Patrick put down his brush. ‘Two weeks? We’ll have this work finished this afternoon. What are we going to wait for?’

‘For you to do a little job,’ John told him. ‘How on earth do you think we are going to launch this with that wreck blocking the way in the boat-house? We’ll have to get it up.’

‘We could drag this along the side and topple it into the water just beyond the wreck. There’s room. That’s what I thought we were going to do.’

‘And how about getting it back again afterwards?’

‘I thought we could leave it in the water. Most of it would be inside the boat-house; there would only be the bows sticking out.’

‘The bows are quite enough to be spotted by a keeper. Everything we do is going to be done without leaving traces behind us. That wreck has got to be cleared away before we bring this boat out.’

‘We could smash it up, probably,’ Frank suggested. ‘Or get into the water and drag it out into the lake and leave it on the bottom.’

John looked at him. His face had something of the expression that had accompanied his last outburst to Ronnie and the others. For all the ludicrousness of the moustache on his young face, he looked a little frightening.

‘It isn’t much harder to do something useful,’ he said. ‘It may even be easier. Anyway, that’s what we are going to do.’