After maybe half an hour’s restless pacing about the bridge, Bullen turned to go. Just at the head of the companionway he hesitated, turned, beckoned me, and walked out to the end of the starboard wing. I followed.

“I’ve been thinking about Dexter,” he said quietly. “What would be the effect I’m past caring about the passengers now; I’m only worried about the lives of every man and woman aboard — if I announced that Dexter had been murdered?” “Nothing,” I said. “If you can call mass hysteria nothing.”

“You don’t think the fiends responsible for all this might call it off? Whatever ‘it’ is?”

“I’m dead certain they wouldn’t. As no mention has been made of Dexter yet, no attempt to explain away his absence, they must know we know he’s dead. They’ll know damned well that the officer of the watch can’t disappear from the bridge without a hue and cry going up. We’d just be telling them out loud what they already know without being told. You won’t scare this bunch off. People don’t play as rough as they do unless there’s something tremendous at stake.”

“That’s what I thought myself, Johnny,” he said heavily. “That’s just what I thought myself.” He turned and went below, and I had a sudden foreknowledge of how Bullen would look when he was an old man.

I stayed on the bridge until two o’clock, long past my usual time for relief, but then I’d deprived Jamieson, who had the afternoon watch, of much free time that morning. A tray came up to me from the galley, and for the first time ever I sent an offering by Henriques back untouched. When Jamieson took over the bridge he didn’t exchange a word with me except routine remarks about course and speed. From the strained, set expression on his face you would have thought he was carrying the mainmast of the Campari over his shoulder. Bullen had been talking to him; he’d probably been talking to all the officers. That would get them all as worried as hell and jittery as a couple of old spinsters lost in the casbah; I didn’t see that it would achieve anything else.

I went to my cabin, closed the door, pulled off shoes and shirt, and lay down on my bunk — no four-posters for the crew of the Campari — after adjusting the louvre in the overhead cold-air trunking until the draught was directed on my chest and face. The back of my head ached and ached badly. I adjusted a pillow under it and tried to ease the pain. It still ached, so I let it go and tried to think. Somebody had to think and I didn’t see that old Bullen was in any state for it. Neither was I, but I thought all the same. I would have bet my last cent that the enemy — I couldn’t think of them as anything else by this time — knew our course, destination, and time of arrival almost as well as we did ourselves. And I knew that they couldn’t afford to let us arrive in Nassau that night, not, at least, until they had accomplished what they had set out to accomplish, whatever that might be. Somebody had to think. Time was terribly short.

By three o’clock I’d got nowhere. I’d worried all round the problem as a terrier worries an old slipper; I’d examined it from every angle; I’d put forward a dozen different solutions, all equally improbable, and turned up around dozen suspects, all equally impossible. My thinking was getting me nowhere. I sat up, careful of my stiff neck, fished a bottle of whisky from a cupboard, poured a drink, watered it, knocked it back, and then, because it was illegal, helped myself to another. I placed this second on the table by my bunk and lay down again.

The whisky did it. I’ll always swear the whisky did it; as a mental lubricant for rusted-up brains it has no parallel. After five more minutes of lying on my back, staring sightlessly up at the cold-air trunking above my head, I suddenly had it. I had it suddenly, completely and all in a moment, and I knew beyond doubt that I had it right. The radio! The receiver on which the message to the wireless office had been intercepted! There had been no radio. God, only a blind man like myself could have missed it; of course there had been no radio. But there had been something else again. I sat bolt upright with a jerk, Archimedes coming out of his bath, and yelped as a hot blade skewered through the back of my neck.

“Are you subject to these attacks often or do you always carry on like this when you are alone?” A solicitous voice enquired from the doorway. Susan Beresford, dressed in a square-necked white silk dress, was standing in the entrance, her expression half amused, half apprehensive. So complete had been my concentration that I’d never even heard the door open.

“Miss Beresford.” I rubbed my aching neck with my right hand. “What are you doing here? You know passengers are not allowed in the officers’ quarters?”

“No? I understood my father had been up several times in the past few trips talking to you.”

“Your father is not young, female, and unmarried.”

“Pfui!” she stepped into the cabin and closed the door behind her. All at once the smile was no longer on her face. “Will you talk to me, Mr. Carter?”

“Any time,” I said courteously. “But not here…” my voice trailed away. I was changing my mind even as I spoke.

“You see, you’re the only person I can talk to,” she said.

“Yes.” a beautiful girl alone in my cabin and plainly anxious to speak to me and I wasn’t even listening to her. I was figuring out something; it did involve Susan Beresford but only incidentally.

“Oh, do pay attention,” she said angrily.

“All right,” I said resignedly. “I’m paying.”

“You’re paying what?” she demanded.

“Attention.” I reached for my whisky glass. “Cheers!”

“I thought you were forbidden alcohol on duty?”

“I am. What do you want?”

“I want to know why no one will talk to me.” She lifted a hand as I made to speak. “Please don’t be facetious. I’m worried. Something’s terribly wrong, isn’t there? You know I always talk more to the officers than any of the other passengers” — I passed up the pleasure of loosing off a couple of telling shafts — "and now nobody will talk to me. Daddy says I’m imagining it. I’m not. I know I’m not. They won’t talk. And not because of me. I know. They’re all dead scared about something, going about with tight faces and not looking at anyone but looking at them all the time. Something is wrong, isn’t there? Terribly, terribly wrong. And Fourth Officer Dexter he’s missing, Isn’t he?” “What would be wrong, Miss Beresford?”

“Please.” This was something for the books, Susan Beresford pleading with me. She walked across the cabin — with the size of the accommodation old Dexter saw fit to provide for his chief officers that didn’t require more than a couple of steps — and stood in front of me. “Tell me the truth. Three men missing in twenty-four hours — don’t tell me that’s coincidence. And all the officers looking as if they’re going to be shot at dawn.”

“Don’t you think it strange you’re the only person who seems to have noticed anything unusual? How about all the other passengers?”

“The other passengers!” The tone of her voice didn’t say a great deal for the other passengers. “How can they notice anything with all the women either in bed for their afternoon sleep or at the hairdresser’s or in the massage room and all the men sitting around in the telegraph lounge like mourners at a funeral just because the stock exchange machines have broken down? And that’s another thing. Why have those machines broken down? And why is the radio office closed? And why is the Campari going so fast? I went right aft just now to listen to the engines and I know we’ve never gone so fast before.”

She didn’t miss much and that was a fact. I said, “Why come to me?”

“Daddy suggested it.” She hesitated, then half smiled. “He said I was imagining things and that for a person suffering from delusions and a hyperactive imagination he could recommend nothing better than a visit to Chief Officer Carter, who doesn’t know the meaning of either.”