Nat Gibson who’s almost a professional boat captain. He left his house in Island Street about forty minutes ago. It is my belief, sir, that he will have picked up the Estuary House people at the Yacht Club landing stage just round the corner from this hotel.’
‘Does anybody know where they might have gone?’ Inspector Devereux felt they were back in the hunt now, some way behind the fox admittedly, but not out of contact altogether.
‘I haven’t told you the most important bit, sir.’ Sergeant Vaughan felt he had never had a more interested and interesting collection of listeners. ‘The Salcombe lifeboat, fully crewed, is at your service for this evening and however long it may take. They should be by the landing stage in five minutes’ time. They can take two people on board.’
‘Well done, young man, well done indeed.’ Powerscourt was now staring out of the window, up the harbour towards the open sea which lay a couple of miles away.
‘Sergeant Vaughan here is a local man, Inspector, Lord Powerscourt.’ Inspector Timpson had never known a case like it. It had started the afternoon before with an inquiry from the Met. Twenty-four hours later you were preparing to embark in a lifeboat in pursuit of some murdering villains who have hidden themselves away on your patch for months.
‘I’m sure the lifeboat coxswain will have an idea where they might go to, sir.’ Sergeant Vaughan was wondering if he might be one of the two people on the lifeboat. It was, in a manner of speaking, he thought, his lifeboat, as he had ordered it into action, but he suspected he might be too junior. ‘From here they could go down the estuary towards Kingsbridge if they wanted, but I don’t think they will. They’d be sailing into a channel they couldn’t get out of. They’d be trapped. I think they’ll head for the open sea. If they turn left at Prawle Point they could sail round the coast towards Dartmouth, or Torquay, or Exeter even. Go the other way and they could reach Plymouth fairly quickly. Dock the yacht, or leave Skipper Gibson to sail it home, and they could be on a train in a couple of hours.’
‘Could I suggest,’ Powerscourt was not going to be left out of the action this time if he could help it, ‘that Inspector Timpson, as the local man, and myself go on the lifeboat? Inspector Devereux, your expertise on the telegraph will be sorely needed here. We need to contact various other forces about possible railway escapes. Important information may also come in from South Africa. And in any case, apprehending the villains, if we do apprehend them, is only the beginning. The real interviews start when the suspects are back on dry land, not rolling up and down in the swell out on the open sea.’
Inspector Devereux laughed. ‘Very good, my lord. I would just like to ask Inspector Timpson if I could borrow Sergeant Vaughan while he is away. We need to contact the nearby lighthouses and suchlike places to keep watch. His local knowledge will be invaluable.’
‘Of course,’ said Inspector Timpson.
Powerscourt gave a name and a phone number to Inspector Devereux before he left. ‘Tell him it’s tonight. Suggest he leaves as soon as he can. God speed.’
Devereux whistled to himself when he read the name of the recipient. ‘Come on, Sergeant,’ he said to Mark Vaughan as he led the way upstairs to the telegraph room, ‘we’ve got work to do.’
Powerscourt and Inspector Timpson were ushered to their seats at the rear of the lifeboat with that careful air seamen have with landlubbers they suspect may be about to fall in. The William and Emma had a crew of twelve this evening, wearing their uniforms of dark grey trousers and jackets, their oars raised to the vertical position as they sidled up to the landing stage, now back in the water as they headed for the sea.
‘We’re after that big yacht, young Mark told me, sir,’ the coxswain, whose name was Robbie Barton, said to Powerscourt and the Inspector. Barton was a cheerful little man in his early thirties who worked as a fisherman by day. ‘You mightn’t think so, looking at this boat, that it could move quickly but it can. I’m sure we can make up some ground before we reach the English Channel.’
‘If you were a villain, trying to escape from justice,’ said the Inspector, ‘which way would you go once we reached the sea?’
‘I don’t rightly know. We don’t have to decide which way to turn yet.’
They were past East Portlemouth now, little more than a collection of cottages, and were heading towards Mill Bay, a small beach, on their left. The wind was growing stronger. There was a full moon, only visible occasionally through the cloud cover. Powerscourt was shivering with cold. The lifeboatmen were unaffected, pulling vigorously at their oars. As they passed the remains of Fort Charles and Salcombe Castle on the right-hand side of the harbour, the moon cleared for a couple of minutes. ‘There she is!’ a young lifeboat man at the prow shouted. ‘She’s just up there by South Sands. By God, she’s lovely to look at, that yacht.’
Johnny Fitzgerald had persuaded one of the waiters that it was vital for the success of the operation that he, the waiter, should open one of the hotel’s bottles of Chateau Lafite immediately. Johnny felt the Lafite would be wasted on the run-of-the-mill hotel guests with no knowledge of the great wines of Bordeaux. Refreshed by his first glass, he persuaded Lady Lucy to join him on a mission to Estuary House. They might find something useful, he said.
The lights were still blazing on all floors as they made their way round the back and in through the broken door. They started at the top and worked down. It seemed that the three men had separate rooms on the top floor. One was incredibly tidy, so tidy, Lady Lucy discovered, because all the clothes and other possessions had been removed. It looked, she said to Johnny, as if there were only two of them now. The other bedrooms showed signs of hasty departure, the odd sock or jumper left lying on the floor. The biggest room, they decided, must have belonged to Wilfred Allen, if that was his name. There was a powerful telescope by the window, pointing out to sea. Johnny Fitzgerald showed Lady Lucy how the top half of the window had been altered so you could point the device upwards to stare at the stars as easily as you could stare at the sea. Lady Lucy felt a sudden moment of pity for the man who had looked through this lens, hiding in the dark in a tiny English town, thousands of miles from home and consoling himself with visions of the stars turning in their courses across the night sky.
‘Look, Lady Lucy, look here!’ Johnny Fitzgerald was pointing to a strange wooden implement sitting on a book-shelf next to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was about two and a half feet long, with a circular knob rather like a thistle at the end. ‘This must be one of those knobkerrie things that Francis was so excited about. And it’s here. This is probably the one used on the victims.’
‘How horrible,’ said Lady Lucy, staring at the thing as if was a malignant snake. ‘Let’s have a look at the floor below. That thing makes me feel quite sick.’ Johnny put it in his pocket.
On the lower level there was further evidence of a speedy departure. Even in a couple of months, it seemed, people could accumulate an enormous amount of rubbish. Johnny was on his knees, examining a fragment of a letter or a note that had missed the waste-paper basket. ‘More police and a private investigator called Lord Powerscourt coming from London early this evening,’ he read, ‘to be here about seven o’clock.’ Johnny read it twice and handed it to Lady Lucy.
‘What do you think of this?’ he said.
‘My goodness! It looks like a note sent to the people here.’ Lady Lucy paused for a moment and looked carefully at Johnny. ‘Surely it can only have come from across the road? Wilfred Allen must have had an informant inside the Marine Hotel. That’s why they left before we got here.’
‘Come on, Lady Lucy,’ Johnny was running towards the stairs that led to the back door, ‘it’s time to find out.’
The men in the lifeboat had fallen into a deep rhythm now. They looked as if they could row for ever. The moon cleared once more as the William and Emma passed the Pound Stone. Powerscourt suddenly realized that a noise had stopped. Since they left the harbour the principal sound had been the oars dipping in and out of the water and the occasional command of the coxswain. But there had been another sound, coming from further up the channel which he now realized must have been the engine of the Morning Glory. They could see the yacht just ahead, not moving now with the engine turned off, nestling in the tiny bay beside South Sands a few hundred yards away. The yacht’s sails were being hoisted, Nat Gibson scurrying around the little ship.
‘We have to be careful in these waters,’ Robbie Barton the lifeboat coxswain said to Powerscourt and the Inspector. ‘Over there, a mile or so away on the other side of the channel, is the Bar, a spit of sand that can be treacherous in the wrong conditions. Many a vessel has come to grief there. They say, Inspector, Lord Powerscourt, that this is the bar Tennyson was thinking of when he wrote his famous poem. He’s said to have spent time in Salcombe. “Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me! / And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put out to sea.”’
