And I did yawnings and Hugo Rune did too and then we went off to our bunks.

I arose at three the following afternoon, bathed, dressed and went for a stroll on the promenade deck. It was late September now [12] and the sun was low in the sky, throwing long shadows and making the grandeur seem somehow even more grand. I tipped the brim of my panama to passing ladies and wished that I had a dandy cane to twirl between my fingers. This was the life, there was no mistake about it. And though it was all so terribly wrong, it still felt marvellous.

I had wandered about a half a mile along the portside deck when I spied the first of them. And with this spying I realised why Fangio had used the word odd to describe them. The first of the Eastern European nannas.

She was a tiny wrinkled thing with a face like a pickled prune and she was all swaddled up in numerous furs and seated in an old-fashioned wicker bath chair. A gentleman of military appearance with spectacular mustachios steered this chair along. Several children fussed about the prunish nanna, offering her sweeties and dabbing at her mouth with dainty handkerchiefs. Their costumes put me in mind of a photograph I had seen of the Czar and his family, shortly before they came to their terrible end in that cellar at Yekaterinburg in nineteen eighteen.

I offered that nanna a brim-tip and smile, but she returned this pleasantry with such a bitter-eyed look of pure loathing that it quite put the wind up me.

I decided to cease my stroll and find myself some breakfast.

There was seating in the First Class Diner for eighteen hundred people. The tablecloths were of Irish linen, the knives and forks of silver. The head waiter asked for my stateroom number and then led me to my table. Where, sitting squarely, his napkin tucked beneath his chin, Himself was already tucking in to kedgeree and pickled peacock eggs [13] and lapsang souchong tea.

‘Good afternoon to you, Rizla,’ he called. ‘The same again for my young companion, if you will,’ he said to the head waiter, who departed after clickings of the heels.

I sat myself in a comfy chair and accepted a cup of tea.

‘How goes it, Rizla?’ asked Hugo Rune. ‘No seasickness setting in? All shipshape and Bristol fashion?’

‘Never better,’ I said, sipping tea. ‘Although I saw one of those odd old women that Fangio mentioned. And I can confirm that they are very odd and really rather scary.’

‘I think Bavarian beldames are the least of our concerns. But there are certainly some notable personages about this vessel. From the vantage point of this dining chair alone, I can see six high-ranking SS officers, who hopefully will be gracing Mr Pierrepoint’s noose at Nuremberg come the war’s conclusion. Two spies, two of America’s Most Wanteds, three Mafia dons, a defrocked bishop and a shady lady with a crazy baby and a taste for tights and chicken bites and stalactites and troglodytes.’

‘Right,’ I said, nodding. ‘And you must point out the last one to me.’

So Mr Rune pointed.

And I said, ‘Oh yes.’

And presently my breakfast arrived.

Because one of the joys of being rich, and there are many, is that you can take your breakfast at any time of the day or night. And no one will call you a slob.

I got involved with my pickled eggs and said nothing more for a while.

‘We will fall into a torpor on this voyage,’ said Mr Rune, with a sudden sadness. ‘We will need something to occupy our minds or we shall surely succumb to boredom and ennui.’

‘I think we can afford to give it a couple of days,’ I said, dipping a toast soldier into some kind of dip. ‘There are many more combinations of cocktails that need trying and I have yet to know the joys of dinnertime.’

‘Nevertheless, you have the remaining tarot cards?’

‘There’s only four left now,’ I said. And I named them: ‘THE MOON, THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE, THE TOWER and DEATH itself.’

‘Ah yes, DEATH,’ said the Magus. ‘That would be the card onto which you pasted a bit of sticking plaster, so as to distinguish it from the rest when I ask you to pick one out face down at random.’

‘Can you blame me?’ I said. ‘Who would want to pick that card?’

‘More tea?’ asked Hugo Rune, and he poured it. ‘Pick us another then, do.’

And so I chose THE MOON. ‘It looks harmless,’ I explained. ‘And there was a lovely moon last night. THE MOON shall be our talisman, as it were.’

‘Have a care, Rizla,’ said the guru’s guru. ‘You are beginning to think in the manner of a magician. And little good ever came from that!’ And then he popped one of my pickled eggs into his mouth and challenged me to a game of leapfrog on the poop deck.

When done with that, we dabbled in deck quoits, a chukka of cabin-boy polo, kept our hands in at korfball and waterskied a while behind the liner. And as the sun sank slowly in the west, we returned to our staterooms and dolled ourselves up for dinner.

My suit was laid out on my bunk before me, neatly pressed and made fragrant with what I supposed to be an expensive cologne. My shirt too was laundered and luxuriated within a cellophane sleeve. I unfolded this shirt and gave it a sniff and it too smelled most sweetly.

‘I could really get used to this,’ I said, for such treatment merits such clichés. And so I bathed and dried and gave myself a good all-over spraying with the complimentary bottle that held a prominent position on my toiletry table.

I then togged up in my finery and, growing just a tad dizzy from all the stuff I had sprayed on myself and others had sprayed on my clothes, I tottered out of my stateroom and went in search of dinner.

As Hugo Rune had yet to arrive, I seated myself in my reserved and comfy dining chair, ordered something preposterous from the drinks menu and wondered how many master forgers or post-modernist mistresses I could spy out amongst the gorgeously attired and moneyed classes.

They came and went before me, a cavalcade of opulence, the jeunesse dorée and the nouveau riche rubbing padded shoulders with nabobs and Plutocrats, patricians, princes and panjandrums. And would not you know it, or would not you not, they turned up their noses to me. In fact those that drew near to myself became decidedly sniffy. They dabbed at their upraised nostrils with initialled handkerchiefs and nosegays, made haughty disapproving sounds and hurried on their way.

I took a tentative sniff at myself, which caused my eyes to smart. ‘Note to self,’ I noted to myself. ‘Do not go so heavy on the free smelly stuff in future.’

My drink arrived and I sipped at it and wondered where Mr Rune was. The last thing he had said to me before we went our separate ways was, ‘Dinner promptly at eight, young Rizla.’

So what had become of him? I glanced down at my wristlet watch, and it was eight twenty-five.

At eight twenty-eight a bellboy appeared clasping a note in gloved fingers.

I unfolded this note and read the words on it. And at these my blood ran cold.

Please come at once

to the Stateroom Suite of

Lord Hugo Rune

read this note,

for he has been taken gravely ill

and may not survive until morning.