I knew right then that it was Prozor’s work. Maybe Gathing had other enemies – he hadn’t struck me as the kind that picks up many friends – but it was Prozor he’d singled out for a snidey comment in the galley, and me that was tangled up in the implications of it.

No one else had seemed to make much of it there and then, but it wouldn’t have taken more than a second or third remark to start stirring up their curiosity. Prozor coming on the Queenie, then me, and then all of a sudden Trusko’s got a bee in his bonnet about the Fang . . .

No, it wouldn’t have taken much at all. So he had to go. I didn’t have a problem with that, not in principle. It was just the executing of it that was knotty.

He’d died in his quarters and that was where everyone was gathered. He had a hammock, like the rest of us, and he was still in it. But he wasn’t in any kind of restful repose. Gathing looked like he’d had electricity run through him, or more properly that it was still running through him, bunching up his nerves and muscles so that he was all stiff and arched, with his hands drawn up before his face, all clawed and useless. It wasn’t electricity, though. We could touch him, and there was no trace of burning or scalding on him, his clothes or his bedding. That face of his, though, wasn’t one I was going to forget in a hurry. His jaw was locked open, like he was still screaming, and his eyes were so wide it was like there was invisible rigging tugging his eyelids apart. You could start to see around the curve of his eyes, and I didn’t like that at all. No one wants to know what we’ve got going on in our sockets.

‘Looks like poison to me,’ Drozna said, plucking at his own lower lip as he mused the scene.

‘The cove only ate with the rest of us,’ Strambli said. ‘Or what he cooked for himself. Wouldn’t have taken a glass of water from one of us if he’d been on fire.’

‘He looks like he was on fire,’ Surt said. ‘All clenched up like that. Except he ain’t burned.’

‘He was alive when you got to him?’ Trusko asked, buttoning up the top of his shirt, for he had been drawn from his quarters unexpectedly. ‘Convulsing, screaming, and so on?’

‘You ’eard it yourself, Captain,’ Strambli said. ‘Any screamier, he’d have started popping the hull plates.’

‘Look at his handses,’ Tindouf said, pointing with the tip of his pipe. ‘Like he was trying to gets at something in his throat. I thinks Drozna’s right. It was poison after alls.’