I hesitated, thought of Miss Beresford who had already elbowed her way in, realised I’d now no way of stopping any or all of the passengers from getting into the act if they wanted to, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Carreras. You don’t look like a man who would miss very much.”

“We come from the same mould, Mr. Carter.”

I let this cryptic remark go and hurried outside. A cloudless night, with the sky crowded with the usual impossible number of stars, a soft, warm wind blowing out of the south, a moderate cross swell running, but no match for our Denny Brown stabilisers that could knock twenty-five degrees off a thirty-degree roll without half trying. A black shape detached itself from a nearby shadowed bulkhead and Archie Macdonald, the bo’sun, came towards me. For all his solid fifteen-stone bulk he was as light on his feet as a dancer. “Any luck, bo’sun?” I asked.

“No one saw anything; no one heard anything. And there were at least a dozen folk on deck tonight, between eight and nine.”

“Mr. Wilson there? Ah, there. Mr. Wilson, take the engine room staff and three A.B.S. Main deck and below. You should know where to look by this time,” I added bitterly. “Macdonald, you and I will do the upper decks. Port side you, starboard side me. Two seamen and a cadet. Half an hour. Then back here.” I sent one man to examine the boat positions — why Benson should have wished to get into a boat I couldn’t even imagine, except that lifeboats have always had a queer attraction for those who wished to hide, although why he should wish to hide I couldn’t guess either — and another to scour the superstructure abaft the bridge. I started going through the cabins on the boat deck, chart house, flag and radar cabins and had Mr. Carreras to help me. Rusty, our youngest apprentice, went aft to work his way forward, accompanied by Miss Beresford who had probably guessed, and rightly, that I was in no mood for her company. But Rusty was. He always was. Nothing that Susan Beresford said to or about him made the slightest difference to him. He was her slave and didn’t care who knew it. If she’d asked him to jump down the funnel, just for her sake, he’d have considered it an honour. I could just imagine him searching about the upper decks with Susan Beresford by his side, his face the same colour as his flaming shock of hair. As I stepped out of the radar office, I literally bumped into him. He was panting, as if he’d run a long way, and I could see I had been wrong about the colour of his face: in the half-light on the deck it looked grey, like old newspaper. “Radio office, sir.” He gasped out the words and caught my arm, a thing he would never normally have dreamed of doing. “Come quickly, sir. Please.” I was already running. “You found him?”

“No, sir. It’s Mr. Brownell.” Brownell was our Chief Wireless Operator. “Something seems to have happened to him.”

I reached the office in ten seconds, brushed past the pale blur of Susan Beresford standing just outside the door, crossed over the storm sill, and stopped. Brownell had the overhead rheostat turned down until the room was less than half lit, a fairly common practice among radio operators on duty night watches. He was leaning forward over his table, his head pillowed on his right forearm, so that all I could see was his shoulders, dark hair, and the bald spot that had been the bane of his life. His left hand was outflung, his fingers just brushing the bridge telephone. The transmitting key was sending continuously. I eased the right forearm forward a couple of inches. The transmitting stopped. I felt for the pulse in the outstretched left wrist. I felt for the pulse in the side of the neck. I turned to Susan Beresford, still standing in the doorway, and said, “Do you have a mirror?” she nodded wordlessly, fumbled in her bag, and handed over a compact, opened, the mirror showing. I turned up the rheostat till the radio cabin was harsh with light, moved Brownell’s head slightly, held the mirror near mouth and nostrils for maybe ten seconds, took it away, glanced at it, then handed it back. “Something’s happened to him all right,” I said. My voice was steady, unnaturally so. “He’s dead. Or I think he’s dead. Rusty, get Dr. Marston right away. He’s usually in the telegraph lounge this time of night. Tell the captain, if he’s there. Not a word to anyone else about this.”

Rusty disappeared and another figure appeared to take his place beside Susan Beresford in the doorway. Carreras. He stopped, one foot over the storm sill, and said, “My god! Benson.”

“No, Brownell. Wireless officer. I think he’s dead.” On the off-chance that Bullen hadn’t yet gone down to the lounge I reached for the bulkhead phone labelled “Captain’s cabin” and waited for an answer, staring at the dead man sprawled across the table. Middle-aged, cheerful, his only harmless idiosyncrasy being an unusual vanity about his personal appearance that had once even driven him to the length of buying a toupee for his bald spot — public shipboard opinion had forced him to discard it Brownell was one of the most popular and genuinely liked officers on the ship. Was? Had been. I heard the click of a lifted receiver. “Captain? Carter here. Could you come down to the wireless office? At once, please.”

“Benson?” “Brownell. Dead, sir, I think.” There was a pause, a click. I hung up, reached for another phone that connected directly to the radio officers’ cabins. We had three radio officers and the one with the middle watch, from midnight to 4 a.m., usually skipped dinner in the dining room and made for his bunk instead. A voice answered: “Peters here.”

“First mate. Sorry to disturb you, but come up to the radio room right away.”

“What’s up?”

“You’ll find out when you get here.” The overhead light seemed far too bright for a room with a dead man in it. I turned the rheostat and the white glare was replaced by a deep yellow glare.

Rusty’s face appeared in the doorway. He didn’t seem so pale any more, but maybe the subdued light was just being kind to him. “Surgeon’s coming, sir.” His breathing was quicker than ever. “Just picking up his bag in the dispensary.”

“Thanks. Go and fetch the bo’sun, will you? And no need to kill yourself running, Rusty. There’s no great hurry now.” He left, and Susan Beresford said in a low voice, “What’s wrong? What — what happened to him?”

“You shouldn’t be here, Miss Beresford.”

“What happened to him?” She repeated. “That’s for the ship’s surgeon to say. Looks to me as if he just died where he sat. Heart attack, coronary thrombosis, something like that.” she shivered, made no reply. Dead men were no new thing to me, but the faint icy prickling on the back of my neck and spine made me feel like shivering myself.

The warm trade wind seemed cooler, much cooler, than it had a few minutes ago. Dr. Marston appeared. No running, no haste, even, with Dr. Marston: a slow measured man with a slow measured stride. A magnificent mane of white hair, clipped white moustache, a singularly smooth and unlined complexion for a man getting so far on in years, steady, clear, keen blue eyes with a peculiarly penetrating property, here, you knew instinctively, was a doctor you could trust implicitly, which only went to show that your instinct should be taken away from you and locked up in some safe place where it couldn’t do you any harm.

Admittedly, even to look at him made you feel better, and that was all right as far as it went, but to go further, to put your life in his hands, say, was a very different and dicey proposition altogether, for there was an even chance that you wouldn’t get it back again. Those piercing blue eyes had not lighted on the “lancet” or made any attempt to follow the latest medical developments since quite a few years prior to the Second World War. But they didn’t have to: he and Lord Dexter had gone through prep school, public school, and university together and his job was secure as long as he could lift a stethescope. And, to be fair to him, when it came to treating wealthy and hypochondriacal old ladies he had no equal on the seven seas. “Well, John,” he boomed.