Lind was relocking the door, Goddard remarked, ‘It’s odd he’s so pale; I mean, with an outdoor job.’

‘Heliophobe,’ Lind said. ‘Can’t stand sunlight at all; his skin burns like a crisp, so he has to stay covered completely. And as a matter of fact, in the jungle there’s practically no sunlight anyway. He had kind of a lame botanical joke about it; said if he were a plant he’d be classified as negatively heliotropic. It means turning away from the sun.’ He broke off as they came to a companionway at the end of the passage. ‘Come on down. You can see how it’s done.’

‘Egerton?’ Goddard asked.

‘Yeah. Bos’n’s working on him now.’

They went down to the next deck. There was a dimly lighted passageway here outside the engine room casing which contained a number of locked storerooms and the steward’s big freezer and chill box. One of the doors was unlocked. Lind opened it and stuck his head in. ‘How you doing, Boats?’ He went in, followed by Goddard.

It was a bleak steel cubicle with a single overhead light, empty except for two wooden horses with a door lying across them. Egerton’s body was on the door, being sewn into the canvas burial sack by the bos’n and one of the sailors, a blond-bearded, heavily built man in his twenties whom Goddard had heard addressed as Otto. They looked up from their work and nodded, but said nothing. The sack was a single long strip of white canvas a yard wide, doubled under Egerton’s feet and stitched up the sides by the two men with sail needles and white twine. They were almost finished; only the head remained exposed. The gray hair was still neat, even in death, Goddard noted, and the slender face was pale as marble under the naked light.

‘It’s weighted at the foot,’ Lind said. ‘The engineers gave us the cap of an old bearing. Weighs about fifty pounds.’

Captain Steen came in, carrying a rolled flag. ‘Good morning, Mr. Goddard,’ he said, and turned to the mate. ‘Here’s the Union Jack, Mr. Lind.’

Lind took the flag. ‘After well-deck, port side; that all right?’

‘Yes. And I would appreciate it if everybody who can would change to shore clothes. That doesn’t include the black gang on watch, of course.’

Lind nodded. ‘I’ll pass the word. Incidentally, there are two British subjects in the crew; the eight-to-twelve fireman and the second cook. It might be a gesture of some kind if we asked them to bear a hand bringing the body out. And maybe Mr. Goddard would like to represent the passengers.’

‘I’d be glad to,’ Goddard said.

He watched moodily as the bos’n pulled the remaining canvas up over Egerton’s face and matched the corners. The two men went on stitching up the edges of the white anonymous sack.

6

There were poisonous-looking squalls on the horizon on both sides of them, but here the sun bore down with leaden weight and there was a dead stillness to the air like the feeling of vacuum before a tornado. It was oppressive, and Goddard found himself wishing nervously that Captain Steen would advance the service a few minutes so they could complete it before one of the squalls came screaming down on them and wrecked Egerton’s chances of departing from the visible world with a little grace and dignity. But he’d said four p.m., and apparently four it would be.

A single wooden horse had been set five feet in from the bulwark on the port side of the after well-deck, and all the crew not on watch on the bridge or in the engine room were gathered in a semicircle about it, most of them in shore-going trousers and white shirts that were already limp with perspiration by the time they’d got them on. Lind was wearing tropical whites, the first time Goddard had seen him in uniform. In the background were two or three of the black gang, just come up from below and still in singlets and sweat rags. Goddard was standing by the horse with Lind, the bos’n, and the two English members of the crew, the only ones of the whole assemblage wearing ties.

There was a growl of thunder from one of the squalls. Then Goddard saw Karen Brooke and Madeleine Lennox coming down the ladder from the deck above, followed by Captain Steen in full uniform with jacket, carrying his Bible. The two women were in simple white summer dresses. Four bells struck, followed immediately by the jingle of the