upon hundreds of tiny silver-and-yellow fish flicked noiselessly past him, and some of their bigger cousins peered pop-eyed through the glass of his mask as they followed him curiously down. Then a spur of jagged rock rose to meet him out of the olive twilight; some fronds of slimy weed brushed at his legs for a moment; and then he was within arm’s length of the bottom.
He gazed arcund at the glaucous world of weeds and fishes. The sea bed was mostly sandy there, but it was far from flat, and there were little forests of marine growths at intervals for as far as his eyes could see in the soft gloom. He turned and surveyed the sea bed in the opposite direction. The same irregular landscape, if it can be called a landscape, met his probing eyes.
And then he saw it. It was perhaps twenty yards away, and it could only have been the remains of a boat.
At first glance he had taken it for another patch of the almost fluorescently tinted seaweed; but on longer inspection the shape of a largish cabin cruiser was unmistakable. Simon swam towards it, and as he came closer he could easily understand how he had almost been deceived on that first glance; for the sunken boat was almost overgrown by variegated algae. The Saint had, as a matter of fact, had a lucky line of sight, from which it was the sharp point of her bows that had caught his eyes. If he had been looking from any other angle, he might never have seen anything but the splodge of weed... And perhaps, he thought as he swam the last few yards towards the sunken hull, that was a good omen.
The first thing he noticed was the big jagged hole in her transom. He examined the hole closely for a moment; he had seen enough shellfire damage before to be sure that he was looking at an example of it now. This must be the boat in which Schwarzkopf-Tatenor had made his run for it; and therefore Simon Templar knew that he was surely approaching the moment when his theory — for it had little right to be called anything more — would be put to the final test. He was well aware of the many “ifs” and “buts” he had glossed over, perhaps too slickly, in the speculations which he had shared with Arabella the previous night in a corner of that bright blue world forty feet above him. He looked up again at the high liquid ceiling. It was dimmed from this depth, but he could still make out the underside of the dinghy, now well to the edge of his field of view.
Yes, he knew his hypothesis was just that, on any objective view. That Charles Tatenor had kept his gold eleven years ago, rather than finding some immediate way of turning it into cash; that he had continued to keep it during those years since; that he had paced his “spending” of his hoard so that a good proportion of the original amount might still remain; and finally that he had kept that hoard, not in a series of safe deposit boxes around the world, not buried in a cave on dry land, nor in any of a hundred other good and possible hiding places, but just exactly where it had sunk — in forty feet of water, in the locker of Davy Jones.
That was the postulate: and the Saint knew that at any step in the reasoning, Charles Tatenor might not have acted in the way which that reasoning assumed. But the Saint’s thinking was characterised by those occasional intuitive leaps of great boldness, which had usually proved justified when they had been trusted in the past. And that was why — supported now by the evidence of the chart and its annotations, which certainly suggested something of interest down there — he expected to find gold in the sunken cabin cruiser he had discovered in the silent depths of the sea.
Slowly he finned his way along the length of the boat and back along the other side, the silence broken only by the regular suck of his own breath drawn in from the compressed-air tanks on his back, and the gurgle of the escaping bubbles that trailed upwards as he exhaled. He saw weird and garish fish flitting at their leisure between the rusting railings that had long been incorporated into their submarine world. He saw the slow sure accretions of eleven years, the barnacles and sea urchins which had colonised the superstructure. He saw the wheelhouse that was now an eerie undersea cave where a school of small translucent squid were pumping themselves sporadically along beneath the sodden and rotting remains of the helm. And he saw the big hatchway set in the after-deck, its fastenings still gleaming with a faint metallic sheen and still relatively free from the encroaching weeds... as if it had seen some use over the years.