“Yes, that would seem to square with the evidence, if only we knew—”

He was suddenly distracted. An elderly hotel clerk had just appeared in the distant doorway. He came towards us with maddening slowness, a genial kindly man with a large envelope in his hand.

At once David brought a bill out of his pocket, and held it in readiness.

“Fax, sir, just in.”

“Ah, thank you so much.”

He tore open the envelope.

“Ah, here we are. News wire via Miami. A hilltop villa on the island of Curaçao. Probable time early yesterday evening, not discovered till four a.m. Five persons found dead.”

“Curaçao! Where the hell is that?”

“This is even more baffling. Curaçao is a Dutch island—very far south in the Caribbean. Now, that really makes no sense at all.”

We scanned the story together. Once again robbery was apparently the motive. The thief had come crashing through a skylight, and had demolished the contents of two rooms. The entire family had been killed. Indeed, the sheer viciousness of the crime had left the island in the grip of terror. There had been two bloodless corpses, one that of a small child.

“Surely the devil isn’t simply moving south!”

“Even in the Caribbean there are far more interesting places,” said David. “Why, he’s overlooked the entire coast of Central America. Come, I want to get a map. Let’s have a look at this pattern flat out. I spied a little travel agent in the lobby. He’s bound to have some maps for us. We’ll take everything back to your rooms.”

The agent was most obliging, an elderly bald-headed fellow with a soft cultured voice, who groped about in the clutter of his desk for several maps. Curaçao? Yes, he had a brochure or two on the place. Not a very interesting island, as the Caribbean islands go.

“Why do people go there?” I asked.

“Well, in the main they don’t,” he confessed, rubbing the top of his bald head. “Except for the cruise ships, of course. They’ve been stopping there again these last few years. Yes, here.” He placed a little folder in my hand for a small ship called the Crown of the Seas, very pretty in the picture, which meandered all through the islands, its final stop Curaçao before it started home.

“Cruise ships!” I whispered, staring at the picture. My eyes moved to the giant posters of ships which lined the office walls. “Why, he had pictures of ships all over his house in Georgetown,” I said. “David, that’s it. He’s on some sort of ship! Don’t you remember what you told me. His father worked for some shipping company. He himself said something about wanting to sail to America aboard a great ship.”

“My God,” David said. “You may be right. New York, Bal Harbour … ” He looked at the agent. “Do cruise ships stop at Bal Harbour?”

“Port Everglades,” said the agent. “Right near it. But not very many start from New York.”