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.