"In No. 9 cabin," answered the man in his sullen throaty voice. "He is tied up and gagged; but I think he will sleep for a little while."
"Do you know who he is?"
"I have not seen him before. Perhaps one of the men who has been watching on shore will know him."
Vogel said nothing. Even if the captive was a stranger, it would be possible to find out who he was. If he carried no papers that would identify him, he would be made to talk. It never occurred to him that the prisoner might be innocent: Ivaloff made no mistakes, and Vogel himself had seen the canoe's significant swerve and first instinctive attempt to dodge the searchlight. He threw the engine into neutral and then into reverse, bringing the tender neatly up to the companion, and went across the deck to the wheelhouse.
Professor Yule was there. He glanced up from a newspaper.
"I wish I knew what these gold mining shares were going to do," he remarked casually. "I could sell now and take a profit, but I'd like to see another rise first."
"You should ask Otto about it—he is an expert," said Vogel. "By the way, where is he?"
"I don't know. He went out to look for part of a broken cufflink. Didn't you see him on deck?"
Vogel shook his head.
"Probably he was on the other side of the ship. Do you hold very many of these shares?"
He selected a cigar from a cedarwood cabinet and pierced it carefully while Yule talked. So Arnheim hadn't been able to wait more than a few minutes before he tried to find out something about the man they had captured. Otto had always been impatient—his brain lacked that last infinitesimal milligram of poise which gave a man the power to possess himself indefinitely and imperturbably. He should have waited until Yule went to bed.
Not that it was vitally important. The Professor was as unsuspecting as a child; and No. 9 cabin was the dungeon of the ship —a room so scientifically soundproofed that a gun fired in it would have been inaudible where they were. Vogel drew steadily at his cigar and discussed the gold market with unruffled composure for a quarter of an hour, until Yule picked himself up and decided to retire.
Vogel stood at the chart table and gave the Professor time to reach his stateroom. In front of him was the chart with that lone position marked in red ink, the scraps of torn paper in the ashtray, the pencil lying beside it ... untouched. Loretta Page had stood over those things for a full minute, but from where he was watching he could not see her face. "When she turned away she had seemed unconcerned. And yet . . . there were more things than that to be explained. Kurt Vogel was not worried—his passionlessly efficient brain had no room for such a futile emotion— but there had been other moments in his career, like that, when he knew that he was fighting for his life.
He left the chart table without a shrug, and left the wheelhouse by the door at the after end. Between him and the saloon a companion ran down to the lower deck. He went aft along the alleyway at the bottom—the door of the Professor's cabin was close to the foot of the companion, and he paused outside it for a couple of seconds and heard the thud of a dropped shoe before he went on. His cigar glowed evenly, gripped with the barest necessary pressure between his teeth, and bis feet moved with a curious soundlessness on the thick carpet.
No. 9 cabin was the last door in the passenger section. Just beyond it another companion sloped steeply up to the after deck, and abaft the companion a watertight door shut off the continuation of the alleyway on to which the crew's quarters opened. Vogel stopped and turned the handle, and a faint frown creased in between his eyebrows when the door did not move.
He raised his hand to knock; and then for some reason He glanced downwards and saw that the key was in the lock on the outside. At the same time he became conscious of a cool dampness on his hand. He opened it under the light, and saw a glisten of moisture in the palm and on the inside of his fingers.
For an instant he did not move. And then his hand went down slowly and touched the door-handle again. He felt the wetness of it under the light slide of his finger-tips, and bent down to touch the carpet. That also was damp; so were the treads of the companion.
Without hesitation he turned the key silently in the lock, slipped an automatic out of his pocket, and thrust open the door. The cabin was in darkness, but his fingers found the switch instantaneously and clicked it down. Otto Arnheim lay at his feet in the middle of the floor, with his face turned whitely up to the light and his round pink mouth hanging vacuously open. There were a couple of lengths of rope carelessly thrown down beside him—and that was all.
IV. HOW STEVE MURDOCH REMAINED OBSTINATE,
AND SIMON TEMPLAR RENDERED FIRST AID
IF THE quality of surprise had ever been a part of Orace's emotional make-up, the years in which he had worked for Simon Templar had long since exhausted any trace of its existence. Probably from sheer instinctive motives of self-preservation he had acquired the majestically immutable sang-froid of a jellied eel; and he helped Simon to haul his prize out on to the deck of the Corsair as unconcernedly as he would have lent a hand with embarking a barrel of beer.
"How d'you like it?" asked the Saint, with a certain pardonable smugness.
He was breathing a little deeply from the effort of life-saving Steve Murdoch's unconscious body through the odd half-mile of intervening water, and the shifting muscles glistened over his torso as he filled his chest. Murdoch, lying in a heap with the water oozing out of his sodden clothes, was conspicuously less vital; and Orace inspected him with perceptible distaste.
"Wot is it?" he inquired disparagingly.
"A sort of detective," said the Saint. "I believe he's a good fellow at heart; but he doesn't like me and he's damned stubborn. He's tried to die once before to-night, and he didn't thank me when I stopped him."
Orace sucked his moustache ghoulishly over the body.
"Is 'e dead now?"
"Not yet—at least I don't think so. But he's got a lump on the back of his head the size of an apple, and I don't expect he'll feel too happy when he wakes up. Let's try him and see."
They undressed Murdoch out on the deck, and Simon wrung out his clothes as best he could and tied them in a rough bundle which he chucked into the galley oven when they took the still unconscious man below. He left Orace to apply the usual restoratives, and went back into the saloon to towel himself vigorously and brush his hair. He heard various groans and thumps and other sounds of painful resuscitation while he was doing this; and he had just settled into a clean shirt and a pair of comfortable old flannel trousers when the communicating door opened and the fruit of Orace's labours shot blearily in.
It was quite obvious that the Saint's prophecy was correct. Mr Murdoch was not feeling happy. The tender imprint of a skilfully wielded blackjack had established at the base of his skull a high-powered broadcasting station of ache from which messages of hate and ill-will were radiating in all directions with throbbing intensity, while the grinding machinery of transmission was setting up a roaring din that threatened to split his head. Taking these profound disadvantages into consideration, Mr Murdoch entered, comparatively speaking, singing and dancing; which he is to say that he only looked as if he would like to beat somebody on the head with a mallet until they sank into the ground.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded truculently.
"Just another boat," answered the Saint kindly. "On your left, the port side. On your right, the starboard. Up there is the forward or sharp end, which goes through the water first——"
Murdoch glowered at him speechlessly for a moment; and then the team of pneumatic drills started work again under the roof of his skull, and he sank on to a bunk.
"I thought it would be you," he said morosely.