"I always thought the whole business was a devilish odd one," growled Tommy; "but the more one finds out about it the queerer it seems to get. These people of yours—McMurtrie and Savaroff—are weird enough customers on their own, but when it comes to their being mixed up with both George and Marks …" he paused. "It will turn out next that Latimer's in it too," he added half-mockingly.
"I shouldn't wonder," I said. "I can't swallow everything he told you, Tommy. It leaves too much unexplained. You see, I'm pretty certain that the chap who tried to do him in is one of McMurtrie's crowd, and in that case—"
"In that case," interrupted Tommy, with a short laugh, "we ought to have rather an interesting evening. Seems to me, Neil, we're what you might call burning our boats this journey."
The old compunction I had felt at first against dragging Tommy and
Joyce into my affairs suddenly came back to me with renewed force.
"I'm a selfish brute, Thomas," I said ruefully. "I think the best thing I could do really would be to drop overboard. The Lord knows what trouble I shall land you in before I've finished."
"You'll land me into the trouble of telling you not to talk rot in a minute," he returned. Then, standing up and peering out ahead over the long dim expanse of water, dotted here and there with patches of blurred light, he added cheerfully: "You take her over now, Neil, We're right at the end of the Yantlet, and after this morning you ought to know the rest of the way better than I do."
He resigned the tiller to me, and pulling out his watch, held it up to the binnacle lamp.
"Close on a quarter to nine," he said. "We shall just do it nicely if the engine doesn't stop."
"I hope so," I said. "I should hate to keep a Government official waiting."
We crossed the broad entrance into Queenborough Harbour, where the dim bulk of a couple of battleships loomed up vaguely through the haze. It was a strange, exhilarating sensation, throbbing along in the semi-darkness, with all sorts of unknown possibilities waiting for us ahead. More than ever I felt what Joyce had described in the morning—a sort of curious inward conviction that we were at last on the point of finding out the truth.