LITMIR.BIZ

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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 characterizes 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 bed-board 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, and 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-cheeked 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 pig 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 he had 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 torn 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 physically 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 Rose. 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

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