“Well, there wasn’t. I been on duty here constant. No flowers come aboard after eight bells.”

P. C. Moir said, “Well, thanks, anyway. P’raps she met someone on the wharf and handed them over.”

“No flowers never come aboard with nobody. Not since when I told you. Eight bells.”

“Awright, awright, we ’eard,” said the driver ungratefully. “Bells!”

“Are your passengers all aboard?” Moir asked.

“Last one come aboard five minutes back. All present and correct including Mr. Aubyn Dale. You’d never pick him, though, now he’s slaughtered them whiskers. What a change! Oh, dear!” The sailor made a gesture that might have indicated his chin, or his neck. “I reckon he’d do better to grow again,” he said.

“Anyone else been about? Anyone you couldn’t place, at all?”

“Hullo-ullo! What’s wrong, anyway?”

“Nothing so far as I know. Nothing at all.”

The sailor said, “It’s been quiet. The fog makes it quiet.” He spat carefully overboard. “I heard some poor sod singing,” he said. “Just the voice; funny sort of voice, too. Might of been a female and yet I don’t reckon it was. I didn’t rekkernize the chune.”

Moir waited a moment and then said, “Well, thanks again, sailor, we’ll be moving along.”

When he had withdrawn the driver to a suitable distance he said, coughing a little because a drift of fog had caught him in the throat, “What was she like, daddy? To look at?”

The taxi driver gave him a jaundiced and confused description of his fare in which the only clear glimpse to emerge was of a flash piece with a lot of yellow hair done very fancy. Pressed further, the driver remembered pin-heels. When she left the taxi the girl had caught her foot in a gap between two planks and had paused to adjust her shoe.

Moir listened attentively. “Right you are,” he said. “Now, I think I’ll just take a wee look round, daddy. You go back to your cab and wait. Wait, see?”