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premonition that this was going to be an unlucky voyage.
     
    All the next morning the fog still hung over the English Channel. As she waited off Portsmouth the
Farewell
was insulated in obscurity. Her five male passengers were on deck with their collars turned up. In the cases of Messieurs Merryman, McAngus and Cuddy and Father Jourdain, they wore surprised-looking caps on their heads and wandered up and down the boat-deck or sat disconsolately on benches that would probably never be used again throughout the voyage. Before long Aubyn Dale came back to his own quarters. He had, in addition to his bed-room, a little sitting-room, an arrangement known in the company’s offices as “the suite.” He had asked Mrs. Dillington-Blick and Dr. Timothy Makepiece to join him there for a drink before luncheon. Mrs. Dillington-Blick had sumptuously appeared on deck at about eleven o’clock and, figuratively speaking, with one hand tied behind her back, had achieved this invitation by half-past. Dr. Makepiece had accepted hoping that Brigid Carmichael, too, had been invited, but Brigid spent the morning walking on the boat-deck and reading in a chilly but undiscovered little shelter aft of the centrecastle.
    Mr. McAngus, too, remained but a short time on deck and soon retired to the passengers’ drawing-room, where, after peering doubtfully at the bookcases, he sat in a corner and fell asleep. Mrs. Cuddy was also there and also asleep. She had decided in the teeth of the weather forecast that it was going to be rough and had taken a pill. Miss Abbott was tramping up and down the narrow lower deck, having, perhaps instinctively, hit upon that part of the ship which after the first few hours is deserted by almost everyone. In the plan shown to passengers it was called the promenade deck.
     
    It was Brigid who first noticed the break in the weather. A kind of thin warmth fell across the page of her book; she looked up and saw that the curtain of fog had grown threadbare and that sunlight had weakly filtered through. At the same moment the
Farewell
gave her noonday hoot and then Brigid heard the sound of an engine. She went over to the port side and there, quite close, was the pilot cutter. She watched it come alongside the rope ladder. A tall man stood amidships, looking up at the
Farewell
. Brigid was extremely critical of men’s clothes and she noticed his with absent-minded approval. A sailor at the head of the ladder dropped a line to the cutter and hauled up two cases. The pilot went off and the tall man climbed the ladder very handily and was met by the cadet on duty, who took him up to the bridge.
    On his way he passed Mr. Merryman and Mr. Cuddy, who looked up from their crime novels and were struck by the same vague notion, immediately dismissed, that they had seen the new arrival before. In this they were not altogether mistaken; on the previous evening they had both looked at his heavily distorted photograph in the
Evening Herald
. He was Superintendent R. Alleyn.
    Captain Bannerman put his hands in his jacket pockets and surveyed his latest passenger. At the outset Alleyn had irritated Captain Bannerman by not looking like his own conception of a plain-clothes detective and by speaking with what the captain, who was an inverted snob, considered a bloody posh accent entirely unsuited to a cop. He himself had been at some pains to preserve his own Midland habits of speech.
    “Well,” he said. “Superintendent
A’leen,
is it? I take it you’ll tell me what all this is in aid of and I don’t mind saying I’ll be glad to know.”
    “I suppose, sir,” Alleyn said, “you’ve been cursing ever since you got whatever signals they sent you.”
    “Well — not to say cursing.”
    “I know damn well what a bore this must be. The only excuse I can offer is one of expedience, and I must say of extreme urgency.”
    Captain Bannerman, deliberately broadening his vowels, said, “Sooch a-a-s?”
    “Such as murder. Multiple