Her fingers curled up and tightened. Nothing in the books. The littered chart table, perhaps . . . She crossed the room quickly, startled by the loud swish of her dress as she moved, her heart throbbing at a speed which surprised her even more. Funny, she thought. Three weeks ago she would have sworn she didn't possess a heart—or nerves. A week ago. A day ago. Or a century.
She was staring down at the table, at a general chart of the Channel Islands and the adjacent coast of France, spread out on the polished teak. But what was there in a chart? A course had been ruled out from Dinard to St Peter Port, with a dog's-leg bend in it to clear the western end of the Minquiers. There was a jotted note of bearings and distances by the angle of the thin pencilled lines. Nothing in that . . . Her glance wandered helplessly over the scattered smudges of red which stood for lighthouses and buoys.
And then she was looking at a red mark that wasn't quite the same as the other red marks. It was a distinct circle drawn in red ink around a dot of black marked to the east of Sark. Beside it, also in red ink, neat tiny figures recorded the exact bearing.
The figures jumbled themselves before her eyes. She gripped on her bag, trying to stifle the absurd pulse of excitement that was beginning to work under her ribs. Just like that. So easy, so plain. Perhaps the last clue, the fabulous open sesame that had been tormenting her imagination. Whatever those red marks meant—and others would soon find that out.
There was a pencil lying on the table; and she had opened her bag before she remembered that she had nothing in it to write on. Lipstick on a handkerchief, then . . . but there were a dozen scraps of torn-up paper in an ashtray beside the pencil, and a square inch of paper would be enough.
Her hand moved out.
Suddenly she felt cold all over. There was a feeling of nightmare limpness in her knees, and when she breathed again it was in a queer little shuddering sigh. But she put her hand into her bag quite steadily and took out a powder box. Quite steadily she dabbed at her nose, and quite steadily she walked away to another table and stood there turning the pages of a magazine— with the thrum of a hundred demented dynamos pounding through her body and roaring sickeningly in her brain.
Those scraps of inviting paper. The pencil ready to be picked up at the first dawn of an idea. The chart left out, with the red bearing marked on it. The excuse for Vogel to leave the room. The ordeal on the deck, before that, which had sabotaged her self-control to the point where the finest edge of her vigilance was dulled ... to the point where her own aching nerves had tempted her on to the very brink of a trap from which only the shrieked protest of some indefinable sixth sense had held her back ...
She stood there shivering inside, although her hand was quite steady—scanning a meaningless succession of pictures which printed themselves on her retinas without ever reaching her brain. For several seconds she hadn't the strength to move again.
She fought back towards mastery of herself. After an eternity that could scarcely have lasted a quarter of a minute, she let the magazine fall shut on the table and strolled idly back to the chair from which she had started. She sat down. She could feel that her movements were smooth and unhurried, her face calm and untroubled in spite of the tumult within her. Before that, her face and hands might have betrayed her—it only depended on the angle from which she must have been watched. But when Vogel came back, the smile with which she looked up to greet him was serene and artless.
He nodded.
"Please excuse me."
The smile with which he answered her was perfunctory and preoccupied—he didn't even make the mistake of looking closely at her. He went straight across to a folding bureau built into the panelling on one side of the room, and pulled out a drawer.
"I don't want you to be alarmed," he said in his cold even voice, "but I should like you to stay here a few minutes longer."
She felt the creep of her skin up towards the nape of her neck, and searched for the voice that had once been her own.
"I'm quite comfortable," she said.
"I think you'd better stay," he said, and turned round as he slipped the jacket of a big blued automatic in his hand. "The stewards have seen someone prowling about the ship again, just like that mysterious person I told you about who was here last night. But this time he isn't going to get away so easily."
3
Something as intangible as air and as vicious as a machinegun began hammering at the pit of Loretta's stomach. The cohort of ghostly dynamos sang in her ears again, blotting out her precarious instant of hard-won peace in a din that was twice as bad as anything before it. She felt the blood draining down from her head until only a dab of powder and the sea-tan on her skin were left to save her from ultimate disaster.
"Not really?" she said.
Her voice seemed to come from four or five miles away, a mere hollow echo of itself. She knew that by some miracle of will-power she had kept the smile steady on her face; but even that wasn't enough. The disaster was not dispelled—it was barely checked.
A queer glimpse of desperate humour was the only thing she could cling to. She, who had met case-hardened men on their own ground, who had faced death as often as dishonour, and with the same poised contempt and unfaltering alertness—she, Loretta Page, who was ranked at Ingerbeck's as the coolest head on a roster of frost-bitten intellects which operated in the perpetual bleakness of temperatures below zero—was being slowly and inevitably broken up. The rasps of a third degree more subtle and deadly than anything she had ever dreamed of were achieving what mere violence and crude terrorism could never have achieved. They were working away as implacably and untiringly as fate, turning her own self into her bitterest enemy.
Vogel's jet-black eyes were fixed on her now. They had moved on to her face like the poles of a magnet from which she would have had to struggle transparently to get away; and yet his aquiline features were still without positive expression.
"You've nothing to worry about," he said, in a purr of caressing reassurance.
"But I'm thrilled." She met his gaze unflinchingly, with the same smile of friendly innocence. "What is it that makes you so popular?"
He shrugged.
"They're probably just some common harbour thieves who think the boat looks as if she might have some valuables on board. We shall find out."
"Let me come with you."
"My dear——"
"I'm not a bit frightened. Not while you've got that gun. And I'll be awfully quiet. But I couldn't bear to miss anything so exciting. Please—would you mind?"
He hesitated for a moment only, and then opened the door on the starboard side.
"All right. Will you keep behind me?"
He switched out the lights, and she followed him out on to the deck. Under the dim glow of the masthead light she caught sight of his broad back moving forward, and stepped after him. In the first shock of transition from the bright illumination of the wheelhouse there was no difference in quality between the blackness of the air and the sea, so that the night seemed to lie all around them, above and below, as if the Falkenberg was suspended in a vast bowl of darkness sprinkled with tiny twinkling lights. Vogel was almost invisible in his black evening clothes as he tiptoed round in the half-solid shadow to the other side of the deck; and when he halted she could hardly have been a pace behind him—his shape swam up before her eyes so suddenly that she touched him as she stopped.
"He's still there."
His voice touched her eardrums as a mere bass vibration in the stillness. From where she stood she could look down the whole length of the deck, a grey pathway stencilled with the yellow windows of the saloon where Yule and Arnheim were still presumably discussing the port. The deckhouse profiled itself in black and slanted black banks of shadow across the open space. Away aft there was another shadow merging into the rest, a thing that distinguished itself only by its shorter and sharper curves from the long cubist lines of the others—something that her eyes found and froze on.