"No, Mary dear, I'm not going to sleep again." Whatever tone of firm resolution my tone carried, it was superfluous: the throbbing pain in my neck was sufficient guarantee of my wakefulness.

"Well, that's all right then." I didn't ask what this cryptic remark was intended to convey. Physically, we couldn't have been closer but mentally I was no longer with her. I was with Halliday, the man whom I had thought had come to kill me, the man I'd practically forced to have a drink, the man who'd drunk what had been intended for me.

I knew I would never see him again. Not alive.

6

Dawn, in those high latitudes and at that time of year, did not come until half-past ten in the morning, and it was then that we buried the three dead men, Antonio and Moxen and Scott, and surely their shades would have forgiven us for the almost indecent dispatch with which their funerals were carried out, for that driving blizzard was still at its height, the wind was full of razored knives and struck through both clothes and flesh and laid its icy fingers on the marrow. Captain Imrie, a large and brassbound Bible in his mittened hands, read swiftly through the burial service or at least I assumed he did, he could have been reading the Sermon on the Mount for all I could tell, the wind just plucked the inaudible words from his mouth and carried them out over the grey-white desolation of waters. Three times a canvas-wrapped bundle slid smoothly out from beneath the Morning Rose's only Union flag, three times a bundle vanished soundlessly beneath the surface of the sea: we could see the splashes but not hear them for our cars were full of the high and lonely lament of the wind's requiem in the frozen rigging.

On land, mourners customarily find it difficult to tear themselves away from a newly filled grave, but here there was no grave, there was nothing to look at and the bitter cold was sufficient to drive from every mind any thought other than that of immediate shelter and warmth: besides, Captain Imrie had said that it was an old fisherman's custom to drink a toast to the dead. Whether it was or not I had no idea, it could well have been a custom that Imrie had invented himself, and certainly the deceased had been no fisherman: but whatever its origin I'm sure that it made its contributory effect towards the extremely rapid clearing of the decks. I remained where I was. I felt inhibited from joining the others not because I found Captain Imrie's proposal distasteful or ethically objectionable-only the most hypocritical could find in the Christian ethic a bar to wishing bon voyage to the departed-but because, in crowded surroundings, it could be very difficult to see who was filling my glass and what he was filling it with. Moreover, I'd had no more than three hours' sleep the previous night, my mind was tired and a bit fuzzy round the edges and it was my hope that the admittedly heroic treatment of exposure to an Arctic blizzard might help to blow some of the cobwebs away. I took a firm hold on one of the numerous lifelines that were rigged on deck, edged my way out to the largest of one of the numerous deck cargoes we were carrying, took what illusory shelter was offered in its lee and waited for the cobwebs to fly away.

Halliday was dead. I hadn't found his body, I'd searched, casually and unobtrusively, every likely and most of the unlikely places of concealment on the Morning Rose: he had vanished and left no trace. Halliday, I knew, was lying in the black depths of the Barents Sea. How he'd got there I didn't know and it didn't seem to be important: it could be that someone had helped him over the side but it was even more probable that he had required no assistance. He'd left the saloon as abruptly as he had because the poison in his Scotch-my Scotch-had been as fast acting as it had been deadly. He had felt the urgent need to be sick and the obvious place to be sick was over the side: a slip on the snow or ice, one of the hundreds of trough-seeking lurches that the trawler had experienced during the night and in what must have been by that time his ill, weakened, and dazed state, he would have been quite unable to prevent himself from pitching over the low guardrails. The only consolation, if consolation it was, was that he had probably succumbed from poison before his lungs had filled with water. I did not subscribe to the popular belief that death from drowning was a relatively easy and painless way to go if for no other reason than that it was a theory that in the nature of things lacked positive documentation.

I was as certain as could be that Halliday's absence had so far gone unnoticed by everyone except myself and the person responsible for his death and there was not even certainty about that last point, it was quite possible that he knew nothing of Halliday's brief visit to the saloon. True, Halliday had not appeared for breakfast but as a few others had done the same and those who had come had done so intermittently over the best part of a couple of hours, his absence had gone unremarked. His cabin-mate, Sandy, was still feeling under the weather to the extent that Halliday's presence or absence was a matter of total indifference to him: and as Halliday had been very much a solitary there was no one who would be sufficiently concerned to enquire anxiously as to his whereabouts'. I hoped that his absence remained undiscovered as long as possible: although the signed guarantee given to Captain Imrie that morning had contained no specific reference as to the action to be taken in the event of someone going missing he was quite capable of seizing upon this as a pretext to abandon the trip and make with all speed for Hammerfest.

The match I'd left jammed between the foot of my cabin door and the sill had no longer been in position when I'd returned to my cabin early in the morning. The Coins I'd left in the linen pockets of the lids of my suitcases had shifted position from the front to the back of the pockets, sure evidence that my cases had been opened in my absence. It says much for my frame of mind that the discovery occasioned me no particular surprise-which was in itself surprising, for although someone aboard was aware that the good doctor had been boning up on aconitine and so had more than a fair idea that the poisoning had not been accidental, that in itself was hardly reason to start examining the doctor's hand luggage. More than ever, it behooved me to watch my back.

I heard a sound behind my back. My instinctive reaction was to take a couple of rapid steps forward, who knew what hard or sharp implement might be coming at my occiput or shoulder blades, then whirl round, but a simultaneous reasoning told me that it was unlikely that anyone would propose to do me in on the upper deck in daylight under the interested gaze of watchers on the bridge, so I turned round leisurely and saw Charles Conrad moving into what little shelter was offered in the lee of the bulk deck cargo.

"What's this, then?" I said. "The morning constitutional at all costs?

Or don't you fancy Captain Imrie's Scotch?"

"Neither." He smiled. "Curiosity, is all." He tapped the tarpaulin covered bulk beside us. It was close on ten feel? in height, semicylindrical-the base was flat-and was lashed in position by at least a dozen steel cables. "Do you know what this is?"

Is this a clever question?"

"Yes."

"Prefabricated Arcticised buts. Or so the word went in Wick. Six of them, designed to fit one inside the other for ease of transportation."

"That's it. Made of bonded ply, kapok insulation, asbestos, and aluminium." He pointed to another bulky item of deck cargo immediately foreword of the one behind which we were sheltering. This peculiarly shaped object appeared to be roughly oval along its length, perhaps six feel? high.

"And this?"

"Another clever question?"