Johnny Fitzgerald and Lady Lucy found Horace Ross, manager of the Marine Hotel, in the dining room, keeping a close eye on his waiters. Johnny beckoned him aside into the room reserved for the police.
‘Whose handwriting is this, pray?’ he asked, waving the scrap of paper at Ross’s face. The manager of the Marine looked at it closely.
‘Why, it’s my head porter’s writing, man by the name of Mills, Timothy Mills. What of it?’
‘Simply this, Mr Ross. We found this piece of paper on the floor in Estuary House. It looks as if the recipient was trying to tear the message into pieces and drop them into the waste-paper basket, but he ran out of time. If you read it carefully you will see that it looks as if your Timothy Mills has been sending messages to the enemy, as it were. Could you summon him here for a little conversation, do you think? Now? This minute?’
At Powerscourt’s suggestion the lifeboat coxswain had brought the William and Emma to within fifty yards of the Morning Glory. The men stopped rowing as Powerscourt rose to his feet. The beach seemed to be glistening in the moonlight.
‘Mr Allen, I should like to speak to you! My name is Powerscourt,’ he shouted across the water between the two vessels. Powerscourt had suggested that they should not get too close in case of gunfire.
There was no reply. Nat Gibson seemed to have completed his work with the sails and was returning to the tiller.
‘Mr Allen!’ Powerscourt tried again. The lifeboat crew stared as if spellbound by the sirens as a head, then a trunk, then finally a whole person emerged very slowly from the inner cabin of the yacht. The one eye and the red eye patch seemed to Powerscourt to shriek defiance to the world.
‘I am Allen,’ the man said, glaring at the William and Emma with his one eye. ‘I know about your activities, Powerscourt. What do you want of me?’
‘You must know perfectly well what we want of you, Mr Allen. The police and myself would like to question you about three recent murders carried out on your instructions.’
Allen laughed. ‘Are you asking me to give myself up, you fool? I have been in Salcombe all the time for the last three months and I can prove it. You are very stupid indeed if you think I am going to be convicted of anything at all.’
‘But what of your associates? Your bearded colleague who travelled here second class to murder your enemies?’
‘I have to tell you, Powerscourt, your attentions are becoming very unwelcome. You traced me to this little town. Now you are following me around in that ridiculous wooden boat. You are annoying me, I tell you. I came here to carry out a mission. That mission is now complete. I advise you now to drop the matter, to abandon your inquiries. You may hope to place me in the dock. I tell you that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. I am going below now. You will never see me again. Gibson, let’s move out of here as fast as we can. Goodbye, Powerscourt. It may interest you to know that while you may have troubled me, your activities in my case were like a fly trying to wound an elephant.’
Ten minutes later, with the wind rising and the shelter of the estuary losing its power, the Morning Glory had pulled well away from the lifeboat. Neither Powerscourt nor the Inspector could see any trace of the Bar. But Robbie assured them that they were past it now. Dimly ahead, he could see the bulk of Bolt Head which marked one side of the end of the long estuary and the beginning of the English Channel. Now then, he said to himself, which way is the Morning Glory going to turn? As the cloud lifted again they could see her, two sails aloft, heading straight ahead.
‘She ain’t out of the estuary yet, not proper,’ said Robbie Barton. ‘She’s got to pass Prawle Point on the other side before she’s really out in the open sea.’
The stereotype for a head porter would be a tall figure, well over six feet in height, solidly built, possibly wearing a top hat, dispensing taxis and greetings by the front door of one of London’s great hotels like the recently opened Ritz halfway along Piccadilly. Timothy Mills, head porter of the Marine Hotel, Salcombe, was just over five feet six inches tall and as thin as a whippet. He looked defiant when Johnny Fitzgerald showed him the slip of paper from Estuary House.
‘This is your handwriting, I believe,’ said Johnny.
‘It is. I’m sorry if I’ve done the wrong thing. My wife’s been ill, so very ill, you see, and I needed the money for the doctor’s bills. You’re not going to arrest me, are you? I couldn’t bear to leave Bertha on her own.’
‘I’m not going to arrest you, Mr Mills. I’m sorry to hear about your wife. The best thing would be if you could tell us everything you did for the Estuary House people and everything you know about where they’ve gone.’
‘Well now, my main job,’ said Mills, ‘was to tell them when anybody was making inquiries about them, and sending notes to Nat Gibson about that boat over the way. Oh, I nearly forgot.’ Mills, having cheered up a little on hearing he was not to be arrested, looked really anxious all of a sudden. ‘I had to go into Plymouth for them shortly after they arrived.’
‘And what did you have to do in Plymouth, Mr Mills?’
‘I didn’t quite know what to make of it, actually. I had to buy a uniform for the young man.’
‘What sort of uniform?’
There was a pause and then the words were pulled out like a bad tooth. ‘A policeman’s uniform.’
‘God in heaven,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘What on earth did they want with a policeman’s uniform?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Mills, ‘there’s only the old one gone off on the boat. The young one’s still here, or if he’s not, maybe he’s going round pretending to be a police officer.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Johnny and shot off to the telegraph room to consult with Sergeant Vaughan.
Sharp Tor, Starehole Bay, Shag Rock, Pig’s Nose, Ham Stone, Gammon Head, Mew Stone, Robbie Barton called out the names of the landmarks along the coast as they passed. There was no sign of the William and Emma changing over to sail yet. The coxswain told his passengers that they probably made better speed with the oars. The wind was rising now, changing direction, blowing hard towards the shore. The moon came out and stayed out for a couple of minutes. Powerscourt saw that the contest was deeply unfair. The odds were stacked in favour of Morning Glory, even with the wind against her. She was built for speed and for grace. The William and Emma was built to be solid, to keep afloat however bad the storms, to reach the wrecks off the Devon shore and bring the passengers and the seamen home to safety. It was a dray horse against an Olympic sprinter.
‘She’s not turning to the left or the right, Inspector, my lord. No late supper in Plymouth or Dartmouth by the look of it.’
‘My God,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’ve been a fool! Why didn’t I think of it earlier. Of course she’s going straight out to sea. Once she’s three miles from the coast she’s outside British territorial waters altogether, and outside British jurisdiction. Inspector Timpson here couldn’t arrest them even if we could catch them.’
‘Well,’ said Robbie, ‘she’s not three miles out yet. She’s got some way to go. But we’d better start praying for a miracle if we’re ever to catch up with her.’
It took Sergeant Vaughan less than half an hour to find William James Strauss, disguised as a police constable, making his way very slowly along the road from Salcombe to Kingsbridge where the railway connected you to a wider world. Lady Lucy took the young man into the Imperial Suite away from the police uniforms. Johnny Fitzgerald had been reunited with his bottle of Chateau Lafite.
‘You must be William James Strauss,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘And the older gentleman is a Mr Allen, a Wilfred Allen, is that right?’
‘People call me Jimmy,’ said the young man, speaking with a strong South African accent, ‘and the older man, as you put it, is Wilfred Allen.’
‘And there was a third person, I think, was there not? Elias Harper, if my memory serves me. What became of him?’
The young man turned pale. ‘Do I have to answer that?’
‘You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to,’ Lady Lucy replied. ‘I’m not a policeman, as you can see. Not tall enough for a start.’
Jimmy Strauss managed a ghost of a smile. ‘Can I tell you what happened? What’s been going on, I mean. I feel it’s all bottled up inside me.’
‘Of course,’ said Lady Lucy.
The flares lit up the night sky as if some celestial switch had been turned on. Half a mile away from the lifeboat, directly across the path of the Morning Glory, lay the nine thousand tons of HMS Sprightly, one of His
