Moths swerved in at Charles’s window. The smoke from his cigarette streamed out and upwards on the faintest of breezes. He was thinking of Bunder. Why had no one ever questioned him? Could it be that Bunder had escaped? Or had he been arrested and still kept his mouth shut about his accomplices? Obviously he, Charles, could never know the answer to these and a hundred other questions. The men who had scattered and run before the police at the dock, for instance, surely some or all of them had been arrested. How long would it take for enquiries to lead to him wherever he hid himself? On the face of it, he ought to have been afraid; but he could not frighten himself. His deepest instincts told him that the whole business was over, for him at least. For one thing, if Bunder had only been a comparatively minor figure in a large organization, headed by men who never revealed their identity, some way had probably been found of intimidating the captured men into revealing nothing, not even the little that they knew. It was all quite beyond him, and yet he felt secure. When the police patrol car had swept past his uncon­scious form as he lay by the roadside, the law had brushed its net across him, and it had not picked him up. All he had to do was to stay a long way away from publicity, and especially police-court publicity. Deepest of all, generating a calm that spread through his mind, was the intuitive conviction that Bunder had not, in fact, been captured. ‘In any case they’re not taking me alive,’ he had said, and Charles had absolute confidence that he meant it. The pace, and the manner, of his driving had probably led him into a fatal accident; or he had taken some other way of following his victim out of this life. Somehow, and certainly, he had slipped through the net by the smallest hole of all.

A rustling and whispering from down below. Two figures, one of each gender, were making their way through the bushes. Who­ever they were, they had some reason for not wanting to be seen. Walter and the latest kitchen-maid, perhaps. He froze and watched intently.

‘I hope you’re right when you say this is simple,’ came a female voice. It was subdued almost to a whisper, but its clear, bell-like quality was unmistakable. ‘I still say you ought to have come to the hotel.’

‘I tell you this is much the simpler way,’ hissed Hutchins. ‘It would be absolutely impossible to avoid being seen down there. I’ve got to keep my job.’

So the June Veeber game was still going on, after a year! And the harpy had followed him down here.