was caught in a trap, that in such a situation he could not help challenging her. And then, as the monotonous chugging of the outboard circled round and came closer, he caught in her upturned eyes a frantic forlorn-hope appeal, a desperate voiceless entreaty that placed the ultimate seal on his destiny in that adventure.
He leaned over the side and grasped her wrist; and her first revelation of his steel-wire strength was the amazing ease with which he lifted her inboard with one hand. Without a word he pushed her down on the floor of the cockpit and unhitched a fender, dipping it in the water to repeat the faint splash she had made as she came out.
At that moment the outboard loomed up through the mist and coughed itself to silence. Dropping the fender to water level once again, so that there should be no doubt left in any interested minds about the origin of whatever noise had been heard from that quarter, he adjusted it under the gunwale of his dinghy and made it fast to the stanchion from which he had slipped it. The other boat was gliding up under its own momentum while he did so, and he was able to make a swift summary of its occupants.
There were three of them. Two, in rough seamen's jerseys, sat in the sternsheets, one of them holding the tiller and the other rewinding the starter lanyard. The third man was sitting on one of the thwarts forward, but as the boat slid nearer he rose to his feet.
Simon Templar studied him with an interest that never appeared more than casual. From his position in the boat, his well-cut reefer jacket and white trousers, and the way he stood up, he was obviously the leader of the party. A tallish well-built man with one hand resting rather limply in his coat pocket—a typical wealthy yachtsman going about his own mysterious business. And yet, to the Saint, who had in his time walked out alive from the bright twisted places where men who keep one hand in a side pocket are a phenomenon that commands lightning alertness, there was something in the well-groomed impassivity of him as he rose there to his full height that touched the night with a new tingling chill that was nevertheless a kind of unlawful ecstasy. For a couple of seconds the Saint saw his face as the dinghy hissed under the lee of the
Then the beam of a powerful flashlight blazed from the man's free hand, blotting out his face behind its dazzling attack. For a moment it dwelt on Simon's straightening figure, and he knew that in that moment the dryness of his hair and his pyjamas were methodically noted and reduced to their apparent place in the scheme of things. Then the light swept on, surveyed the lines of the ketch from stern to bow, rested for another moment on the name lettered there, and went flickering over the surrounding water.
'Lost something?' Simon inquired genially; and the light came back to him.
'Not exactly.' The voice was clear and dispassionate, almost lackadaisical in its complete emptiness of expression. 'Have you seen anyone swimming around here?'
'A few unemployed fish,' murmured the Saint pleasantly. 'Or are you looking for the latest Channel swimmer? They usually hit the beach further east, towards Calais.'
There was a barely perceptible pause before the man chuckled; but even then, to the Saint's abnormally sensitive ears, there was no natural good humour in the sound. It was simply an efficient adaptation to circumstances, a suave getout from a situation that bristled with question marks.
'No—nothing like that. Just one of our party took on a silly bet. I expect he's gone back.'
And with that, for Simon Templar, a flag somewhere among the ghostly armadas of adventure was irrevocably nailed to the mast. The mystery had crept out of the night and caught him. For the tall hooknosed man's reply presumed that he hadn't heard any of the other sounds associated with the swimmer; and, presuming that, it stepped carefully into the pitfall of its own surpassing smoothness. More—it attempted deliberately to lead him astray. A swim on a foggy night that included gun-play and .the peculiar kind of shout that had awakened him belonged to a species of silly bet which the Saint had still to meet; and he couldn't help being struck by the fact that it disposed so adequately of the obvious theory of an ordinary harbour theft, and the hue and cry which should have arisen from such an explanation. Even without the glaring error of sex in the last sentence, that would have been almost enough.
He stood and watched the search party vanishing on their way into the fog, the flashlight in the hooknosed man's hand blinking through the mist until it was lost to sight; and then he turned and slid down the companion into the saloon, switching on the lights as he did so. He heard the girl follow him down, but he drew the curtains over the portholes before he turned to look at her.
