‘What the hell do I do?’

After a moment’s thought the hand went up again.

‘All right, all right,’ Alleyn said. ‘You tell me.’

I

Hazel Rickerby-Carrick sat in her cabin turning over with difficulty the disastrous pages of her diary.

They were not actually pulp; they were stuck together, buckled, blistered and disfigured. They had half-parted company with the spine and the red covers had leaked into them. The writing, however, had not been irrevocably lost.

She separated the entries for the previous day and for that afternoon.

‘I’m at it again,’ she read dismally. ‘Trying too hard, as usual. It goes down all right with Mavis, of course, but not with these people: not with Troy Alleyn. If only I’d realized who she was from the first! Or if only I’d heard she was going to be next door in Cabin 7: I could have gone to the Exhibition. I could have talked about her pictures. Of course, I don’t pretend to know anything about—’ Here she had had second thoughts and had abstained from completing the aphorism. She separated the sopping page from its successor using a nail-file as a sort of slice. She began to read the final entry. It was for that afternoon, before the diary went overboard.

‘—I’m going to write it down. I’ve got my diary with me: here, now. I’m lying on my Li-lo on deck (at the “blunt end”!!!) behind a pile of chairs covered with a tarpaulin. I’m having a sun-tan. I suppose I’m a goose to be so shy. In this day and age! What one sees! And of course it’s much healthier and anyway the body is beautiful: beautiful. Only mine isn’t so very. What I’m going to write now, happened last night. In Tollardwark. It was so frightful and so strange and I don’t know what I ought to do about it. I think what I’ll do is I’ll tell Troy Alleyn. She can’t say it’s not extraordinary because it is.