"You were going to try it anyway. Go on. Drink it."

Mary Stuart opened her eyes. "Do you always make people drink against their will? Is this what doctors do-force alcohol on those who don't want it?"

I felt like scowling and saying, `Why don't you shut up?" but instead I smiled and said: "Teetotal objections overruled."

"So what's the harm?" Halliday said. He had the glass to his lips. I stared at him until I remembered I shouldn't be staring which was all of a fraction of a second, smiled indulgently, glanced at Mary Stuart whose ever so slightly compressed lips registered no more than a trace of prudish disapproval, then looked back in time to see Halliday lowering his half empty glass.

"Not bad," he pronounced. "Not bad at all. Kind of a funny taste, though."

"You could be arrested in Scotland for saying that," I said mechanically. The villain had nonchalantly quaffed the hemlock while his accomplice had looked on with indifference. I felt very considerably diminished, a complete and utter idiot: as a detective, my inductive and deductive powers added up to zero. I even felt like apologising to them except that they wouldn't know what I was talking about.

"You may in fact be right, Doe, one could even get to like this stuff!'

Halliday topped up his glass, drank again, took the bottle across to its wrought-iron rest and resumed his former scat. He sat there silently for perhaps half a minute, finished off the Scotch with a couple of swallows and rose abruptly to his feet?. "With that lot inside me I can even ignore Lonnie's hobnails. Good night, all." He hurried from the saloon.

I looked at the doorway through which he had vanished, my mind thoughtful, my face not. I still didn't understand why he had come to the saloon in the first place: And what thought had so suddenly occurred to him to precipitate so abrupt a departure? An unprofitable line of thinking to pursue, I couldn't even find a starting point to begin theorising.

I looked at Mary Stuart and felt very guilty indeed: murderesses, I knew, came in all shapes, sizes, and guises but if they came in this particular guise then I could never trust my judgement again. I wondered what on earth could have led me to entertain so ludicrous a suspicion: I must be even more tired than I thought.

As if conscious of my gaze she opened her eyes and looked at me. She had this extraordinary ability to assume this still and wholly expressionless face but beneath this remoteness, this distance, this aloofness lay, I thought, a marked degree of vulnerability. Wishful thinking on my part, it was possible: but I was oddly certain it wasn't. Still without speaking, still without altering her expression or lack of it, she half-rose, hobbled awkwardly in her cocoon of steamer rugs and sat close beside me. In my best avuncular fashion I put my arm round her shoulders, but it didn't stay there for long for she took hold of my wrist and deliberately and without haste lifted my arm over the top of her head and pushed it clear of her. Just to show that doctors are superhuman and incapable of being offended by patients who aren't really responsible for their own behaviour I smiled at her. She smiled back at me and her eyes, I saw with an astonishment that I knew was not reflected in my face, were filled with unshed tears: almost as if she were aware of those tears and wished to hide them, she suddenly swung her legs up on the settee, turned towards me and got back to the short-range examination of my shirt front, only this time she put both her arms around me. As far as freedom of mobility was concerned I was as good as handcuffed, which was doubtless what she wanted anyway. That she harboured no lethal intent towards me I was sure: I was equally sure that she was determined not to let me out of her sight and that this was the most effective way she knew of doing just that. How much it cost that proud and lonely person to behave like this I couldn't guess: even less could I imagine what made her do it at all.

I sat there and tried to mull things over in my now thoroughly befogged mind and, predictably, made no progress whatsoever. Besides, my tired eyes were being almost hypnotised by the behaviour of the Scotch inside the Black Label bottle, with the almost metronomic regularity with which the liquid ascended and descended the opposite sides of the bottle in 0l response to the regular pitching of the Morning Rose. One thing led to another and I said: "Mary dear?"

"Yes?" She didn't turn her face up to look at me and I didn't have to be told why: the area around the level of my fourth shirt button was becoming noticeably damp.

I don't want to disturb you but it's time for my nightcap."

'Whisky?"

"Ah! Two hearts that beat as one."

"No." She tightened her arms.

'No?"

I hate the smell of whisky."

"I'm glad," I said sotto voce, "I'm not married to you."

"What was that?"

I said, "Yes, Mary dear."'

Five more minutes passed and I realised that my mind had closed down for the night. Idly I picked up the Olympus manifesto, read some rubbish about the sole completed copy of the screenplay being deposited in the vault of a London bank, and put it down again. Mary Stuart was breathing quietly and evenly and seemed to be asleep. I bent and blew lightly on the left eyelid which was about the only part of her face that I could see. It didn't quiver. She was asleep. I shifted my position experimentally, not much, and her arms automatically tightened round me, she'd clearly left a note to her subconscious before turning in for the night.

I resigned myself to remaining where I was, it wasn't a form of imprisonment that was likely to scar me permanently: I wondered vaguely whether the idea behind this silken incarceration was to prevent me from doing things or from chancing upon some other devilry that might well be afoot. I was too tired to care. I made up my mind just to sit there and keep a sleepless vigil until the morning came: I was asleep within not more than two minutes.

Mary Stuart was not and didn't look as if she was built along the lines of a coal-heaver but she wasn't stuffed with swansdown either for when I woke my left arm was asleep, wholly numb and almost useless, a realisation that was brought home to me when I had to reach across my right hand to lift up my left wrist to see what time the luminous hands of my watch said it was. They said it was 4:15.

It says much for my mental acuity that at least ten seconds elapsed before it occurred to me why it had been necessary for me to consult the luminous hands. Because it was dark, of course, but why was the saloon dark? Every light had been on when I'd gone to sleep. And what "had wakened me? Something had, I knew without knowing why that I hadn't wakened naturally but that there had been some external cause. What and where was the cause? A sound or a physical contact, it couldn't be anything else, and whoever was responsible for whatever it had been was still with me. He had to be, insufficient time had elapsed since I'd waked for him to have left the saloon: more importantly the hairs on the back of my neck told me there was another and inimical presence in the saloon with me.

Gently I took hold of Mary Stuart's wrists to ease her arms away. Again the resistance was automatic, hers was not a subconscious to go to sleep on the job, but I was in no mood to be baulked by any subconscious. I prised her arms free, slid along the settee, lowered her carefully to the horizontal, rose and moved out towards the middle of the saloon. I stood quite still, my hands grasping the edge of a table to brace my self, my breathing almost stopped as I listened intently. I could have spared myself the trouble. I was sure that the weather had moderated, not a great deal but enough to be just noticeable, since I'd gone to sleep, but it hadn't moderated to the extent where any stealthy movements-and I could expect none other-could possibly be heard above the sound of the wind and the seas, the metallic creakings and groanings of the ancient plates and rivets of the Morning Rose.