his cabin key. ‘He didn’t lock the door from the inside. I did from the outside.’ The Count looked at me for an uncomprehending moment, then mechanically reached for his flask as shocked understanding showed in his face. Not too much shock, just a little, but I was sure that what little there was was genuine. He tilted the flask and two or three drops trickled into his glass. He reached for the Black Label, helped himself with a steady but generous hand and drank deeply.
‘He couldn’t hear me? He—he is beyond hearing?’
‘I’m sorry. Something he ate, I can’t think what else, some killer toxin, some powerful, quick-acting and deadly poison.’
‘Quite dead?’ I nodded. ‘Quite dead,’ he repeated. ‘And I told him to stop making such a grand opera Latin fuss and walked away and left a dying man.’ He drank some more scotch and grimaced, an expression that was no reflection on Johnnie Walker. ‘There are advantages in being a lapsed Catholic, Dr Marlowe.’
‘Rubbish. Sackcloth and ashes not only don’t help, they’re simply just not called for here. All right, so you didn’t suspect there was anything wrong with him. I saw him at table and I wasn’t any cleverer and I’m supposed to be a doctor. And when you left him in the cabin it was too late anyway: he was dying then.’ I helped him to some more scotch but left my own glass untouched: even one relatively sober mind around might prove to be of some help, although just how I couldn’t quite see at that moment. ‘You sat beside him at dinner. Can you remember what you ate?’
‘The usual.’ The Count, it was clear, was more shaken than his aristocratic nature would allow him to admit ‘Rather, he didn’t eat the usual.’
‘I’m not in the right frame of mind for riddles, Tadeusz.’
‘Grapefruit and sunflower seeds. That was about what he lived on. One of those vegetarian nuts.’
‘Walk softly, Tadeusz. Those nuts may yet be your pallbearers.’
The Count grimaced again. ‘A singularly ill-chosen remark. Antonio never ate meat. And he’d a thing against potatoes. So all he had were the sprouts and horseradish. I remember particularly well because Cecil and I gave him our horseradish, to which, it seems, he was particularly partial.’ The Count shuddered. ‘A barbarian food, fit only for ignorant Anglo-Saxon palates. Even young Cecil has the grace to detest meat offal.’ It was noteworthy that the Count was the only person in the film unit who did not refer to Cecil Golightly as the Duke: perhaps he thought he was being upstaged in the title stakes but, more probably, as a dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat himself, he objected to people taking frivolous liberties with titles.
‘He had fruit juice?’
‘Antonio had his own homemade barley water.’ The Count smiled faintly. ‘It was his contention that everything that came out of a can had been adulterated before it went into that can. Very strict on those matters, was Antonio.’
‘Soup? Any of that?’
‘Ox-tail?’
‘Of course. Anything else? That he ate, I mean?’
‘He didn’t even finish his main course—well, his sprouts and radish. You may recall that he left very hurriedly.’
‘I recall. Was he liable to sea-sickness?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t forget, I’ve known him no longer than yourself. He’s been a bit off-colour for the past two days. But then, who hasn’t?’
I was trying to think up another penetrating question when John Cummings Goin entered. His unusual surname he’d inherited from a French grandfather in the High Savoy, where, apparently, this was not an altogether uncommon name. The film crew, inevitably, referred to him as Comin’ and Goin’, but Goin was probably wholly unaware of this: he was not the sort of man with whom one took liberties.
Any other person entering the dining saloon from the main deck on a night like that would have presented an appearance that would have varied from the wind-blown to the dishevelled. Not one hair of Goin’s black, smooth, centre-parted, brushed-back hair was out of place: had I been told that he eschewed the standard proprietary hairdressing creams in favour of cow-hide glue, I would have seen no reason to doubt it. And the hairstyle was typical of the man—everything smooth, calm, unruffled and totally under control. In one area only did the comparison fall down. The hairstyle was slick, but Goin wasn’t: he was just plain clever. He was of medium height, plump without being fat, with a smooth, unlined face. He was the only man I’d ever seen wearing pince-nez, and that only for the finest of fine print which, in Goin’s line of business, came his way quite often: the pince-nez looked so inevitable that it was unthinkable that he should ever wear any other type of reading aid. He was, above all, a civilized man and urbane in the best sense of the word.
He picked up a glass from a rack, timed the wild staggering of the Morning Rose to walk quickly and surely to the seat on my right, picked up the Black Label and said: ‘May I?’
‘Easy come, easy go,’ I said. ‘I’ve just stolen it from Mr Gerran’s private supply.’
‘Confession noted.’ He helped himself. ‘This makes me an accessory. Cheers.’
‘I assume you’ve just come from Mr Gerran,’ I said.
‘Yes. He’s most upset. Sad, sad, about that poor young boy. An unfortunate business.’ That was something else about Goin, he always got his priorities right: the average company accountant, confronted with the news of the death of a member of a team, would immediately have wondered how the death would affect the project as a whole: Goin saw the human side of it first Or, I thought, he spoke of it first: I knew I was being unfair to him. He went on: ‘I understand you’ve so far been unable to establish the cause of death.’ Diplomacy, inevitably, was second nature to Goin: he could so easily and truthfully have said that I just hadn’t a clue.
So I said it for him. ‘I haven’t a clue.’
‘You’ll never get to Harley Street talking that way.’
‘Poison, that’s certain. But that’s all that’s certain. I carry the usual sea-going medical library around with me, but that isn’t much help. To identify a poison you must be able either to carry out a chemical analysis or observe the poison at work on the victim—most of the major poisons have symptoms peculiar to themselves and follow their own highly idiosyncratic courses. But Antonio was dead before I got to him and I lack the facilities to do any pathological work, assuming I could do it in the first place.’
‘You’re destroying all my faith in the medical profession. Cyanide?’
‘Impossible. Antonio took time to die. A couple of drops of hydrocyanic—prussic acid—or even a tiny quantity of pharmacopoeial acid, and that’s only two per cent of anhydrous prussic acid—and you’re dead before your glass hits the floor. And cyanide makes it murder, it always makes it murder. There’s no way I know of it can be administered by accident. Antonio’s death, I’m certain, was an accident.’
Goin helped himself to some more scotch. ‘What makes you so certain it was an accident?’
‘What makes me so certain?’ That was a difficult one to answer off the cuff owing to the fact that I was convinced it was no accident at all. ‘First, there was no opportunity for the administering of poison. We know that Antonio was alone in his cabin all afternoon right until dinner-time.’ I looked at the Count. ‘Did Antonio have any private food supplies with him in his cabin?’
‘How did you guess?’ the Count looked surprised.
‘I’m not guessing. I’m eliminating. He had?’
‘Two hampers. Full of glass jars—I think I mentioned that Antonio would never eat anything out of a tin—with all sorts of weird vegetable products inside, including dozens of baby food jars with all sorts of purees in them. A very finicky eater, was poor Antonio.’
‘So I’m beginning to gather. I think our answer will lie there.