The sergeant was beyond surprise. "The only wonder to me is you haven't got an aeroplane waiting," he said. "Pity you didn't think of that. How did you come to have this here boat?"
"I hired it. I've a man watching the bungalow from this side of the creek. He'll take us across. I daren't risk going round by road. Takes too long, though that's the way the Vauxhall went. There's a wooden landing-stage at the bottom of the bungalow garden."
"Know all about it, don't you, sir?"
"I ought to. I came down here this morning to investigate."
"Well, I'll be jiggered!" said the sergeant. "Whatever made you do that, sir? Did you find anything out?"
"I did. I found that a certain privately owned motorboat has been fetched from Morton's Yard, which we passed a little way back, and made fast to a mooringbuoy about a quarter of a mile up the creek. Not only has she recently been overhauled, but her tanks are full. I found that so interesting, Sergeant, that I'm paying a longshoreman who lives in one of the cottages this side of the creek to watch the boat and the bungalow and let me know what he sees."
The sergeant found that he could still feel surprise after all. He would very much have liked to ask why Mr. Amberley should suddenly dart off to Littlehaven unknown to anyone, and why the vicissitudes of a motorboat should interest him in the least, but he thought it unlikely that he would get a satisfactory answer just now. He merely said: "Well, sir, I'll say one thing for you; for one who ain't in the Force you're very thorough. Very thorough indeed, you are."
The road curved inland; the sergeant could see the sheen of water and knew that they must have reached the creek. The car was slowing down and stopped presently in front of a small cottage about five hundred yards from the coast. The sergeant, peering, could just see the dark line of the shore -on the other side of the creek, and something that might have been a house reared the night sky.
Amberley had opened the door of the car and was getting out when suddenly he checked and said sharply: "Listen!"
Through the stillness of the evening the throb of a motorboat's engines drifted over the water to their ears.