"It's all right, Mary," I said. "Only me. Dr. Marlowe." I looked at the figure on the floor and recognised him, not without some difficulty, as young Allen. "Come on, now, be a good girl. Let me have a look at him."

He's terribly hurt, Dr. Marlowe, terribly hurt!" She had difficulty in getting her words out during long and almost soundless gasps. "Oh, look at him, look at him, it's awful!" Then she started crying in earnest, not quietly this time. Her whole body shook. I looked up.

"Mr. Hendriks, will you please go to the galley and ask Mr. Haggerty for some brandy? Tell him I want it. If he's not there, take it anyway."

Hendriks nodded and hurried away. I said to Captain Imrie: "Sorry, I should have asked permission."

"That's all right, Doctor." We were back on professional terms again, however briefly: perhaps it was because his reply was largely automatic for the bulk of his interest, and all that clearly hostile, was for the moment centred on Michael Stryker. I turned back to Mary.

"Go and sit on the settee, there. And take some of that brandy. You hear?"

"No! No! I-"

"Doctor's orders." I looked at Eddie and Lonnie and without a word from me they took her across to the nearest settee. I didn't wait to see whether she followed doctor's orders or not: a now stirring Allen had more pressing claims on my attention. Stryker had done a hatchet job on him: he had a cut forehead, a bruised cheek, an eye that was going to be closed by night, blood coming from both nostrils, a split lip, one tooth missing and another so loose that it was going to be missing very soon also.

I said to Stryker: "You do this to him?"

"Obvious, isn't it?"

"You have to savage him like this? Christ, man, he's only a kid. Why don't you pick on someone your own size next time?"

Like you, for instance?"

"Oh, my God!" I said wearily. Beneath Stryker's tissue-thin veneer of civilisation lay something very crude indeed. I ignored him, asked Lonnie to get water from the galley and cleaned up Allen as best I could. As was invariable in such cases the removal of surface blood improved his appearance about eighty percent. A plaster on his forehead, two cottonwool plugs for his nose and two stitches in a frozen lip and I'd done all I could for him. I straightened as an indignant Captain Imrie started questioning Stryker.

"What happened, Mr. Stryker?"

"A quarrel."

"A quarrel, was it now?" Captain Imrie was being heavily ironic. "And what started the quarrel?"

"An insult. From him."

"From that-from that child?" The captain's feelings clearly matched my own. "What kind of insult to do that to a boy?"

"A private insult." Stryker dabbed the cut on his cheek and, Hippocrates in temporary abeyance, I felt sorry that it wasn't deeper, even although it looked quite unpleasant enough as it was. "He just got what anyone gets who insults me, that's all."

"I shall endeavour to keep a still tongue in my head," Captain Imrie said drily. "However, as captain of this ship-"

"I'm not a member of your damned crew. If that young fool there doesn't lodge a complaint-and he won't-I’d be obligated if you'd mind your own business." Stryker rose and left the saloon. Captain Imrie made as if to follow, changed his mind, sat down wearily at the head of his own table and reached for his own private bottle. He said to the three men now clustered round Mary: "Any of you see what happened?"

"No, sir." It was Hendriks. "Mr. Stryker was standing alone over by the window there when Allen went up to speak to him, I don't know what, and next moment they were rolling about the floor. It didn't last more than seconds."

Captain Imrie nodded wearily and poured a considerable measure into his glass, he was obviously and rightly depending on Smithy to make the approach to the anchorage. I got Allen, now quite conscious, to his feel?

and led him towards the saloon door. Captain Imrie said: "Taking him below?"

I nodded. "And when I come back I'll tell you all about how I started it." He scowled at me and returned to his Scotch. Mary, I noticed, was sipping at the brandy and shuddering at every sip. Lonnie held her glasses in his hand and I escaped with Allen before he gave them back to her. I got Allen into his bunk and covered him up. He had a little colour in his battered cheeks now but still hadn't spoken.

I said: "What was all that about?"

He hesitated. "I'm sorry. I'd rather not say."

`Why ever not?"

"I'm sorry again. It's a bit private."

"Someone could be hurt?"

"Yes, I-" He stopped.

"It's all right. You must be very fond of her." He looked at me for a few silent moments, then nodded. I went on: Shall I bring her down?"

"No, Doctor, no! I don't want-I mean, with my face like this. No, no, I couldn't!"

`Your face was an awful sight worse just five minutes ago. She was doing a fair job of breaking her heart even then."

"Was she?" He tried to smile and winced. "Well, all right."

I left and went to Stryker's cabin. He answered my knock and his face didn't have welcome written all over it. I looked at the still bleeding cut.

"Want me to have a look at that?" Judith Haynes, clad in a fur parka and trousers and looking rather like a red-haired Eskimo, was sitting on the cabin's only chair, her two cocker spaniels in her lap. Her dazzling smile was in momentary abeyance.

No."

"It might scar." I didn't give a damn whether it scarred or not.

"Oh." The factor of his appearance, it hadn't been too hard to guess, was of importance to Stryker. I entered, closed the door, examined and dabbed the cut, put on astringent and applied a plaster. I said: "Look, I'm not Captain Imrie. Did you have to bang that boy like that? You could have flattened him with a tap."

"You were there when I told Captain Imrie that it was a purely personal matter." I'd have to revise my psychological thinking, clearly neither my freely offered medical assistance nor my reasonableness of approach nor the implied flattery had had the slightest mollifying effect. "Having MD hung round your neck doesn't give you the right to ask impertinent prying questions. Remember what else I said to Imrie?"

"You'd be obligated if I minded my own damned business?"

"Exactly."

"I'll bet young Allen feels that way too."

"That young Allen deserves all he got," Judith Haynes said. Her tone wasn't any more friendly than Stryker's. I found what she said interesting for two reasons. She was widely supposed to loathe her husband but there was no evidence of it here: and here might lie a more fruitful source for enquiry for, clearly, she wasn't as good at keeping her emotions and tongue under wraps as her husband was.

"How do you know, Miss Haynes? You weren't there."

I didn't have to be. I-"

"Darling!" Stryker's voice was abrupt, warning.

"Can't trust your wife to speak for herself, is that it?" I said. His big fists balled but I ignored him and looked again at Judith Haynes. "Do you know there's a little girl up in the saloon crying her eyes out over what your big tough husband did to that kid? Does that mean nothing to you?"

"If you're talking about that little bitch of a continuity girl she deserves all that comes her way too."

"Darling!" Stryker's voice was urgent. I stared at Judith Haynes in disbelief but I could see she meant what she said. Her red slash of a mouth was contorted into a line as straight and as thin as the edge of a ruler, the once beautiful green eyes were venomous and the face ugly in its contorted attempts to conceal some hatred or viciousness or poison in the mind. It was an almost frightening display of what must have been a very, very rare public exhibition of what powerful rumour in the film world to which I now partially apologised for my former mental strictures maintained to be a fairly constant private amalgam of the peasant shrew and the screaming fishwife.