He wondered what had happened on this boat. Had someone crept aboard in the dark, rowing out just as they had, climbing on board silently, creeping soundlessly across the wooden planking and taking Mickey Parfitt by surprise? Or was it someone he had expected, someone he had assumed to be a friend, and then he had suddenly, horribly, found that he was wrong?

Orme was bending over the hatch.

“We’ll have to break it,” he said, frowning. “He must’ve been killed on deck.”

“Or he never got this far,” Monk replied.

Orme looked up at him. “You mean it could have nothing to do with this? Why would ’Orrie tell that story about bringing him here if he didn’t? If he’s got the guts to lie at all, surely he’d say he knew nothing about it?”

Monk took one of the crowbars and levered it into the lock in the hatch. “Maybe other people know he took Parfitt out. He might have been seen on the dockside.”

“At eleven at night?” Orme said skeptically. He slid his own crowbar into place and leaned hard on it, but the heavy metal hasp of the lock did not budge.

Monk put his weight behind his crowbar too, working in unison with Orme.

On the fourth attempt the wood splintered. On the fifth it gave, tearing the other end of the lock off and pulling the screws out.

“What the hell has he got in here that’s so valuable?” Orme said in amazement. “Smuggling? Brandy, tobacco? Must be a hell of a lot of it. Unless whoever killed him took it?”

Monk did not reply. He hoped that was what it was. “I think ’Orrie’s afraid of Tosh, don’t you?”

Orme straightened his back, pulling the hatch open. “You mean Tosh told him what to say? That would mean Tosh has a fair idea of what really happened.”

The sky was darkening around them, the light draining out of the air. There was no sound but the faint ripple of the water.

“Or else he’s protecting someone else,” Monk suggested. He moved closer to the black square of the hatch. Only the new wood where the screws were torn out showed pale. “We’d better get down there while we can still see. We’ll need a lantern below anyway.”

They did not look at each other. They both knew what they were afraid of. The same memories crowded both their minds.

Orme struck a match. In the still air he did not have to shelter it; carrying it carefully, he started down the wooden steps into the bowels of the boat.