Slowly, then all at once

A single loose thread

And it all comes undone

-- Sleeping at Last, Sorrow

Cabin 174

The ocean liner Kaiserin Elisabeth

4th June, 19—

The first days on the ship went exactly as Phil had expected. Her aunt spent most of the time bed-ridden with sea-sickness. Well, she said she had sea-sickness. Phil was there when her meals were delivered, and for a sick woman Rachael ate an astonishing amount. When not eating she demanded on Phil reading to her. Occasionally she tired of finding fault with Phil's reading and demanded on Király going over the year's sales so far. That was the only time when Phil had freedom, and by then she was always so exhausted that she went back to her cabin and fell asleep.

She hadn't seen the mysterious reappearing stranger since that first day. Nor had she seen many other people. Apart from the staff and Rachael, the only person she'd spoken to since they left Hong Kong was Király, and those conversations were confined to cursing Rachael.

The situation had finally changed this morning. Rachael announced she was well enough to get up, had met some acquaintances in the dining room during breakfast, and was now in a sitting room somewhere playing bridge. That was the odd thing about Rachael. Sometimes she demanded on controlling every minute of Phil's life, and sometimes she left Phil completely to her own devices.

Phil took advantage of her new freedom to put on her best dress — which had been a present from Vi for her twentieth birthday and was consequently four years out of fashion, but Rachael had sent Phil away with a flea in her ear when she dared to suggest buying a new one — and going to the dining room, then ordering coffee and two slices of chocolate cake.

To anyone else it would have seemed a strange or downright childish thing to do. But Rachael dictated what Phil wore and how much sugar she could eat. It had been over a year since Phil had last had chocolate cake. There was very little cake of any sort in the Patton-Langdale household, for that matter. Rachael had a tight hold over every aspect of Phil's life, and this was the only sort of rebellion she was currently capable of.

The teapot, teacup and saucer were pink and white and decorated with painted roses. Phil knew something about pottery — Rachael's efforts to appear more upper-class than she was extended to buying the most expensive tea-sets she could find so she could show them off when she invited her friends to tea, and it had become Phil's job to distinguish between fakes and genuine articles — and she spotted at once that this was Royal Albert china.

She contemplated how much it must have cost to buy hundreds of these dainty, easily-broken little things. Her mind boggled. It was more money than she ever expected to have in her life.

This early in the afternoon the dining room was fairly busy but not crowded. Some people came for a late lunch, some came for a snack after lunch, and some came just to meet up with their friends. As she slowly ate her chocolate cake Phil watched the people who passed her table without much interest. She couldn't help noticing various things: that all of the women her own age had more fashionable clothes than she did, that an elderly woman had lifted her dog onto the table and asked the waiter to bring it a plate of its own, and that the man at the table closest to her was reading her copy of Old Mortality.

Phil did a double take. At once she realised how stupid she'd been — her copy of Old Mortality was in her cabin, and the man's was much newer and looked like it had barely been read. His copy had the exact same cover as hers, and her brain had jumped to conclusions.

She looked curiously at the stranger who shared her taste in literature. Off-hand she couldn't think of anyone who looked less likely to be interested in Sir Walter Scott's more obscure novels

As Rachael insisted on telling her, Scott and other authors from the last century simply weren't fashionable any more. This man, however, was wearing a suit in the very latest fashion — Vi worked in the costume department of the Belfast Opera House and Phil had learnt more than she would ever need to know about men's fashions from her — and the material alone had probably cost a hundred pounds. Based solely on his clothes Phil would have expected him to read James Joyce or some other recently-published pretentious idiot who fashionable people claimed to have read so they looked cultured. He was also Chinese, which wasn't unusual on a ship that had just left Hong Kong but was unusual for a reader of Sir Walter Scott.

Phil amused herself for a minute by imagining how someone who looked like a rich businessman had ever discovered a no-longer-fashionable novelist from the other side of the world. Then a commotion on the other side of the dining room attracted her attention and she forgot about the man and the book.

A young boy had knocked over his teacup. The tea had splashed on his mother's dress — a silk dress that looked brand new and was covered with lace. Phil winced as she imagined how much that had cost. The mother hissed something at the boy. He slumped back in his chair, the picture of misery. Clearly he was in for a lecture as soon as they left the dining room. A lecture or worse.

Phil was suddenly reminded of herself when Rachael was angry. The thought left a bad taste in her mouth. She took another sip of tea to get rid of it. Then she grimaced, because the tea in her cup had cooled. There was some left in the pot so she poured herself another cup.

She froze, still holding the teapot over the cup. The man from the train and the hotel had just walked in. She gawked at him as he went up to the cash register and ordered coffee.

A faint splash returned her attention to the teapot. Once, some time last year, Király had been pouring tea when he saw something that shocked him — Vi walking into the parlour when she was supposed to be in London, if Phil remembered correctly, and that had raised her suspicions and led to a very interesting but rather unsettling conversation with Vi. He had been so shaken that he forgot to stop pouring, and the tea went all over the table. Phil had thought it was funny then. Now it had happened to her, and it suddenly wasn't so funny any more.

She was luckier than Király. Her teacup was on a saucer, and the tea that had spilled out of the cup had landed in the saucer. The table itself was unharmed. But how was she to get the tea back into the cup without spilling it?

She was seriously considering just drinking the tea from the saucer, good manners be damned, when a shadow fell over the table. She looked up, expecting to see a waiter, and came face to face with the stranger.

"Do you need help?" he asked politely, offering her a handkerchief.

Phil took it mutely, too stunned to think of anything to say. She mopped up the puddle of tea in the saucer. It left the handkerchief a soggy mess. She began to hand it back to the man, then realised it would just soak his pocket.

He laughed, with a hint of embarrassment in his voice. "It's all right, you can keep it. I have more."

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Thank you," Phil said, finally recovering her voice. Rachael would throw a fit if she knew she'd been talking to a strange man, business partner or not, and that thought was partly what made her said, "Won't you sit down?"

He sat down opposite her and a waiter brought him his coffee. An awkward silence fell as neither Phil nor the stranger could think of what to say.

"I saw you in Hong Kong," Phil began abruptly, suddenly determined to show she knew more about her aunt's business dealings than Rachael thought. If the stranger told Rachael, maybe dear old auntie would finally tell Phil what she was doing instead of dragging her around the world without a by-your-leave. "And on the train to Moscow. If you're looking for my aunt, I think she's in Drawing Room A."

The stranger looked blank. It suddenly occurred to Phil that it was just possible she had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

"Your aunt?" he repeated slowly. "Does she work for the theatre company?"

It was Phil's turn to look blank. "Theatre? Aunt Rachael has never been to a theatre in her life." Realising that something was wrong, she continued, "I think there's been— Well, I think I mistook you for someone else. Maybe we should start with introductions? I'm Ophelia Patton. My aunt owns a company that makes burglar alarms, and I thought you were one of her business partners."

"Pleased to meet you, Miss Patton. I'm Leopold Colman. I work for the Century Theatre in London."

Phil turned scarlet. "Oh. I'm sorry, you must have thought I was very rude when I stared at you, but I was so sure you were..." She trailed off helplessly. Thank god Aunt Rachael doesn't know about this. She'd never let me live it down.

Mr. Colman smiled. "Actually, I thought you'd recognised me. I expected you to ask for my autograph. It was quite a relief when you didn't."

Phil shook her head. "My sister's the one who likes the theatre. Even if I recognise an actor, I can never put a name to them. Are you acting in a play here?" she added curiously, vaguely remembering there was some sort of theatrical entertainment on-board for passengers interested in that sort of thing.

"No, I'm on my way to Sydney for business. Ever heard of Murder, Ahoy?"

Phil took a wild guess. "I suppose it's a play about a murder mystery?"

Mr. Colman nodded with a grimace. "Philpott wrote it. Worst play I've ever starred in. Unfortunately Philpott is the director, the manager, and the theatre owner, so when he writes a play he generally gets it staged. And his wife's brother is a reviewer who gives Philpott's plays good reviews even when they're trash. So a theatre in Sydney heard good things about Murder, Ahoy and have bought the rights to it. Philpott's sent me over to make sure their production is close to the one last year."

"What's the play about?" Phil asked.

"Well, there's a tourist who hires a boat — and believe me, I felt very silly pretending to row a boat across the stage — and while he's sailing he sees a murder committed in a house by the shore."

Unwanted memories of events shortly before leaving Langdale Manor came crowding into Phil's mind. For the first time she considered the possibility that someone out on the lough had witnessed...

Don't be silly, she reprimanded herself. It happened in the evening. They'd have needed a telescope and a floodlight to see anything.

What about when you moved the body? her mind whispered.

I moved it away from the lough. No one could have seen.

She gathered her thoughts and continued listening to Mr. Colman's summary of the plot.

"Then he goes to investigate, and of course everyone in the house behaves very suspiciously in the least plausible ways. We — me and my co-stars — made quite a game of counting how many times someone jumps out a window, or hides under a table, or behaves in a way that would get them sent to Colney Hatch[1] in real life. In the end he discovers the butler is the murderer. I suspect Philpott plagiarised it from a potboiler."

"It doesn't sound like a very good play," Phil said dubiously. "Why does someone want to perform it in Australia?"

"Darned if I know. But I can't say I'm surprised. You wouldn't believe the trash that gets revived year after year because the playwright knows the right people, or the director believes incomprehensible plays are the height of art, or a newly-started theatre can't get the rights to any better material."

From there the conversation moved on to a discussion of other plays, both good and bad, that Mr. Colman had seen or starred in. The memory of Phil's embarrassing misunderstanding became amusing instead of painful, and before they left the dining room Phil and Mr. Colman had a good laugh about it.

Mr. Colman went back to his cabin then, and Phil went for a brief walk on the deck before going in search of her aunt. As she leaned over the rails and watched the sea below, Phil reflected that at least she now knew one normal, likeable person on-board.

----------------------------------------

Yo-han hadn't exactly forgotten the painful scene he'd witnessed that first day. But other things had taken up his attention. He discovered a fellow-passenger was one of his former clients, who took the opportunity to thank him again for clearing him of a murder charge. He found the ship's library had an extensive collection of books and took the opportunity to read the works of authors he'd never heard of before. He had a book of crosswords that he'd bought in New York last year and still hadn't completed. And when he had nothing better to do, he could always sit somewhere and observe the other passengers.

Today he was half-way through Old Mortality. Claverhouse had just rescued Henry from the Cameronians. Yo-han made a note of words he was unfamiliar with as he read. There were a lot of them — clearly he was not as familiar with English dialects as he had thought, but as he didn't expect to visit Scotland any time soon it was unlikely to be a problem. He was struggling to parse Cuddy's dialogue when his attention drifted to someone at a nearby table.

It was the young woman he'd seen in the hall. The niece of the argumentative social-climber, who was required to change cabins for her aunt's convenience. She looked, if not exactly cheerful, then certainly less miserable than she had on that day. Her clothes were much brighter too. There was an air about her that was almost defiant, as if she expected someone to question her right to order food in a public restaurant.

Yo-han guessed that it was a rare occasion for her to have this sort of freedom.

She watched the passers-by with as much interest as Yo-han himself did. He wondered if she deduced pieces of their lives and came to the same conclusions as he did. He was no Sherlock Holmes, but he had been all over the world and met so many people — and more importantly learnt that there were only so many different types of people; once you knew which type you were dealing with, you could deduce almost everything about their life with near-certainty — that he had become skilled in spotting things that most people overlooked.

For a minute he observed her. He drew the conclusions that she was used to travelling by ship, that she was interested in pottery, and that chocolate cake was a rare treat for her. Not particularly interesting. But the memory of her face when he first saw her kept coming back. That hunted look was something he'd seen often enough from people who'd been driven — or were about to be driven — to desperation. Which usually involved breaking the law. And not infrequently resulted in someone's death.

His mind repeated what he'd thought before: What would happen if she snapped?

Unfortunately there was nothing he could do without barging into someone else's business. But he had a presentiment that something was going to happen. And that presentiment told him this woman would be involved in it.

Yo-han pushed those thoughts away. No use in borrowing trouble before it came. He went back to his book and continued his struggles to to decipher the Scottish dialect. He succeeded well enough that it came as a surprise, when he next looked up, to see a young man sitting at the woman's table.

Inexplicably Yo-han's first thought was of his stepmother. He blinked in utter confusion. Why had his brain found a connection between a foreigner he'd never seen before and Seo Hui-jae? They didn't even look alike.

Ludicrous or not, the association left a bitter taste in Yo-han's mouth. He forced himself to push away the automatic negative impression he'd developed of the stranger. He looked at him thoughtfully. There was nothing reminiscent of Hui-jae in his behaviour. There was nothing about him to suggest he was anything but a perfectly normal twenty-something talking to a friend.

Hui-jae had smiled so sweetly at her mother-in-law while treading on Yo-han's foot to stop him speaking. She had promised Mrs. Han that everything she said was in confidence, and an hour later had told Mrs. Han's secrets to half the town.

Yo-han watched as the man and woman left. He couldn't have said what he expected to see — proof that the man was two-faced? Whatever it was, he didn't see it.

That pesky presentiment was stronger than ever.