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.