"The coastline of Bear Island is regarded as perhaps the most inhospitably bleak in the world. This is especially true in the south where the island ends in vertical cliffs, the streams entering the sea by waterfalls. A characteristic feature of this area is the detached pillars of rock that stand in the sea close to the foot of the cliffs, remnants from that distant period when the island was considerably larger than it is now. The melting of the snows and ice in June/July, the powerful tidal streams and the massive erosion undermining those coastal hills so that large masses of rock are constantly falling into the sea. The great dolomite cliffs of Hambergfjcil drop sheer for over 1400 feet?: at their base, projecting from the seas are sharp needles of rock as much as 250 feet? high, while the Fuglefiell (Bird Fell) cliffs are almost as high and have at their most southerly point a remarkable series of high stacks, pinnacles, and arches. To the east of this point, between Kapp Bull and Kapp Kolthoff, is a bay surrounded on three sides by vertical cliffs which are nowhere less than 1000 feel? high.

"Those cliffs are the finest bird breeding grounds in the Northern Hemisphere."

It was all very fine for the birds, I supposed. That was the end of the Geographical Society's report-or as much of it as the writer had chosen to include-and I was bracing myself for a return to Heissman's limpid prose when the lee door opened and John Halliday staggered in. Halliday, the unit's highly competent stills photographer, was a dark, swarthy, taciturn, and unsmiling American. Even by his normal cheerless standards Halliday looked uncommonly glum. He caught sight of us and stood there uncertainly, holding the door open.

"I'm sorry." He made as if to go. "I didn't know-"

"Enter, enter," I said. "Things are not as they seem. What you see before you is a strictly doctor-patient relationship." He closed the" door and sat down morosely on the settee that Mary Stuart had so lately occupied.

"Insomnia?" I asked. "A touch of the mal demier?"

"Insomnia." He chewed dispiritedly on the wad of black tobacco that never seemed to leave his mouth. "The mal de mer's all Sandy's." Sandy, I knew, was his cabin-mate. True, Sandy hadn't been looking very bright when last I'd seen him in the galley but I'd attributed this to Haggerty's yearning to eviscerate him: at least it explained why he hadn't called in to see the Duke after he'd left us.

"Bit under the weather, is he?"

"Very much under the weather. Kind of a funny green colour and sick all over the damned carpet." Halliday wrinkled his nose. "The smell-"

"Mary." I shook her gently and she opened sleep-dulled eyes. "Sorry, I've got to go for a moment." She said nothing as I half-helped her to a sitting position, just glanced incuriously at Halliday and closed her eyes again.

I don't think he's all that bad," Halliday said. "Not poisoning or anything like that, I mean. I'm sure of it."

"No harm to take a look," I said. Halliday was probably right: on the other hand Sandy had had the freedom of the galley before Haggerty had caught him and with Sandy's prehensile and sticky fingers anything was conceivable, including the possibility that his appetite was not quite as birdlike as he claimed. I picked up my medical bag and left.

As Halliday had said, Sandy was of a rather peculiar greenish shade and he'd obviously been very sick indeed. He was sitting propped up in his bunk, with both forearms wrapped round his middle: he glared at me balefully as I entered.

"Christ, I'm dying," he wheezed. He swore briefly, pungently, and indiscriminately at life in general and Otto in particular. "Why that crazy bastard wants to drag us aboard this bloody old stinking hell ship-"

I gave him some sleeping sedatives and left. I was beginning to find Sandy a rather less than sympathetic character: more importantly, sufferers from aconitine poisoning couldn't speak far less indulge in the fluent Billingsgate in which Sandy was clearly so proficient. Swaying from side to side and again with her arms stretched out to support herself, Mary Stuart still had her eyes shut: Halliday, dejectedly chewing his wad of tobacco, looked up at me in lackadaisical half-enquiry as if he didn't much care whether Sandy was alive or dead.

"You're right," I said. "Just the weather." I sat down a little way from Mary Stuart and not as much as by a flicker of a closed eyelid did she acknowledge my presence. I shivered involuntarily and drew the steamer rug around me. I said: "It's getting a bit nippy in this saloon. Why don't you take one of these and kip down here?"

"No thanks. I'd no idea it would be so damn cold here. My blankets and pillow and it's me for the lounge." He smiled faintly. "Just as long as Lonnie doesn't trample all over me with his hobnailed boots in the middle watch." It was apparently common knowledge that the liquor in the lounge drew Lonnie like a lodestone. Halliday chewed some more then nodded at the bottle in Captain Imrie's wrought-iron stand. "You're a whisky man, Doe. That's the stuff to warm you up.)

"Agreed. But I'm a very choosy whisky man. What is it?"

Halliday peered. "Black Label."

"None better. But I'm a malt man myself. You're cold, you try some. It's on the house. Stole it from Otto."

"I'm not much of a one for Scotch. Now Bourbon-?'

"Corrodes the digestive tract. I speak as a medical man. Now, one sip of that stuff there and you'll swear off those lethal Kentucky brews forever . Go on. Try it."

Halliday looked at the bottle, as if uncertainly. I said to Mary Stuart: "How about you? just a little? You've no idea how it warms the cockles."

She opened her eyes and gave me that oddly expressionless look. "No thank you. I hardly ever drink." She closed her eyes again.

"The flaw that makes for perfection," I said absently, because my mind was on other things. Halliday wouldn't drink from that bottle, Mary Stuart wouldn't drink from that bottle, but Halliday seemed to think it was a good idea that I should. Had they both remained in their seats during my absence or had they been busy little bees, one keeping guard against my premature return while the other altered the character of the Black Label with ingredients not necessarily made in Scotland? Why else had Halliday come up to the saloon if not to lure me away? Why hadn't he gone direct to the lounge with blankets and pillow instead of wandering aimlessly up here to the saloon where he must have known from mealtimes that the temperature was considerably colder than it was down below?

Because, of course, before Mary Stuart had made her presence known to me here, she'd seen me through the outer windows and had reported to Halliday that a certain problem had arisen that could only be solved by bringing about my temporary absence from the saloon. Sandy's sickness had been a convenient Coincidence-if it had been a Coincidence, I suddenly thought: if Halliday was the person, or was in cahoots with the person who was so handy with poisons, then the introduction of some mildly emetic potion into Sandy's drink would have involved no more problem than that of opportunity. It all added up.

I became aware that Halliday was on his feet? and was lurching unsteadily in my direction, bottle in one hand and glass in the other: the bottle, I noticed almost mechanically, was about one third full. He halted, swaying, in front of me and poured a generous measure into the glass, bowed slightly, offered me the glass and smiled. "Maybe we're both on the hidebound and conservative side, Doe. In the words of the song, I will if you will so will I'

I smiled back. "Your willingness to experiment does you credit. But no thanks. I told you, I just don't like the stuff. I've tried it. Have you?"

"No, but I-"

"Well, how can you tell, then?"

I don't think-"