“Thorough enough to have killed me too.” She turned to face Simon: “It’s lucky I heard him say so — lucky I could understand enough German for that. Otherwise I could never have given you the gun — you know that?”
“Yes,” said the Saint. “I know. And you know now that I wasn’t the sixth man. Lebec was. All those years in the police, he must have been waiting, and wondering if he’d ever hear of that gold. He must have known about Descartes and the others, of course. He’d probably been watching them since they first arrived in the village. And then we turned up, and led him straight to the hoard — and to his old accomplice Karl.”
“And it was Charles — Karl — who tried to kill you in the night club, and who drove the van. And later, he must have been hiding on the Phoenix all the time.”
Simon nodded.
“Except when Lebec and I searched the ship.”
“And where was he then?”
“He could have been underwater, lurking on the blind side of the launch. But my guess is that he headed for the shore at the nearest point. It was only about a hundred yards from where we were, and there are some big rocks there. He’d have kept behind them out of sight until it was time to move. He could probably hear what I shouted to Lebec from the water, or anyway enough of it to know when I was getting near the end of the job.”
Arabella pondered for a while longer. Then she said:
“What about all this gold, Simon?”
“We’re returning it to the authorities, of course,” he said virtuously. “And claiming the reward.”
The coastguard cutter was keeping level with the Phoenix, about fifty yards off the starboard beam, escorting them watchfully back to Marseille.
“And how about the coastguard — won’t he make a fuss about being slugged?”
Simon stretched lazily in the sun.
“I squared it with him. I apologised handsomely — and sincerely. I explained that Lebec was a rotten egg. The crewman’ll get a tenth of our ten percent — I mean a fifth of my five percent.”
“And if the Marseilles police aren’t satisfied about Lebec’s death?” she persisted.
“They will be — once they dig into his past in Morocco and find the connections with the bullion job.”
Arabella pondered a while longer.
“And Finnegan? He was always just what he seemed, then?” she said finally.
“Innocent as a tipsy lamb,” Simon agreed. “And he’s back in top form.” He indicated the ship’s wake stretching away to the southeast behind them in a series of broad zigzags. “However, if I were you, I’d think twice about keeping him on as captain.”
Something else occurred to Arabella.
“Simon,” she said slowly, as she traced the line of his tanned shoulder with a finger. “It looks as though you’re not going to be left with so much out of all this. Four percent. Isn’t that an awfully small commission — for the Saint?”
He grinned, and ruffled her hair where the sun glinted on the red and gold of it.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” he said. “I did manage to keep a bit of the gold back. Forty-one bars, to be precise. Somehow I just forgot to send them up.”
Arabella gazed at him in wonder, and then she threw back her head and chuckled with abandoned delight.
“So you’ve left half a million dollars down there!.. But wait a minute. We pulled up part of the boat, remember? The whole thing may have been moved, dragged along the sea bed. Will you be able to find it again?”
“I think so,” said the Saint. “At any rate, I’m going to have a lot of fun trying.”
“We certainly are,” said Arabella.