". . . This open piece of deck is rather pleasant for sitting out when it's hot. We rig an awning over that boom if the sun's too strong."
"It must be marvellous to own a boat like this," she said.
They stood at the rail, looking down the river. Somewhere among the lights in the broadening of the estuary was the Corsair, but there was nothing by which she could pick it out.
"To be able to have you here—this is pleasant," he said. "At other times it can be a very lonely ownership."
"That must be your own choice."
"It is. I am a rich man. If I told you how rich I was you might think I was exaggerating. I could fill this boat hundreds of times over with—delectable company. A generous millionaire is always attractive. But I've never done so. Do you know that you're the first woman who has set foot on this deck?"
"I'm sorry if you regret it," she said carelessly.
"I do."
His black eyes sought her face with a burning intensity. She realised with a thrill of fantastic horror that he was absolutely sincere. In that cold passionless iron-toned voice he was making love to her, as if the performance was dragged out of him against his will. He was still watching her; but within that inflexible vigilance there was a grotesque hunger for illusion that was an added terror.
"I regret it because when you give a woman even the smallest corner of your mind, you give her the power to take more. You are no longer in supreme command of your destiny. The building of a lifetime can be betrayed and broken for a moment's foolishness."
She smiled.
"You're too cynical—you sound as if you'd been disappointed in love."
"I have never been in love——"
The last word was bitten off, as if it had not been intended to be the last. It gave the sentence a curiously persistent quality, so that it seemed to reverberate in the air, repeating itself in ghostly echoes after the actual sound was gone.
She half turned towards him, in a natural quest for the conclusion of that unfinished utterance. Instead she found his hands pinning her to the rail on either side, his great predatory nose thrust down towards her face, his wide lipless mouth working under a torrent of low-pitched quivering words.
"You have tempted me to be foolish. For years I shut all women out of my life, so that none of them could hurt me. And yet what does wealth give without women? I knew that you wanted to come and see my boat. For you it might only have been a nice boat to look at, part of your holiday's amusement; for me it was a beginning. I broke the rule of a lifetime to bring you here. Now I don't want you to go back."
"You'll change your mind again in the morning." Somehow she tore her gaze away, and broke through his arms. "Besides, you wouldn't forget a poor girl's honour——"
She was walking along the deck, swinging her wrap with an affectation of sophisticated composure, finding a moment's escape in movement. He walked beside her, speaking of emotion in that terrifying unemotional voice.
"Honour is the virtue of inferior people who can't afford to dispense with it. I have enough money to ignore whatever anyone may think or anyone may say. If you shared it with me, nothing need hurt you."
"Only myself."
"No, no. Don't be conventional. That isn't worthy of you. It's my business to understand people. You are the kind of woman who can stand aside and look at facts, without being deluded by any fogs of sentimentality. We speak the same language. That's why I talk to you like this."
His hand went across and gripped her shoulder, so that she had to stop and turn.
"You are the kind of woman with whom I could forget to be cold."
He drew her towards him, and she closed her eyes before he kissed her. His mouth was hard, with a kind of rubbery smoothness that chilled her so that she shivered. After a long time he released her. His eyes burned on her like hot coals.
"You'll stay, Loretta?" he said hoarsely.
"No." She swayed away from him. She felt queerly sick, and the air had become heavy and oppressive. "I don't know. You're too quick. . . . Ask me again to-morrow. Please."
"I'm leaving to-morrow."
"You are?"
"We're going to St Peter Port. I hoped you would come with us."
"Give me a cigarette."
He felt in his pockets. The commonplace distraction, thrust at him like that, blunted the edge of his attack.
"I'm afraid I left my case inside. Shall we go in?"
He opened the door, and her hand rested on his arm for a moment as she passed him into the wheelhouse. He passed her a lacquer box and offered her a light.
"You didn't show me this," she said, glancing round the room. was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the most attractive living-rooms on the ship. At the after end there were shelves of books, half a dozen deep long armchairs invited idleness, a rich carpet covered the floor. Long straight windows ran the length of the beam sides, and the forward end was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the structure. There were flowers in chromium wall brackets, and concealed lights built into the ceiling. The wheel and instrument panel up in one corner, the binnacle in front of it and the littered chart table filling the forward bay, looked almost like property fittings, as if a millionaire's whim had played with the idea of decorating a den in an ordinary house to look like the interior of a yacht.
"We were coming here," said Vogel.
He did not smoke, and he had an actor's mastery over his unoccupied hands which in him seemed to be only the index of an inhuman restraint. She thought he was gathering himself to recover the mood of a moment ago; but before he spoke again there was a knock on the door.
"What is it?" he demanded sharply—it was the first time she had seen a crack in the glassy veneer of his self-possession.
"Excuse me, sir."
The steward who had served dinner stood at the door, his saturnine face mask-like and yet obsequiously expressive. He stood there and waited, and Vogel turned to Loretta with an apologetic shrug.
"I'm so sorry—will you wait for me a moment?"
The door closed on the two men, and she relaxed against the back of a chair. The cigarette between her fingers was held quite steadily—there wasn't a crease or an indentation in the white oval paper to level a mute accusation at the mauling of unsteadied fingers. She regarded it with an odd detached interest. There was even a full half-inch of ash built out unbroken from the end of it—a visible reassurance that she hadn't once exposed the nervous strain that had keyed up inside her almost to breaking pitch.
She dragged herself off the chair-back and moved across the room. This was the first time she had been left alone since she came on board. It was the chance which had forced her through the ordeal of dinner, the one faint hope of finding a shred of evidence to mark progress on the job, without which anything she suffered would have been wasted—and would have to be gone through again.
She didn't know exactly what she was looking for. There was no definite thing to find. She could only search around with an almost frantic expectancy for any scrap of something that might be added to the slowly mounting compilation of what was known about Kurt, Vogel—for something that might perhaps miraculously prove to be the last pointer in the long paper-chase. Others had worked like that before, teasing out fragments of knowledge with infinite patience and at infinite risk. Fragments that had been built up over many months into the single clue that had brought her there.
She ran her eyes over the titles of the books in the cases. There were books on philosophy, books on engineering and navigation, books on national and international law in various languages. There were works on criminology, memoirs of espionage, a very few novels of the highly mathematical detective type. They didn't look like dummies. She pulled out a couple at random and flicked the pages. They were real; but it would have taken twenty minutes to try them all.