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or two as it ploughed into the waves with a ponderous slow-motion plunging progress, like a great anaemic whale. Beyond lay the quiet stretch of wooded coast from Hill Head up to Warsash and Bursledon, inaccessible except on foot or from the water. From his viewpoint on the island it usually appeared as a smudged mass of dark green, but now he could have counted off the thousands of trees one by one.
    The English summer may not be quite as mythical as some visitors have concluded, but its reputation for unpredictability is largely deserved. Like an inconsiderate annual houseguest, it can’t be relied upon to put in an appearance on schedule, or even to show up at all; and when it does appear it may arrive without notice and depart the scene just as abruptly. By these elastic standards this year’s summer had been a good one, the Saint observed to himself. The warmth had lasted pretty well without interruption right through from mid-June until this late August morning, when the abrupt-departure habit had manifested itself in temperature a good twelve to fifteen degrees down on the previous day’s.
    The wind was shifting about skittishly from moment to moment but blowing mostly from the west: which meant that the powerboats on their mainly westerly course would be headed directly into it.
    All of which meterological observation the Saint summed up to himself in this way: navigation straight forward, thanks to the visibility, but in every other way a rough, tough race.
    He girded up his figurative loins to meet this prognostication by consuming a leisurely and substantial hotel breakfast. As he munched his way imperturbably through grapefruit, wheatflakes, a buttered Finnan haddock that overhung the plate, and a mountain of toast, washed down with a pint or so of coffee, he looked forward to the exertion to come.
    The diet wasn’t the recipe for obesity that it might have been. He expected to burn it all up very quickly in the race. He expected to use a lot of energy in the eight or ten hours it might take him to win it. He knew that besides the drain of continued concentration on achieving every bit of non-suicidal speed the conditions might allow, there would be the constant exertion of riding the boat’s bucking motion so as to stay approximately upright and functional for all the time. He knew that he and his partner would need to draw liberally on their fitness, and he fully expected to see some of the competition drop out sooner or later for want to that same fitness.
    He had dressed for the race simply and practically in tough canvas trousers and oiled-wool sweater. As he strolled out of the hotel entrance, he met a shorter strong-looking man who was similarly clad but with the addition of a dark wollen beret on his close-cropped head.
    “OK, Vic?” The Saint grinned, clapped his navigator on the shoulder, and fell into step beside him.
    “Positively rarin’ to go, Soimon.”
    An answering grin split Vic’s broad canny face, which had the high colour of a man who had spent most of his life in the open air, summer and winter.
    “Tin’t ‘alf gointa be rough roide, though,” he added with a glance at the sky.
    “Looks like it,” the Saint agreed. “But there’s one consolation in that. If it’s uncomfortable for us, think how uncomfortable it’s going to be for at least one member of the Tatenor team. And if that slows ‘em down a fraction, I don’t suppose you and I’ll be the first to complain.”
    “Reck’n not,” Vic agreed, with a broad cheerful wink and a single oblique sweep of the head that was an expressive gesture halfway between an affirmative nod and a negative shake. “But ut’s a fast boat they’ve got there, arl roight … a moighty fast boat.”
    He paused as they turned to walk the last hundred yards along the harbour wall past most of the opposition to the Privateer’s mooring. “Reck’n we can beat ‘em though,” he added thoughtfully.
    “I reckon we can,” said the