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.There was no point in taking a risk of overloading the net, andSimon judged that sixty bars would be the most they could safely try to bringup 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 hismind.As he began to take the net down for the first time, he found himselfcoming back again to a fantastically improbable notion which he hadn't yetfound a way of entirely dismissing from his thoughts.It was the notion that Finnegan might not be all that he seemed; that hisdrunkenness was a pretence and a blind, merely the product of brilliantlyconvincing acting; that the seemingly innocent Irishmanhad after all done allthose things of which the Saint had previously judged him incapable.Simon swam down into the sunken cruiser, spread out the net on top of thegolden hoard, and began loading it for the first time, with his mind stillfollowing that same corridor of thought or was it a blind alley? CouldFinnegan have been the shadowy man in the Bidou Club after all? Had he escapedin the blue van, only to reappear a few minutes later, stumbling about andcarolling squiffily? Could Finnegan have "forced the strangulation" of Pancho,as Descartes had put it? And had Finnegan been the man at the helm, perhapseven humming a little ditty, when thePhoenix rammed the dinghy?He had to admit to himself that it was just about possible.Finnegancouldhave done all these things.But had he? If he had, it was an actingachievement to stagger the imagination, atour de force rivalling or surpassingthe best the Saint had ever seen and the Saint had seen some.And again, if Finnegan had done all those things, there was still thetoppling crate to be explained.There was still no way, as far as Simon couldsee, that the Irishman could have been responsible for that.Of course, itPage 99ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlcould conceivably have been a genuine accident; but wasn't that stretching thetheory too far piling coincidence on top of fantasy?And then there was the question of how Finnegan could have managed that lastmind-boggling feat of locking himself in the store-room and leaving the key onthe outside of the door.The Saint's mind continued to work at the problem as he steadily transferredthe first clutch of gold to the net.Perhaps Bernadotti had locked Finneganin? Perhaps he had realised what Finnegan was really up to, and had put himaway to immobilise him while.While what? And in that case, where hadBernadotti vanished to? That question was the one that continued to echo mostpersistently through his thoughts.In any case, where was Bernadotti?But to pile puzzle upon puzzle, there was another missing party one who, onan earlier hypothesis, would have been expected to show up before now.Andthat was Tranchier.The idea that Tranchier was still alive and anxious to grab all the swag forhimself had once seemed reasonable enough, but now the Saint was no longer sosure.If Tranchier was alive and knew that thePhoenix held the secret of thegold, why hadn't the fish-faced Frenchman shown his phizzog?Finnegan, Bernadotti, perhaps Tranchier,.two dead bodies.and thegold of Schwarzkopf-Tatenor.As Simon added the final few gold bars tocomplete the first load, he stepped off that carousel of thought andspeculation and back on again, with the same question ringing in his head likea refrain.Where was Bernadotti?He tried a different tack, turning the reasoning around the other way.IfFinnegan was as innocent as he appeared, why wasn't Bernadotti there onthePhoenix?There seemed to be only two reasonable explanations.The first was thatBernadotti was deliberately keeping himself hidden, and the second was that hehad been got rid of.The Saint couldn't put it to himself any more neatly than that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]