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.