Bear Island

4

At least Otto wasn't dead. Even above the sound of the wind and the sound of the sea, the creakings and groanings as the elderly trawler slammed her way into the Arctic gale, Otto's voice could be distinctly heard at least a dozen feel? from his cabin door. What he was saying, however, was far from distinct, the tearing gasps and agonised groans boded ill for what we would see when we opened the door.

Otto Gerran looked as he sounded, not quite in extremis but rapidly heading that way. As Goin had said, he was indeed rolling about the floor, both hands clutching his throat as if he was trying to throttle himself : his normally puce complexion had deepened to a dark and dangerous looking purple, his eyes were bloodshot and a purplish foam at his mouth had stained his lips to almost the same colour as his face: or maybe his lips were purplish anyway, like a man with cyanosis. As far as I could see he hadn't a single symptom in common with Smithy and Oakley: so much for the toxicological experts and their learned textbooks.

I said to Goin: "Let's get him on his feel? and along to the bathroom."

As a statement of intent it was clear and simple enough, but its execution was far from simple: it was impossible. The task of hoisting 245 lbs. Of unco-operative jellyfish to the vertical proved to be quite beyond us. I was just about to abandon the attempt and administer what would certainly be a very messy first aid on the spot when Captain Imrie and Mr.

Stokes entered the cabin. My surprise at the remarkable promptness with which they had put in an appearance was as nothing compared to my initial astonishment at observing that both men were fully dressed: it was not until I noticed the horizontal creases in their trousers that I realised that they had gone to sleep with all their clothes on. I made a brief prayer for Smithy's swift and complete recovery.

"What in the name of God goes on?" Whatever condition Captain Imrie had been in an hour or so ago, he was completely sober now. "Allison says that Italian fellow's dead and-" He stopped abruptly as Goin and I moved sufficiently apart to let him have his first glimpse of the prostrate moaning Gerran. "Jesus wept!" He moved forward and stared down.

"What the devil-an epileptic fit?"

"Poison. The same poison that killed Antonio and nearly killed the mate and Oakley. Come on, give us a hand to get him along to the bathroom.

"Poison!" He looked at Mr. Stokes as if to hear from him confirmation that it couldn't possibly be poison, but Mr. Stokes wasn't in the mood for confirming anything, he just stared with a kind of numbed fascination at the writhing man on the floor. "Poison! On my ship. What poison? Where did they get it? Who gave it to them? Why should-"

'I'm a doctor, not a detective. I don't know anything about who, where, when, why, what. All I know is that a man's dying while we're talking."

It took the four of us less than thirty seconds to get Otto Gerran along to the bathroom. It was a pretty rough piece of manhandling but it was a fair assumption that he would rather be Otto Gerran, bruised but alive, than Otto Gerran, unmarked but dead. The emetic worked just as swiftly and effectively as it had with Smithy and Oakley and within three minutes we had him back in his bunk under a mound of blankets. He was still moaning incoherently and shivering so violently that his teeth chattered uncontrollably, but the deep purple had begun to recede from his cheeks and the foam had dried on his lips.

"I think he's OK now but please keep an eye on him, will you?" I said to Goin. I'll be back in five minutes."

Captain Imrie stopped me at the door. "If you please, Dr. Marlowe, a word with you."

"Later."

"Now. As master of this vessel-" I put a hand on his shoulder and he became silent. I felt like saying that as master of this vessel he'd been awash in Scotch and snoring in his bunk when people were all around dropping like flies but it would have been less than fair: I was irritable because unpleasant things were happening that should not have been happening and I didn't know why, or who was responsible.

"Otto Gerran will live," I said. "He'll live because he was lucky enough to have Mr. Goin here stop by his cabin. How many other people are lying on their cabin floors who haven't been lucky enough to have someone stop by, people so far gone that they can't even reach their doors? Four casualties so far: Who's to say there isn't a dozen?"

"A dozen? Aye. Aye, of course." If I was out of my depth, Captain Imrie was submerged. "We'll come with you."

"I can manage."

"Like you managed with Mr. Gerran here?"

We made our way directly to the recreation room. There were ten people there, all men, mostly silent, mostly unhappy: it is not easy to be talkative and cheerful when you're hanging on to your scat with one hand and your drink with the other. The Three Apostles, whether because of exhaustion or popular demand, had laid the tools of their trade aside and were having a drink with their boss Josh Hendriks, a small, thin, stern, and middle-aged Anglo-Dutchman with a perpetual worried frown. Even when off-duty, he was festooned with a mass of strap-hung electronic and recording equipment: word had it that he slept so accoutred. Stryker, who appeared far from overcome by concern for his ailing wife, sat at a table in a corner, talking to Conrad and two other actors, Gunther Jungbeck and Jon Heyter. At a third table John Halliday, the stills photographer, and Sandy, the props man, made up the company. No one, as far as I could judge, was suffering from anything that couldn't be accounted for by the big dipper antics of the Morning Rose. One or two glances of mildly speculative curiosity came our way, but I volunteered no explanation for our unaccustomed visit there: explanations take time but the effects of aconitine , as was being relentlessly borne in upon me, waited for no man.

Allen and Mary Darling we found in the otherwise deserted lounge, more green-faced than ever but clasping hands and gazing at each other with the rapt intensity of those who know there will be no tomorrow:

their noses were so close together that they must have been cross-eyed from their attempts to focus. For the first time since I'd met her Mary Darling had removed her enormous spectacles-misted lenses due to Allen's heavy breathing, I had no doubt-and without them she really was a very pretty young girl with none of that rather naked and defenceless look that so often characterises the habitual wearer of glasses when those are removed. One thing was for sure, there was nothing wrong with Allen's eyesight.

I glanced at the liquor cupboard in the corner. The glass-fronted doors were intact from which I assumed that Lonnie Gilbert's bunch of keys were capable of opening most things: had they failed here I would have looked for signs of the use of some other instrument, not, perhaps, the berserk wielding of a fire axe but at least the discreet employment of a wood chisel: but there were no such signs.

Heissman was asleep in his cabin, uneasily, restlessly asleep, but clearly not ill. Next door Neal Divine, his bedboard raised so high that he was barely visible, looked more like a medieval bishop than ever, but a happily unconscious one this time. Lonnie was sitting upright in his bunk, his arms folded across his ample midriff, and from the fact that his right hand was out of sight under the coverlet, almost certainly and lovingly wrapped round the neck of a bottle of purloined Scotch, did the further fact that he wore a beatific smile, it was clear that his plethora of keys could be put to a very catholic variety of uses.

I passed up Judith Haynes's cabin-she'd had no dinner-and went into what I knew to be, at that moment, the last occupied cabin. The unit's chief electrician, a large, fat, red-faced and chubby-checked individual rejoicing in the name of Frederick Crispin Harbottle, was propped on an elbow and moodily eating an apple: appearances to the contrary he was an invincibly morose and wholly pessimistic man. For reasons I had been unable to discover, he was known to all as Eddie: rumour had it that he had been heard to speak, in the same breath, of himself and that other rather better-known electrician, Thomas Edison.

"Sorry," I said. "We've got some cases of food poisoning. You're not one of them, obviously." I nodded towards the recumbent occupant of the other bed, who was lying curled up with his back to us. "How's the Duke?"

"Alive." Eddie spoke in a tone of philosophical resignation. "Moaning and groaning about his bellyache before he dropped off. Moans and groans nearly every night, come to that. You know what the Duke's like, he just can't help himself."

We all knew what he was like. If it is possible for a person to become a legend within the space of four days then Cecil Golightly had become just that. His unbridled gluttony lay just within the bounds of credibility and when Otto, less than an hour previously, had referred to him as a little pie, who never lifted his eyes from the table he had spoken no more than the truth. The Duke's voracious capacity for food was as abnormal as his obviously practically defunct metabolic system for he resembled nothing so much as a man newly emerged from a long stay in a concentration camp.

More out of habit than anything I bent over to give him a cursory glance and I was glad I did for what I saw were wide-open, pain-dulled eyes moving wildly and purposelessly from side to side, ashen lips working soundlessly in an ashen face and the hooked fingers of both hands digging deep into his stomach as if he were trying to tear it open.

I'd told Goin that I'd be back in Otto's cabin in five minutes: I was back in forty-five. The Duke, because he had been so very much longer without treatment than Smithy, Oakley, or Gerran, had gone very very close to the edge indeed, to the extent that I had on one occasion almost given up his case as being intractably hopeless, but the Duke was a great deal more stubborn than I was and that skeletal frame harboured an iron constitution: even so, without almost continuous artificial respiration, a heart stimulant injection and the copious use of oxygen, he would surely have died: now he would as surely live.

"Is this the end of it, then? Is this the end?" Otto Gerran spoke in a weakly querulous voice and, on the face of it, I had to admit that he had every right to sound both weak and querulous. He hadn't as yet regained his normal colour, he looked as haggard as a heavily jowled man ever can and it was clear that his recent experience had left him pretty exhausted: and with this outbreak of poisoning coming on top of the continuously hostile weather that had prevented him from shooting even a foot of background film, Otto had reason to believe that the fates were not on his side.

I should think so," I said. In view of the fact that be bad aboard some ill-disposed person who was clearly a dab hand with some of the more esoteric poisons this was as unwarrantedly optimistic a statement as I could remember making, but I had to say something. "Any other victims would have shown the symptoms before now: and I've checked everyone."

"Have you now?" Captain Imrie asked. "How about my crew? They eat the same food as you do."

"I hadn't thought of that." And I hadn't. Because of some mental block or simply because of lack of thought, I'd assumed, wholly without reason, that the effects would be confined to the film unit people: Captain Imrie was probably thinking that I regarded his men as second-rate citizens who, when measured against Otto's valuable and expensive cast and crew, hardly merited serious consideration. I went on: "What I mean is, I didn't know that. That they ate the same food. Should have been obvious. If you'll just show me-"

With Mr. Stokes in lugubrious attendance, Captain Imrie led me round the crew quarters. Those consisted of five separate cabins-two for the deck staff, one for the engine-room staff. one for the two cooks and the last for the two stewards. It was the last one that we visited first.

We opened the door and just stood there for what then seemed like an unconscionably long time but was probably only a few seconds, mindless creatures bereft of will and speech and power of motion. I was the first to recover and stepped inside.

The stench was so nauseating that I came close to being sick for the first time that night and the cabin itself was in a state of indescribable confusion, chairs knocked over, clothes strewn everywhere and both bunks completely denuded of sheets and blankets which were scattered in a tom and tangled mess over the deck. The first and overwhelming impression was that there had been a fight to the death, but both Moxen and Scott, the latter almost covered in a shredded sheet, looked curiously peaceful as they lay there, and neither bore any marks of violence.

I say we go back. I say we return now." Captain Imrie wedged himself more deeply into his chair as if establishing both a physical and argumentatively commanding position. "You gentlemen will bear in mind that I am the master of this vessel, that I have responsibilities towards both passengers and crew." He lifted his bottle from the wrought-iron stand and helped himself lavishly and I observed, automatically and with little surprise, that his hand was not quite steady. If I'd typhoid or cholera aboard I'd sail at once for quarantine in the nearest port where medical assistance is available. Three dead and four seriously ill, I don't see that cholera or typhoid could be any worse than we have here on the Morning Pose.

Who's going to be the next to die?" He looked at me almost accusingly, Imrie seemed to be adopting the understandable attitude that, as a doctor, it was my duty to preserve life and that as I wasn't making a very good job of it what was happening was largely my fault. "Dr. Marlowe here admits that he is at a loss to understand the reasons for this-this lethal outbreak.

Surely to God that itself is reason enough to call this off?"

"It's a long long way back to Wick," Smithy said. Like Goin, seated beside him, Smithy was swathed in a couple of blankets and, like Otto, he still looked very much under the weather. "A lot can happen in that time."

"Wick, Mr. Smith? I wasn't thinking of Wick. I can be in Hammerfest in twenty-four hours."

"Less," said Mr. Stokes. He sipped his rum, deliberated and made his pronouncement. "With the wind and the sea on the port quarter and a little assistance from me in the engine room. Twenty hours." He went over his homework and found it faultless. "Yes, twenty hours."

"You see?" Imrie transferred his piercing blue gaze from myself to Otto.

"Twenty hours."

When we'd established that there had been no more casualties among the crew Captain Imrie, in what was for him a very peremptory fashion, had summoned Otto to the saloon and Otto in turn had sent for his three fellow directors, Goin, Heissman, and Stryker. The other director, Miss Haynes, was, Stryker had reported, very deeply asleep which was less than surprising in view of the sedatives I'd prescribed for her. The Count had joined the meeting without invitation but everyone appeared to accept his presence there as natural.

To say that there was an air of panic in the saloon would have been exaggeration, albeit a forgivable one, but to say that there was a marked degree of apprehension, concern, and uncertainty would have erred on the side of understatement. Otto Gerran, perhaps, was more upset than any other person present, and understandably so, for Otto had a great deal more to lose than any other person present.

I appreciate the reasons for your anxiety," Otto said, "and your concern for us all does you the greatest credit. But I think this concern is making you overcautious. Dr. Marlowe says that this-ah-epidemic is definitely over. We are going to look very foolish indeed if we turn and run now and then nothing more happens."

Captain Imrie said: "I'm too old, Mr. Gerran, to care what I look like.

If it's a choice between looking a fool and having another dead man on my hands, then I’d rather look a fool any time."

"I agree with Mr. Gerran," Heissman said. He still looked sick and he sounded sick. "To throw it all away when we're so near-just over a day to Bear Island. Drop us off there and then go to Hammerfest-just as in the original plan. That means-well, you'd be in Hammerfest in say sixty hours instead of twenty-four. What's going to happen in that extra thirty-six hours that's not going to happen in the next twenty-four? Lose everything for thirty-six hours just because you're running scared?"

I am not running scared, as you say." There was something impressive about Imrie's quiet dignity. "My first-"

I wasn't referring to you personally," Heissman said.

"My first concern is for the people under my charge. And they are under my charge. I am the person responsible. I must make the decision."

"Granted, Captain, granted." Goin was his usual imperturbable self, a calm and reasonable man. "But one has to strike a balance in those matters , don't you think? Against what Dr. Marlowe now regards as being a very remote possibility of another outbreak of food poisoning occurring, there's the near certainty-no, I would go further and say that there's the inevitability-that if we go directly to Hammerfest we'll be put in quarantine for God knows how long. A week, maybe two weeks, before the port medical authorities give us clearance. And then it'll be too late, we'd just have to abandon all ideas about making the film at all and go home." Less than a couple of hours previously, I recalled, Heissman had been making most disparaging remarks about Otto's mental capacities, but he'd backed him up against Captain Imrie and now here was Goin doing the same thing: both men knew which side of their bread required butter. "The losses to Olympus Productions will be enormous."

"Don't be telling me that, Mr. Goin," Imrie said. `Mat you mean is that the losses to the insurance company-or companies-will be enormous."

"Wrong," Stryker said and from his tone and attitude it was clear that directorial solidarity on the board of Olympus Productions was complete.

"Severally and personally, all members of the cast and crew are insured.

The film project-a guarantee as to its successful conclusion-was uninsurable, at least in terms of the premiums demanded. We, and we alone, bear the loss-and I would add that for Mr. Gerran, who is by far and away the biggest shareholder, the effects would be ruinous."

I am very sorry about that." Captain Imrie seemed genuinely sympathetic but he didn't for a moment sound like a man who was preparing to abandon his position. "But that's your concern, I'm afraid. And I would remind you, Mr. Gerran, of what you yourself said earlier on this evening. "Health," you said, "is a damned sight more important than any profit we might make from this film. 'Wouldn't you say this is a case in point?"

"That's nonsense to say that," Goin said equably. He had the rare gift of being able to make potentially offensive statements in a quietly rational voice that somehow robbed them of all offence. "-Profit," you say, was the word Mr. Gerran used. Certainly, Mr. Gerran would willingly pass up any potential profit if the need arose, and that need wouldn't have to be very pressing or demanding. He's done it before." This was at variance with the impression I'd formed of Otto, but then Goin had known him many more years than I had days. "Even without profit we could still make our way by breaking even, which is as much as most film companies can hope for these days. But you're not talking-we're not talking-about lack of profit, we're talking about a total and nonrecoverable loss, a loss that would run into six figures and break us entirely. We've put our collective shirt on this one, Captain Imrie, yet you're talking airily of liquidating our company, putting dozens of technicians-and their families-on the breadline and damaging, very likely beyond repair, the careers of some very promising actors and actresses. And all of this for what? The remote chance-according to Dr. Marlowe, the very remote chance-that someone may fall ill again. Haven't you got things just a little bit out of proportion, Captain Imrie?"

If he had, Captain Imrie wasn't saying so. He wasn't saying anything. He didn't exactly have the look of a man who was thinking and thinking hard.

"Mr. Goin puts it very succinctly," Otto said. "very succinctly indeed and there's a major point that seems to have escaped you, Captain Imrie. You have reminded me of something I said earlier. May I remind you of something you said earlier. May I remind you-"

"And may I interrupt, Mr. Gerran," I said. I knew damn well what he was going to say and the last thing I wanted was to hear him say it.

"Please. A peace formula, if you wish. You want to continue. So does Mr. Goin, so does Mr. Heissman. So do I-if only because my reputation as a doctor seems to depend on it. Tadeusz?"

"No question," said the Count. "Bear Island."

"And, of course, it would be unfair to ask either Mr. Smith or Mr. Stokes. So I propose-"

"This isn't Parliament, Dr. Marlowe," Imrie said. "Not even a local town council. Decisions aboard a vessel at sea are not arrived at by popular vote."

"I've no intention that they should be. I suggest we draw up a document. I suggest we note Captain Imrie's proposals and considered opinions. I suggest if more illness occurs we run immediately for Hammerfest, even though we are at the time only one hour distant from Bear Island. I suggest it be recorded that Captain Imrie be protected and absolved from any accusation of hazarding the health of his crew and passengers in light of the medical officer's affidavit-which I will write out and sign-that no such hazard exists: the only charge the captain has to worry about at any time is the physical hazarding of his vessel and that doesn't exist here. Then we will state that the captain is absolved from all blame and responsibility for any consequences arising from our decision: the navigation and handling of the vessel remains, of course, his sole responsibility. Then all five of us sign it. Captain Imrie?"

"Agreed." There is a time to be prompt and Captain Imrie clearly regarded this as such a time. At best, the proposal was a lame compromise, but one he was glad to accept. "Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me. I have to be up betimes-4 A.M. to be precise." I wondered when he had last risen at that unearthly hour-not, probably, since his fishing days had ended: but the illness of mate and bosan made for exceptional circumstances . He looked at me. I will have that document at breakfast?"

"At breakfast. I wonder, Captain, if on your way to bed you could ask Haggerty to come to see me. I'd ask him personally, but he's a bit touchy about civilians like myself."

"A lifetime in the Royal Navy is not forgotten overnight. Now?"

"Say ten minutes? In the galley."

"Still pursuing your enquiries, is that it? It's not your fault, Dr. Marlowe."

If it wasn't my fault, I thought, I wished they'd all stop making me feel it was. Instead I thanked him and said good night and he said good night to us and left accompanied by Smithy and Mr. Stokes. Otto steepled his fingers and regarded me in his best chairman-of-the-board fashion.

"We owe you our thanks, Dr. Marlowe. That was well done, an excellent face-saving proposal." He smiled. "I am not accustomed to suffering interruption lightly but in this case it was justified."

If I hadn't interrupted we'd all be on our way to Hammerfest now. You were about to remind him of that part of your contract with him which states that he will obey all your orders other than those that actually endanger the vessel. You were about to point out that as no such physical danger exists, he was technically in breach of contract and so would be legally liable to the forfeiture of the entire contract fee, which would certainly have ruined him. But for a man like that money ranks a long, long way behind pride and Captain Imrie is a very proud man. He'd have told you to go to hell and turned his ship for Hammerfest."

"I'd say that our worthy physician's assessment is a hundred percent accurate." The Count had found some brandy and now helped himself freely. "You came close there, Otto, my boy."

If the company chairman felt annoyance at being thus familiarly addressed by his cameraman, he showed no evidence of it. He said: "I agree.

We are in your debt, Dr. Marlowe."

"A free seat at the premiere," I said, "and all debts discharged." I left the board to its deliberations and weaved my unsteady way down to the passenger accommodation. Allen and Mary darling were still in the same place in the lounge, only now she had her head on his shoulder and seemed to be asleep. I gave him a casually acknowledging wave of my hand and he answered in kind: he seemed to be becoming accustomed to my peripatetic presence.

I entered the Duke's cabin without knocking, lest there was someone there asleep. There was. Eddie, the electrician, was very sound indeed and snoring heavily, the sight of his cabin-mate's close brush with the reaper hadn't unnerved him any that I could see. Cecil Golightly was awake and looking understandably very pale and drawn but not noticeably suffering, largely, it seemed very likely, because Mary Stuart, who was just as pale as he was, was sitting by his bedside and holding his far from reluctant hand. I was beginning to think that perhaps she had more friends than either she or I thought she had.

"Good lord!" I said. "You still here?"

"Didn't you expect me to be? You asked me to stay and keep an eye on him. Or had you forgotten?"

"Certainly not," I lied. "Didn't expect you to remain so long, that's all.

You've been very kind." I looked down upon the recumbent Duke. "Feeling a bit better?"

"Lots, Doctor. Lots better." With his voice not much more than a strained whisper he didn't sound it but, then, after what he'd been through in the past hour I didn't expect him to.

"I'd like to have a little talk with you," I said. "Just a couple of minutes. Feel up to it?"

He nodded. Mary dear said: "I'll leave you then," and made to rise but I put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

"No need. The Duke and I share no secrets." I gave him what I hoped would be translated as a thoughtful look. "It's just possible, though, that the Duke might be concealing a secret from me."

"Me? A-a secret?" Cecil was genuinely puzzled.

"Tell me. When did the pains start?"

"The pains? Half-past nine. Ten. Something like that, I can't be sure."

Temporarily bereft of his quick wit and chirpy humour, the Duke was a very woebegone Cockney sparrow indeed. "When this thing hit me I

Wasn't feeling much like looking at watches."

"I'm sure you weren't," I said sympathetically. "And dinner was the last bite you had tonight?"

"The last bite." His voice even sounded firm.

"Not even another teeny-weeny snack? You see, Cecil, I'm puzzled.

"Miss Stuart has told you that others have been ill, too?" He nodded. "Well, the odd thing is that the others began to be ill almost at once after eating. But it took well over an hour in your case. I find it very strange. You're absolutely sure? You'd nothing?"

"Doctor!" He wheezed a bit. "You know me."

"Yes. That's why I'm asking." Mary dear was looking at me with coolly appraising and rather reproachful brown eyes, any moment now and she was going to say didn't I know Cecil was a sick man. "You see, I know that the others who were sick were suffering from some kind of food poisoning that they picked up at dinner and I know how to treat them. But your illness must have had another cause, I've no idea what it was or how to treat it and until I can make some sort of diagnosis I can't afford to take chances. You're going to be very hungry tomorrow morning and for some time after that but I have to give your system time to settle down: I don't want you to eat anything that might provoke a reaction so violent that I mightn't be able to cope with it this time. Time will give the all clear."

"I don't understand, Doctor."

"Tea and toast for the next three days."

The Duke didn't turn any paler than he was because that was impossible : he just looked stricken.

"Tea and toast?" His voice was a weak croak. "For three days!"

"For your own good, Cecil." I patted him sympathetically on the shoulder and straightened, preparing to leave. "We just want to see you on your feel? again."

"I was feeling peckish, like," the Duke explained with some pathos.

"When?"

"Just before nine."

"Just before-half an hour after dinner?"

"That's when I feel the most peckish. I nipped up into the galley, see, and there was this casserole on a hot plate but I'd only time for one spoonful when I heard two people coming so I jumped into the cool room."

"And waited?"

I had to wait." The Duke sounded almost virtuous. "If I'd opened the door even a crack they'd have seen me."

"So they didn't see you. Which means they left. Then?"

"They'd scoffed the bleedin" lot," the Duke said bitterly.

"Lucky you."

"Lucky?"

"Moxen and Scott, wasn't it? The stewards?"

"How-how did you know?"

"They saved your life, Duke."

"They what?"

"They ate what you were going to cat. So you're alive. They're both dead."

Allen and Mary Darling had obviously given up their midnight vigil for the lounge was deserted. I'd five minutes before I met Haggerty in the galley, five minutes in which to collect my thoughts: the trouble was that I had to find them first before I could collect them. And then I realised I was not even going to have the time to find them for there were footsteps on the companionway. Trying with very little success to cope with the wild staggering of the Morning Rose Mary Stuart made her unsteady way towards an armchair opposite me and collapsed into rather than sat in it. Insofar as it was possible for such an extraordinarily good-looking young woman to look haggard, then she looked haggard: her face was grey. I should have felt annoyed with her for interrupting my train of thought, assuming, that was, that I ever managed to get the train under way, but I could feel no such emotion: I was beginning to realise, though only vaguely, that I was incapable of entertaining towards this Latvian girl any feeling that remotely bordered on the hostile. Besides, she had clearly come to talk to me, and if she did she wanted some help, or reassuring or understanding and it would come very hardly indeed for so proud, so remote, so aloof a girl to ask for any of those. In all conscience, I couldn't make things difficult for her.

"Been sick?" I asked. As a conversational gambit it lacked something but doctors aren't supposed to have manners. She nodded. She was clasping her hands so tightly that I could see the faint ivory gleam of knuckles.

"I thought you were a good sailor?" The light touch.

"It is not the sea that makes me ill."

I abandoned the light touch. "Mary dear, why don't you lie down and try to sleep?"

"I see. You tell me that two more men have been poisoned and died and then I am supposed to drop off to sleep and have happy dreams. Is that it?" I said nothing and she went on wryly: `You're not very good at breaking bad news, are you?"

"Professional callousness. You didn't come here just to reproach me with my tactlessness. What is it, Mary dear?"

"Why do you call me "Mary dear"?"

"It offends you?"

"Oh, no. Not when you say it." From any other woman the words would have carried coquettish overtones, but there were none such here. It was meant as a statement of fact, no more.

"Very well, then." I don't know what I meant by `Very well, then," it just made me feel obscurely clever. "Tell me."

"I'm afraid," she said simply.

So she was afraid. She was tired, overwrought, she'd tended four very, very sick men who'd been poisoned, she'd learnt that three others whom she knew had died of poison and the violence of the Arctic gale raging outside was sufficient to give pause to even the most intrepid. But I said none of those things to her.

"We're all afraid at times, Mary."

"You too?"

"Me too."

"Are you afraid now?"

"No. What's there to be afraid of?"

"Death. Sickness and death."

"I have to live with death, Mary. I detest it, of course I do, but I don't fear it. If I did, I'd be no good as a doctor. Would I now?"

"I do not express myself well. Death I can accept. But not when it strikes out blindly and you know that it is not blind. As it is here. It strikes out carelessly, recklessly, without cause or reason, but you know there is cause and reason. Do you-do you know what I mean?"

I knew perfectly well what she meant. I said: "Even at my brightest and best, metaphysics are hardly my forte. Maybe the old man with the scythe does show discrimination in his indiscrimination, but I'm tootired-"

"I'm not talking about metaphysics." She made an almost angry little gesture with her clasped hands. "There's something terribly far wrong aboard this ship, Dr. Marlowe."

"Terribly far wrong?" Heaven only knew that I couldn't have agreed with her more. "What should be wrong, Mary dear?"

She said gravely: "You would not patronise me, Dr. Marlowe? You would not humour a silly female?"

I had to answer at once so I said obliquely but deliberately: I would not insult you, Mary dear. I like you too much for that."

"Do you really?" She smiled faintly, whether amused by me or pleased at what I'd said I couldn't guess. "Do you like all the others, too?"

"Do I-I'm sorry."

"Don't you find something odd, something very strange about the people , about the atmosphere they create","

I was on safer ground here. I said frankly: "I'd have to have been born deaf and blind not to notice it. One is warding off barely expressed hostilities, elbowing aside tensions, wading through undercurrents the whole of the livelong day, and at the same time, if you'll forgive the mixing of the metaphors, trying to shield one's eyes from the constant shower of sparks given off by everyone trying to grind their own axes at the same time. Everyone is so frighteningly friendly to everyone else until the moment comes, of course, that everyone else is so misguided as to turn his or her back. Our esteemed employer, Otto Gerran, cannot speak too highly of his fellow directors, Heissman, Stryker, Goin, and his dear daughter, all of whom he vilifies most fearfully the moment they are out of earshot, all of which would be wholly unforgivable were it not for the fact that Heissman, Goin, Stryker, and his dear daughter each behave in the same fashion to Otto and their co-directors. You get the same petty jealousies, the same patently false sincerities, the same smilers with the knives beneath the cloaks on the lower film unit crew level-not that they and probably rightly, would regard themselves as being any lower than Otto and his chums-I use the word "chums," you understand, without regard to the strict meaning of the word. And, just to complicate matters, we have this charming interplay between the first and second divisions.

The Duke, Eddie Harbottle, Halliday, the stills man, Hendriks, and Sandy all cordially detest what we might call the management, a sentiment that is strongly reciprocated by the management themselves. And everybody seems to have a down on the unfortunate director, Neal Divine. Sure, I've noticed all of this, I'd have to be a zombie not to have, but I disregard ninety-odd percent and just put it down to the normally healthy backbiting bitchery inseparable from the cinema world. You get fakes, cheats, liars, mountebanks, sycophants, hypocrites the world over, it's just that the movie-making milieu appears to act as a grossly distorting magnifying glass that selects and high-lights all the more undesirable qualities while ignoring or at best diminishing the more desirable ones-one has to assume that there are some."

"You don't think a great deal of us, do you?"

"Whatever gave you that impression?"

She ignored that. "And we're all bad?"

"Not all. Not you. Not the other Mary or young Allen-but maybe that's because they're too young yet or too new in this business to have come to terms with the standard norms of behaviour. And I'm pretty sure that Charles Conrad is on the side of the angels."

Again the little smile. "You mean he thinks along the same lines as you

"Yes. Do you know him at all-

"We say good morning."

"You should get to know him better. He'd like to know you better. He likes you-he said so. And, no, we weren't discussing you-your name cropped up among a dozen others."

"Flatterer." Her tone was neutral, I didn't know whether she was referring with pleasure to Conrad or with irony to myself. "So you agree with me? There is something very strange in the atmosphere here?"

"BY normal standards, Yes."

"By any standards." There was a curious certainty about her. "Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, one looks to find those things in our unpleasant little world, but one does not look to find them on the scale that we have here.

"Do not forget that I know about those things. I was born in a Communist country, I was brought up in a Communist country. You understand?"

"Yes. When did you pet away?"

"Two years ago. just two years."

"How?"

"Please. Others may wish to use the same way."

"And I'm in the pay of the Kremlin. As you wish."

"You are offended?" I shook my head. "Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, Dr. Marlowe. But there is more here, much more. There is hate and there is fear. I-I can smell it. Can't you?'

"You have a point to make", dear, and you're leading up to it in a very tortuous fashion. I wish you would come to it." I looked at my watch.

"I do not wish to be rude to you but neither do I wish to be rude to the person who is waiting to see me."

"If people hate and fear each other enough, terrible things can happen ." This didn't seem to require even an affirmative, so I kept silent and she went on: "You say that those illnesses, those deaths, are the result of accidental food poisoning. Are they, Dr. Marlowe? Are they?"

So this is what has taken you all this long time to lead up to? You think-you think it may have been deliberate, have been engineered by someone. That's what you think," I hoped it was clear to her that the idea had just occurred to me for the first time.

I don't know what to think. But yes-yes, that's what I think."

"Who?"

"Who" She looked at me in what appeared to be genuine astonishment. "How should I know who? Anybody, I suppose!"

"You'd be a sensation as a prosecuting counsel. Then if not who, why?"

She hesitated, looked away, glanced briefly back at me, then looked at the deck. I don't know why, either!'

"So you've no basis for this incredible suggestion other than your Communist-trained instincts."

"I've put it very badly, haven't I"

"You'd nothing to put, Mary. just examine the facts and see how ridiculous your suggestion is. Seven disparate people affected and all struck down completely at random-or can you give me a reason why so wildly diverse a group as a film producer, a hairdresser, a camera focus assistant, a mate, a bosan, and two stewards should he the victims?

Can you tell me why some lived, why some died? Can you tell me why two of the victims assimilated this poison from food served at the saloon table, two from food consumed in the galley and one, the Duke, who may have been poisoned in either the galley or the saloon? Can you, Mary' She shook her head, the straw-coloured hair fell over her eyes and she let it stay there. Maybe she didn't want to look at me, maybe she didn't want me to look at her.

"After today," I said, "I've been left standing, I've been widely given to understand, among the ruins of my professional reputation but I'll wager what's left of it, together with anything else you care to name, that this wholesale poisoning is completely accidental and that no person aboard the Morning Rose wished to, hoped to, or intended to poison those seven men." Which was a different thing entirely from claiming that there was no one aboard the Morning Rose who was responsible for the tragedy. "Not unless we have a madman aboard, and you can say what you like-you've already said it-about our highly-ah-individualistic shipboard companions, none of them is unhinged. Not, that is, criminally unhinged."

She hadn't looked at me once when I was speaking and, even when I'd finished, continued to present me with a view of the crown of her head. I rose, lurched across to the armchair where she was sitting, braced myself with one hand on the back of her chair and placed a finger of the other under her chin. She straightened and brushed back the hair from her eyes, brown eyes large and still and full of fear. I smiled at her and she smiled back and the smile didn't touch her eyes. I turned and left the lounge.

I was quite ten minutes late for my appointment in the galley and as Haggerty had already made abundantly clear to me that he was a stickler for the proprieties, I expected to find him in a mood anywhere between stiff outrage and cool disapproval. Haggerty's attention, however, was occupied with more immediate and pressing matters for as I approached the galley through the stewards" pantry I could hear the sound of a loud and very angry altercation. At least, Haggerty was being loud and angry. It wasn't so much an altercation as a monologue and it was Haggerty, his red face crimson now with anger and his periwinkle blue eyes popping , who was conducting it: Sandy, our props man, was the unfortunate party on the other side of this very one-sided argument and his silent acceptance of the abuse that was being heaped upon him stemmed less from the want of something to say than from the want of air. I thought at first that Haggerty had his very large red hand clamped round Sandy's scrawny neck but then realised that he had the two lapels of Sandy's jacket crushed together in one hand: the effect, however, was about the same, and as Sandy was only about half the cook's size there was very little he could do about it. I tapped Haggerty on the shoulder.

"You're choking this man," I said mildly. Haggerty glanced at me briefly and got back to his choking. I went on, just as mildly: "This isn't a naval vessel and I'm not a master-at-arms so I can't order you about. But I am what the courts would accept as an expert witness and I don't think they'd question my testimony when you're being sued for assault and battery. Could cost you your life's savings, you know."

Haggerty looked at me again and this time he didn't look away. Reluctantly , he removed his hand from the little man's collar and just stood there, glaring and breathing heavily, momentarily, it seemed, at a loss for words.

Sandy wasn't. After he'd massaged his throat a bit to see if it were still intact, he addressed a considerable amount of unprintable invective to Haggerty, then continued, shouting: "You see? You heard, you great big ugly baboon. It's the courts for you. Assault and battery, mate, and it'll cost you-"

"Shut up," I said wearily. "I didn't see a thing and he didn't lay a finger on you. Be happy you're still breathing." I looked at Sandy consideringly. I didn't really know him, I knew next to nothing about him, I wasn't even sure whether I liked him or not. Like Allen and the late Antonio, if Sandy had another name no one seemed to know what it was.

He claimed to be a Scot but had a powerful Liverpool accent. He was a strange, undersized, wizened leprechaun of a man, with a wrinkled walnut brown face and head-his pate was gleamingly bald-and stringy white hair that started about earlobe level and cascaded in uncombed disarray over his thin shoulders. He had quick-moving and almost weasel like eves but maybe that was unfair to him, it may have been the effect of the steel-legged rimless glasses that he affected. He was given to claiming, when under the influence of gin which was as often as not, that he not only didn't know his birthday, he didn't even know the year in which he had been born, but put it around 1919 or 1920. The consensus of informed shipboard opinion put the date, not cruelly, at 1900 or slightly earlier.

I noticed for the first time that there were some tins of sardines and pilchards on the deck, and a larger one of corned beef. "Aha!" I said. "The midnight skulker strikes again."

"What was that?" Haggerty said suspiciously.

"You couldn't have given our friend here a big enough helping for dinner," I said.

It wasn't for myself." Sandy, under stress, had a high-pitched squeak of a voice. I swear it wasn't. You see-'

I ought to throw the little runt over the side. Little sneaking robbing bastard that he is. Down here, up to his thieves" tricks, the minute my back's turned. And who's blamed for the theft, eh, tell me that, who's blamed for the theft? Who's got to account to the captain for the missing supplies? Who's got to make the loss good from his own pocket? And who's going to get his pay docked for not locking the galley door?" Haggerty's blood pressure, as he contemplated the injustices of life, was clearly rising again. "To think," he said bitterly, "that I've always trusted my fellow man. I ought to break his bloody neck."

"Well, you can't do that now," I said reasonably. "You can't expect me, as a professional man, to perjure myself in the witness box. Besides, there's no harm done, nothing stolen. You've no losses to pay for, so why get in bad with Captain Imrie?" I looked at Sandy, then at the tins on the floor.

"Was that all you stole?"

"I swear to God-?"

"Oh, do be quiet." I said to Haggerty: "Where was he, what was he doing when you came in?"

"He'd his bloody great long nose stuck in the big fridge there, that was what he was doing. Caught him red handed, I did."

I opened the refrigerator door. Inside it was packed with a large number of items of very restricted variety-butter, cheeses, long-life milk, bacon, and tinned meats. That was all. I said to Sandy: "Come here. I want to look through your clothes."

"You want to look through my clothes?" Sandy had taken heart from his providential deliverance from the threat of physical violence and the knowledge that he would not now be reported to those in authority. "And who do you think you are then? A bleedin cop? The CID, eh?"

"Just a doctor. A doctor who's trying to find out why three people died tonight." Sandy stared at me, his eyes widening behind his rimless glasses sand his lower jaw fell down. "Didn't you know that Moxen and Scott were dead? The two stewards',"

"Aye, I'd heard." He ran his tongue over his lips. "What's that got to do with me?"

"I'm not sure. Not yet."

"You can't pin that on me. What are you talking about':" Sandy's brief moment of truculence was vanished as if it had never been. "I've nothing to do-"

"Three men died and four almost did. They died or nearly died from food poisoning. Food comes from the galley. I'm interested in people who make unauthorised visits to the galley." I looked at Haggerty. I think we'd better have Captain Imrie along here."

"---No! Christ, no!" Sandy was close to panic. "Mr. Gerran would kill me-"

"Come here." He came to me, the last resistance gone. I went through his pockets but there was no trace of the only instrument he could have used to infect foodstuffs in the refrigerator, a hypodermic syringe. I said:

"What were you going to do with those tins?"

"They weren't for me. I told you. What would I want with them? I don't eat enough to keep a mouse alive. Ask anyone. They'll tell you."

I didn't have to ask anyone. What he said was perfectly true: Sandy, like Lonnie Gilbert, depended almost exclusively upon the Distillers Ltd. to maintain his calorific quota. But he could still have been using those tins of meat as an insurance, as a red herring, if he'd been caught out as he had been.

"Who were the tins for, then?"

"The Duke. Cecil. I've just been to his cabin. He said he was hungry.

"No, he didn't. He said he was going to be hungry "cos you'd put him on tea and toast for three days." I thought back to my interview with the Duke. I'd only used the tea and toast threat to extract information from him and it wasn't until now that I recalled that I had forgotten to withdraw the threat. This much of Sandy's story had to be true.

"The Duke asked you to get some supplies for him?"

"No."

"You told him you were going to get them?"

"No. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted to see his face when I turned up with the tins."

Impasse. He could be telling the truth. He could equally well be using the story as a cloak for other and more sinister activities. I couldn't tell and probably would never know. I said: "You better go and tell your friend the Duke that he'll be back on a normal diet as from breakfast."

"You mean-I can go?"

"If Mr. Haggerty doesn't wish to press a charge."

"I wouldn't lower myself." Haggerty clamped his big hand round the back of Sandy's neck with a grip tight enough to make the little man squeal in pain. "If I ever catch you within sniffing distance of my galley again I won't just squeeze your neck, I'll break the bloody thing." Haggerty marched him to the door, literally threw him out and returned. "Got off far too easy if you ask me, sir."

"He's not worth your ire, Mr. Haggerty. He's probably telling the truth not that that makes him any less a sneak thief. Moxen and Scott ate here tonight after the passengers had dinner?"

"Every night. Waiting staff usually cat before the guests-they preferred it the other way round." With the departure of Sandy, Haggerty was looking a very troubled and upset man, the loss of two stewards had clearly shaken him badly and was almost certainly responsible for the violence of his reaction towards Sandy.

I think I've traced the source of the poison. I believe the horse-radish was contaminated with a very unpleasant organism called Clostridium botulinum, a sporing anaerobe found most commonly in garden soil."

"I'd never heard of such a case of contamination but that didn't make it impossible. "No possible reflection on you-it's totally undetectable before, during, and after cooking. Were there any leftovers tonight?"

"Some. I made a casserole for Moxen and Scott and put the rest away."

"Away?"

"For throwing. There wasn't enough to reuse for anything."

"So it's gone." Another door locked.

"On a night like this? No fear. The gash is scaled in polythene bags, then they're punctured and go over the side-in the morning."

The door had opened again. "You mean it's still here?"

"Of course." He nodded towards a rectangular plastic box secured to the bulkhead by butterfly nuts. "There."

I crossed to the box and lifted the lid. Haggerty said: `You'll be going to analyse it, is that it?"

"That's what I intended. Rather, to keep it for analysis." I dropped the lid. "That won't be possible now. The bin's empty."

"Empty? Over the side-in this weather?" Haggerty came and unnecessarily checked the bin for himself. "Bloody funny. And against regulations."

"Perhaps your assistant-"

"Charlie. That bone-idle lay about. Not him. Besides, he's off-duty tonight ." Haggerty scratched the grey bristle of his hair. "Lord knows why they did it but it must have been Moxen or Scott."

"Yes," I said. "It must have been."

I was so tired that I could think of nothing other than my cabin and my bunk. I was so tired that it wasn't until I had arrived at my cabin and looked on the bare bunk that I recalled that all my blankets had been taken away for Smithy and Oakley. I glanced idly at the small table where I'd left the toxicological books that I had been consulting and my tiredness

very suddenly left me.

The volume on Medical jurisprudence that had provided me with the information on the aconitine was lying with its base pressed hard against the far fiddle of the table, thrown there, of course, by one of the violent lurches of the Morning Rose. The silken bookmark ribbon attached to the head of the book stretched out most of its length on the table, which was an unremarkable thing in itself were it not for my clear and distinct recollection that I'd carefully used the bookmark to mark the passage I'd been reading.

I wondered who it was who knew I'd been reading the article on aconitine.