"And your director and camera crew on their backs for the past four days," Captain Imrie said sympathetically. It was impossible to say whether a smile lay behind the obfuscatory luxuriance of moustache and beard.

"The caprices of nature, Mr. Gerran."

"Three days," Gerran said again. "Maybe another week. A thirty-three day location budget, Kirkwall to Kirkwall." Otto Gerran looked ill, clearly both the state of his stomach and his film finances were making very heavy demands upon him. "How far to Bear Island, Captain Imrie?"

"Three hundred miles, give or take the usual. Twenty-eight hours, if we can keep up our best speed."

"You can keep it up?"

I wasn't thinking about the Morning Rose. It can stand anything. It's your people, Mr. Gerran. Nothing against them, of course, but I'm thinking they'd be more at home with those pedal boats in the paddling ponds."

"Yes, of course, of course." You could see that this aspect of the business had just occurred to him. "Dr. Marlowe, you must have treated a great deal of seasickness during your years in the Navy." He paused, but as I didn't deny it, he went on: "How long do people take to recover from sickness of this kind?"

"Depends how sick they are." I'd never given the matter any thought, but it seemed a logical enough answer. "How long they've been ill and how badly. Ninety rough minutes on a cross-Channel trip and you're as right as rain in ten minutes. Four days in an Atlantic gale and you'll be as long again before you're back on even keel."

"But people don't actually die of seasickness, do they?"

"I've never known of a case." For all his usual indecisiveness and more than occasional bumbling ineptitude which tended to make people laugh at him-discreetly and behind his back, of course-Otto, I realised for the first time and with some vague feeling of surprise, was capable of a determination that might verge on the ruthless. Something to do with money. I supposed. "Not by itself, that is. But with a person already suffering from a heart condition, severe asthma, bronchitis, ulcerated stomach-well, yes, it could see him off."