Read Online Saint Overboard by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online

more than one tight corner. They were old campaigners, men with his own cynical contempt of legal technicalities, and his
own cool disre gard of danger, men who
had followed him before, without a qualm, into whatever precarious paths
of breathless filibustering he had led them, and who were always accusing him
of hogging all the fun when he tried to
dissuade them from taking the same risks
again. He liked working alone; but some aspects of Vogel’s crew of modern pirates might turn out to be more
than one man’s meat.
    “Okay.” The Saint drew at his
cigarette, and his slow smile floated over the wire in the undertones of
his voice. “Get hold of Peter, and any other of the boys who are
looking for a sticky end. But the other instructions stand. Ship
that outfit to me personally,
care of the Southern Railway—you might even make it two outfits, if you feel like looking at some fish—and Peter’s to do his stuff exactly as I’ve already told him.
You toughs can put up at the Royal;
but you’re not to recognise me unless I recognise you first. It may be worth a point or two if the un godly don’t know we’re connected. Sold?”
    “Cash,” said Roger happily.
    Simon walked on air to the stairs. As he
stepped down into the foyer, he became aware of a pair of socks. The socks were
partic ularly noticeable because they were of a pale brick-red hue, and intervened
between a pair of blue trousers and a pair of brown and yellow
co-respondent shoes. It was a combination of colours which, once seen,
could not be easily forgotten; and the Saint’s glance voyaged idly up to the
face of the man who wore it. He had already seen it once before, and his
glance at the physiognomy of the wearer confirmed his suspicion that there
could not be two men simultaneously inhabiting Dinard with the
identi cally horrible taste in colour schemes. The sock stylist was no stranger.
He had sat at a table close to the Saint’s at lunch-time, arriving a
few moments later and calling for his bill in unison— exactly as he was
sitting in the foyer now, with an aloof air of having nothing
important to do and being ready to do it at a minute’s notice.
    The Saint paid for his calls and the use of
the room, and saun tered
out. He took a roundabout route to his destination, turned three or four
corners, without once looking back, and paused to look in a shop window in the
Rue du Casino. In an angle of the plate
glass he caught a reflection—of pale brick-red socks.
    Item Two. … So
Vogel’s affability had not been entirely unpremeditated.
Perhaps it had been carefully planned from the start. It would have
been simplicity itself for the sleuth to pick him up when he was
identified by sitting with Vogel and Yule at the cafe.
    Not that the situation was immediately
serious. The pink- hosed
spy might have discovered that Simon Templar had rented a room and made some telephone calls, but he wasn’t likely to have discovered much more. And that activity was
not funda mentally suspicious. But
with Vogel already on his guard, it would
register in the score as a fact definitely to be accounted for. And the
presence of the man who had observed it added its own testimony to the thoroughness with which the fact would doubtless be scrutinised.
    The Saint’s estimation of Kurt Vogel went up
another grim notch. In that dispassionate efficiency, that methodical
examina tion of every loophole, that ruthless elimination of every factor of chance
or guesswork, he recognised some of the qualities that must have given Vogel his unique position
in the hierarchy of racketeers—the
qualities that must have been fatally underesti mated by those three nameless scouts of Ingerbeck’s, who had not come home… .
    And which might have been underestimated by
the fourth.
    The thought checked him in his stride for an
almost imper ceptible instant. He knew that Loretta Page was ready to
be told that she was suspected, but was she ready for quite such an
inquisitorial