“Everybody’s favorite. That’s why she couldn’t turn it down. Anyway, I was stuck there alone, and one morning I was having breakfast in the cockpit of the boat, and something odd happened. A yacht of about fifty feet sailed into the harbor, the mainsail ripped, and nobody aboard but a beautiful blonde. After customs had cleared the boat, the police came and took her away.

“The following day I was passing the town hall and there was some sort of hearing under way, and I went in. Turned out to be an inquest. The girl, whose name was Allison Manning, had been sailing across the Atlantic with her husband, who was the writer Paul Manning . . .”

“I’ve read his stuff,” she said. “He’s good.”

“Yes. Anyway, her testimony is that they’re halfway across, and he winches her up the mast to fix something, then cleats the line. She finishes the job and looks down to find him lying in the cockpit, turning blue. She’s stuck at the top of the mast, but eventually she manages to shinny down. He’s dead, probably of a heart attack. He’s the sailor, and she’s the cook and bottle-washer, and now she’s in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, alone, her husband starting to rot in the heat. She buries him at sea and, in a considerable act of seamanship for somebody who isn’t a sailor, manages to get the yacht across the Atlantic to St. Marks.”

“This is beginning to sound familiar. Wasn’t there something about it on Sixty Minutes a while back?”

“Then you know the story?”

“No, go on. Tell me everything.”

“St. Marks’s Minister of Justice doesn’t buy her story, and he charges her with murdering her husband. Stone to the rescue. I offer to help. She’s tried. With the help of a local barrister, I represent her. Long story short, she’s convicted and sentenced to hang.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes. I call New York and pull out all the stops on publicity. Sixty Minutes shows up, and many telegrams are sent to the prime minister, demanding she be released. On the day of the execution, fully expecting a pardon, I and the barrister and a priest visit her in her cell. Suddenly she’s taken out, and the three of us are locked in. A minute later, we hear the trap sprung on the gallows.”

“That’s horrible,” she said. “I don’t think I knew the end of the story. I must have been traveling at the time.”

“There’s more. Turns out her husband wasn’t dead; it was all an insurance scam. He’d lost a ton of weight and shaved off a beard and was unrecognizable, and he was there, in St. Marks, posing as a magazine writer covering the story.”

“And he didn’t stop the hanging?”