was it?’ His voice was husky. ‘What— what kind of poison could kill a man like that? God, I’ve never seen anything so awful.’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. May I look round now?’
‘Christ, yes. Don’t rub it in, Doctor—well, I didn’t know, did I? What do you want to see first?’
‘It’s ten past eleven,’ I said.
‘Ten past—my God, I’d forgotten all about the bridge.’ He prepared the bridge dinner with remarkable speed and efficiency—two cans of orange juice, a tin opener, a flask of soup, and then the main course in snap-lidded metal canteens. Those he dumped in a wicker basket along with cutlery and two bottles of beer and the whole preparation took just over a minute.
While he was away—which wasn’t for more than two minutes—I examined what little open food supplies Haggerty carried in his galley, both on shelves and in a large refrigerator. Even had I been capable of it, which I wasn’t, I’d no facilities aboard for analysing food, so I had to rely on sight, taste and smell. There was nothing amiss that I could see. As Haggerty had said, he ran a hygienic galley, immaculate food in immaculate containers.
Haggerty returned. I said, Tonight’s menu, again.’
‘Orange juice or pineapple juice, oxtail—’
‘All tinned?’ He nodded. ‘Let’s see some.’ I opened two tins of each, six in all, and sampled them under Haggerty’s now very apprehensive eye. They tasted the way those tinned products usually taste, which is to say that they didn’t taste of anything very much at all, but all perfectly innocuous in their pallid fashion.
‘Main course?’ I said. ‘Lamb chops, brussels, horseradish, boiled potatoes?’
‘Right. But these things aren’t kept here.’ He took me to the adjacent cool room, where the fruits and vegetables were stored, thence below to the cold room, where sides of beef and pork and mutton swung eerily from steel hooks in the harsh light of naked bulbs. I found precisely what I had expected to find, nothing, told Haggerty that whatever had happened was clearly no fault of his, then made my way to the upper deck and along an interior passage till I came to Captain Imrie’s cabin. I tried the handle, but it was locked. I knocked several times, without result. I hammered it until my knuckles rebelled, then kicked it, all with the same result: Captain Imrie had still about nine hours’ sleep coming up and the relatively feeble noises I was producing had no hope of penetrating to the profound depths of unconsciousness he had now reached. I desisted. Smithy would know what to do.
I went to the galley, now deserted by Haggerty, and passed through the pantry into the dining saloon. Mary darling and Allen were sitting on a bulkhead settee, all four hands clasped together, pale—very pale—faces about three inches apart, gazing into each other’s eyes in a kind of mystically miserable enchantment. It was axiomatic, I knew, that shipboard romances flourished more swiftly than those on land, but I had thought those phenomena were confined to the Bahamas and suchlike balmy climes: aboard a trawler in a full gale in the Arctic I should have thought that some of the romantically essential prerequisites were wholly absent or at least present in only minimal quantities. I took Captain Imrie’s chair, poured myself a small drink and said ‘Cheers!’
They straightened and jumped apart as if they’d been connected to electrodes and I’d just made the switch. Mary darling said reproachfully: ‘You did give us a fright, Dr Marlowe.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Anyway, we were just leaving.’
‘Now I’m really sorry.’ I looked at Allen. ‘Quite a change from university, isn’t it?’
He smiled wanly. ‘There is a difference.’
‘What were you studying there?’
‘Chemistry.’
‘Long?’
‘Three years. Well, almost three years.’ Again the wan smile. ‘It took me all that time to find out I wasn’t much good at it.’
‘And you’re now?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘All the time in the world to find out what you are good at. I was thirty-three before I qualified as a doctor.’
‘Thirty-three.’ He didn’t say it but his face said it for him: if he was that old when he qualified what unimaginable burden of years is he carrying now? ‘What did you do before then?’
‘Nothing I’d care to talk about. Tell me, you two were at the captain’s table for dinner tonight, weren’t you?’ They nodded. ‘Seated more or less opposite Antonio, weren’t you?’
‘I think so,’ Allen said. That was a good start. He just thought so.
‘He’s not well. I’m trying to find out if he ate something that disagreed with him, something he may have been allergic to. Either of you see what he had to eat?’
They looked at each other uncertainly.
‘Chicken?’ I said encouragingly. ‘Perhaps some French fries?’
‘I’m sorry, Dr Marlowe,’ Mary darling said. ‘I’m afraid—well, we’re not very observant.’ No help from this quarter, obviously they were so lost in each other that they couldn’t even remember what they had eaten. Or perhaps they just hadn’t eaten anything. I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t been very observant myself. But then, I hadn’t been expecting a murder to happen along.
They were on their feet now, clinging to each other for support as the deck tried to vanish from beneath their feet. I said: ‘If you’re going below I wonder if you’d ask Tadeusz if he’d be kind enough to come up and see me here. He’ll be in the recreation room.’
‘He might be in bed,’ Allen said. ‘Asleep.’
‘Wherever he is,’ I said with certainty, ‘he’s not in bed.’
Tadeusz appeared within a minute, reeking powerfully of brandy, a vexed expression on his aristocratic features. He said without preamble: ‘Damned annoying. Most damned annoying. Do you know where I can find a master key? That idiot Antonio has gone and locked our cabin door from the inside and he must be hopped to the eyebrows with sedatives. Simply can’t waken him. Cretin!’
I produced his cabin key. ‘He didn’t lock the door from the inside. I did from the outside.’ The Count looked at me for an uncomprehending moment, then mechanically reached for his flask as shocked understanding showed in his face. Not too much shock, just a little, but I was sure that what little there was was genuine. He tilted the flask and two or three drops trickled into his glass. He reached for the Black Label, helped himself with a steady but generous hand and drank deeply.
‘He couldn’t hear me? He—he is beyond hearing?’
‘I’m sorry. Something he ate, I can’t think what else, some killer toxin, some powerful, quick-acting and deadly poison.’
‘Quite dead?’ I nodded. ‘Quite dead,’ he repeated. ‘And I told him to stop making such a grand opera Latin fuss and walked away and left a dying man.’ He drank some more scotch and grimaced, an expression that
