She was stunned to find that it was ten past eleven.
“Go and have another look,” she said. “Go a little way down the hill and see if he’s coming.”
Orace went, as though he thought it was waste of energy.
Patricia went out and looked down from the cliff edge again. Her calculation had been a good one. The tip of the moon had just peeped up over the rim of the sea, and that made the visibility an infinitesimal fraction of a candle-power better. In an hour or two there would be as much light as they wanted, and probably rather more. And the Tiger’s motor ship was riding right under her eyes, quite easy to see now, about three cables’ lengths off the island. Two black midgets, which she recognised as the ship’s boats, were sculling towards the Old House; she could hear, very faintly, the almost imperceptible rattle of a smooth-running donkey engine. It was not for some time after that she observed a third boat cruising diagonally across the water towards the big ship. From its course she knew that it must have come from the direction of the quay.
Was that Carn, possibly supported by other detectives, ferrying out to catch the Tiger? If so, she was too late, and the law would have to deal with the Tiger after its own protracted and quibbling fashion. . . . But would Carn have been so foolish as to imagine that he could approach the Tiger like that without being spotted by the look out on board? She knew that detectives were popularly judged by the standards of fiction, according to which all police officials have big feet and small intelligence, but she could hardly believe that even the flat-footed kind of oaf depicted by the novelist could be such a flabbergasting imbecile.
Suddenly she saw the solution. The Tiger was in Baycombe, but with the removal of his gold the reason for his stay was also taken away. That boat must have been sent over to fetch him. The Tiger was even then being rowed out to his ship—the ship they were to capture.
Patricia drew a deep breath. Things were clearing up. All the widespread threads of the tangled web of mystery and terror that had cast its shadow so unexpectedly over her life and her home had been obligingly gathered up and dumped down in the few hundred square yards of shining water below. The gold was there; the Tiger was there; the Tiger Cubs were there. The gold was of secondary importance, and the Tiger Cubs, being nothing without their leader, were of no importance whatever except as a dangerous obstacle to be overcome. But the Tiger was the big prize in the Lucky Dip, and that was a gamble she was relentlessly determined to win. There would be no more mystery about his identity, once she was on board: he could only be one of two people. And then . . .
Orace loomed silently out of the dimness.
“Carn’t see ’im,” he said shortly, and with that he would have dismissed the subject of Mr. Lomas-Coper. “Owda we get dahn this plurry precipyse, Miss Patricia? I’d fergot—we ain’t got no rope ter speak of ’ere.”
“He was going to bring some,” said the girl. “I wonder if anything’s happened to him?”