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him?’
    â€˜Four times now.’
    â€˜Vital statistics?’
    â€˜Won three, lost one.’
    Lucy threw him a look.
    â€˜Mid-twenties, although he looks older, probably because he’s on the portly side.’
    â€˜Portly?’ said Lucy, unable to mask her disappointment.
    â€˜Pleasingly so. Well-fed rather than fat. What else? He’s not tall, but you wouldn’t describe him as short . . . well, some might. And he still has most of his hair, which is dark and rather wiry.’
    â€˜He sounds . . . intriguing.’
    â€˜No he doesn’t, but he is. I’ve got to know him rather well over the past couple of weeks.’
    Lucy brought the sloop about, falling in behind a forty-foot cruising ketch motoring towards the harbour mouth.
    Beyond the breakwater, the wind piped up nicely, but Lucy seemed in no hurry to run up the mainsail. Her gaze was fixed on the ketch beating to windward at a fair lick, under full sail now.
    â€˜I think that’s enough of a head start, don’t you?’
    She cranked the winch, raising the mainsail.
    The moment the ketch’s skipper saw them coming he began barking commands, not that it made any difference. The Albatross cut through the chop as if it didn’t exist, her big canvas sheets sucking every available ounce of energy out of the air. While the crew of the ketch scrambled about her topsides, trying to trim up properly, Lucy barely moved a muscle. When she finally did, it was only to offer a demure little salute to the skipper as she overhauled him.
    â€˜Judging from his expression, I would say he hates you.’
    â€˜It wasn’t me,’ grinned Lucy, her flushed face a picture of pure contentment. ‘The helm’s so balanced I could have tied off the tiller and taken a nap.’
    They fell off, running dead before the wind to the eastward, making for Le Rayol. While Lucy put the sloop through its paces, getting to know its limits, Tom sat back and enjoyed the view.
    There were any number of spots along the Riviera where the mountains collided with the sea, but for a short stretch east of Le Lavandou it seemed almost as if the two elements had struck some secret pact, Earth and Water conspiring together to create a place of wild, primitive beauty. The high hills backing the coast fell away sharply in a tumble of tree-shrouded spurs and valleys which were transformed on impact with the sea into a run of rocky headlands separated by looping bays. Dubbed the Côte des Maures – a reminder of a time when the Saracens had held sway over this small patch of France – the exoticism of the title seemed entirely appropriate. The beaches strung out along the shoreline, like pearls on a necklace, were of a sand so fine and white, the waters that washed them so unnaturally blue, that they might well have been transported here from some far-flung corner of the tropics.
    â€˜Stand by to gybe!’ called Lucy.
    â€˜Ready.’
    â€˜Gybe ho!’
    They both ducked the swinging boom as the stern moved through the wind, bringing them round on to a port tack run. Lucy steadied up the Albatross . ‘She feels like a big boat but responds like a small one. How’s that possible?’
    It was a rhetorical question, and Tom smiled at her wonderment.
    Only one thing was missing from the moment: Hector. He should have been there with them in the cockpit, or, as he often liked to do, standing steadfastly at the bow, snout into the wind like some canine figurehead.
    Tom had spent the previous evening walking the twisting coast road either side of Le Rayol, checking the verges and ditches, sick with fear at what he might find. He pushed the memory from him, steering his thoughts towards a far more pleasing prospect: that Hector had finally found his way home, and that as they sailed into the cove below the villa he would come bounding out of the trees behind the boathouse on to the little crescent moon beach, barking