"Right. But these things aren't kept here." He took me to the adjacent cool room, where the fruits and vegetables were stored, thence below to the cold room, where sides of beef and pork and mutton swung eerily from steel hooks in the harsh light of naked bulbs. I found precisely what I had expected to find, nothing, told Haggerty that whatever had happened was clearly no fault of his, then made my way to the upper deck and along an interior passage till I came to Captain Imrie's cabin. I tried the handle, but it was locked. I knocked several times, without result. I hammered it until my knuckles rebelled, then kicked it, all with the same result: Captain Imrie had still about nine hours" sleep coming up and the relatively feeble noises I was producing had no hope of penetrating to the profound depths of unconsciousness he had now reached. I desisted. Smithy would know what to do.

I went to the galley, now deserted by Haggerty, and passed through the pantry into the dining saloon. Mary Darling and Allen were setting on a bulkhead settee, all four hands clasped together, pale-very pale-faces about three inches apart, gazing into each other's eyes in a kind of mystically miserable enchantment. It was axiomatic, I knew, that shipboard romances flourished more swiftly than those on land, but I had thought those phenomena were confined to the Bahamas and suchlike balmy climes: aboard a trawler in a full gale in the Arctic I should have thought that some of the romantically essential prerequisites were wholly absent or at least present in only minimal quantities. I took Captain Imrie's chair, poured myself a small drink and said, "Cheers!"

They straightened and jumped apart as if they'd been connected to electrodes and I'd just made the switch. Mary Darling said reproachfully:

"You did give us a fright, Dr. Marlowe."

"I'm sorry."

"Anyway, we were just leaving."

"Now I'm really sorry." I looked at Allen. "Quite a change from university, isn't it?"

He smiled wanly. "There is a difference."

"What were you studying there?"

"Chemistry."

"Long?"

"Three years. Well, almost three years." Again the wan smile. "It took me all that time to find out I wasn't much good at it."

"And you're now?"

"Twenty-one."

"All the time in the world to find out what you are good at. I was thirty three before I qualified as a doctor."

"Thirty-three." He didn't say it but his face said it for him: if he was that old when he qualified what unimaginable burden of years is he carrying now? "What did you do before then?"

"Nothing I'd care to talk about. Tell me, you two were at the captain's table for dinner tonight, weren't you?" They nodded. "Seated more or less opposite Antonio, weren't you?"

I think so," Allen said. hat was a good start. He just thought so.

"He's not well. I'm trying to find out if he ate something that disagreed with him, something he may have been allergic to. Either of you see what he had to eat?"

They looked at each other uncertainly.

"Chicken?" I said encouragingly. "Perhaps some French fries?"

"I'm sorry, Dr. Marlowe," Mary Darling said. "I'm afraid-well, we're not very observant." No help from this quarter, obviously: they were so lost in each other that they couldn't even remember what they had eaten. Or perhaps they just hadn't eaten anything. I hadn't noticed. I hadn't been very observant myself. But, then, I hadn't been expecting a murder to happen along.

They were on their feel? now, clinging to each other for support as the deck tried to vanish from beneath their feel?. I said: If you're going below I wonder if you'd ask Tadeusz if he'd be kind enough to come up and see me here. He'll be in the recreation room."

"He might be in bed," Allen said. "Asleep-"

"Wherever he is," I said with certainty, "he's not in bed."

Tadeusz appeared within a minute, reeking powerfully of brandy, a vexed expression on his aristocratic features. He said without preamble:

"Damned annoying. Most damned annoying. Do you know where I can find a master key? That idiot Antonio has gone and locked our cabin door from the inside and he must be hopped to the eyebrows with sedatives.

Simply can't waken him. Cretin!"

I produced his cabin key. "He didn't lock the door from the inside. I did from the outside." The Count looked at me for an uncomprehending moment, then mechanically reached for his flask as shocked understanding showed in his face. Not too much shock, just a little, but I was sure that what little there was was genuine. He tilted the flask and two or three drops trickled into his glass. He reached for the Black Label, helped himself with a steady but generous hand and drank deeply.

"He couldn't hear me? He-is beyond hearing?"

"I'm sorry. Something he ate, I can't think what else, some killer toxin, some powerful, quick-acting and deadly poison."

"Quite dead?" I nodded. "Quite dead," he repeated. "And I told him to stop making such a grand opera Latin fuss and walked away and left a dying man." He drank some more Scotch and grimaced, an expression that was no reflection on Johnnie Walker. "There are advantages in being a lapsed Catholic, Dr. Marlowe."

"Rubbish. Sackcloth and ashes not only don't help, they're simply just not called for here. All right, so you didn't suspect there was anything wrong with him. I saw him at table and I wasn't any cleverer and I'm supposed to be a doctor. And when you left him in the cabin it was too late anyway: he was dying then." I helped him to some more Scotch but left my own glass untouched: even one relatively sober mind around might prove to be of some help although just how I couldn't quite see at that moment. "You sat beside him at dinner. Can you remember what he ate?"

"The usual." The Count, it was clear, was more shaken than his aristocratic nature would allow him to admit. "Mother, he didn't cat the usual."

"I'm not in the right frame of mind for riddles, Tadeusz."

"Grapefruit and sunflower seeds. That was about what he lived on.

One of those vegetarian nuts."

"Walk softly, Tadeusz. Those nuts may yet be your pallbearers."

The Count grimaced again. "A singularly ill-chosen remark. Antonio never ate meat. And he'd a thing against potatoes. So all he had were the sprouts and horse-radish. I remember particularly well because Cecil and I gave him our horse-radish, to which, it seems, he was particularly partial." The Count shuddered. "A barbarian food, fit only for ignorant Anglo-Saxon palates. Even young Cecil has the grace to detest that offal."

It was noteworthy that the Count was the only person in the film unit who did not refer to Cecil Golightly as the Duke: perhaps he thought he was being upstaged in the title stakes but, more probably, as a dyed-in-the wool aristocrat himself, he objected to people taking frivolous liberties with titles.

"He had fruit juices?"

"Antonio had his own homemade barley water." The Count smiled faintly. It was his contention that everything that came out of a can had been adulterated before it went into that can. Very strict on those matters, was Antonio."

"Soup? Any of that?"

"Oxtail."

"Of course. Anything else? That he ate, I mean."

"He didn't even finish his main course-well, his sprouts and radish.

You may recall that he left very hurriedly."

"I recall. Was he liable to seasickness?"

I don't know. Don't forget, I've known him no longer than yourself.

He's been a bit off-colour for the past two days. But, then, who hasn't?"

I was trying to think up another penetrating question when John Cummings Goin entered. His unusual surname he'd inherited from a French grandfather in the High Savoy, where, apparently, this was not an altogether uncommon name. The film crew, inevitably, referred to him as Comin" and Goin', but Goin was probably wholly unaware of this: he was not the sort of man with whom one took liberties.