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discover that she enjoyed it. I think Ellen had been even more astonished to discover that she and I had become friends in the months we had worked together, no more than friends, but close enough for her to be wondering whether to sail away with me around the world. Not in Wavebreaker, but in my own boat that needed to be rebuilt before I took it across the South Pacific.
    I heard a whine of servo-motors and guessed that Thessy had turned on the automatic pilot. He came down the companionway, holding the chart I had rescued from Hirondelle and which I had spread to dry on Wavebreaker’s deck. The torn paper was still sodden. “Nick?” There was consternation in his voice. “Do you know vere they vere two nights ago?” Thessy had the Bahamian out-islander’s odd Dickensian accent. He was seventeen years old, skinny as a sopping-wet cat, and was Wavebreaker ’s first and only mate, which also made him the boat’s steward, gorilla, ship’s boy, skivvy and mascot. His real name was Thessalonians, and he was just as pious as that New Testament name suggested. “Do you see, Nick?” He was pointing at the wet chart that he had draped across the galley table. “They vere there just two days ago. Only two days!”
    The chart had been soaked in sea-water, but salt cannot remove the pencil notations from a chart, and whoever had sailed Hirondelle had been a meticulous navigator. A pencil line extended from No Name Bay just south of Miami and reached across the Gulf Stream and into the Bahamas. Hirondelle’ s navigator had sailed much of the course by dead reckoning, and I could see just where that navigator had finally taken a fix and discovered that he or she had underestimated the northwards current of the Gulf Stream, but by very little, so that the Belgian yacht had only been five nautical miles off its estimated course. That course had curved to the south of Bimini towards a tiny island, lost all by itself between the Biminis and the Berrys, with the unprepossessing name of Murder Cay. The pencil line ended there, punctuated by a small circle enclosing a dot beside which the navigator had written the date and time of Hirondelle’ s arrival. And that arrival, as Thessy had noted, had been just two days before. No neat pencilled line betrayed Hirondelle’ s departure from the ill-named Murder Cay.
    I had never noticed the island before, despite its most noticeable name. It was a very small island, a mere speck that lay some twenty miles south-east from Wavebreaker’s present position, and that was exactly the direction from which the currents and wind would drive a derelict boat.
    I fetched the pilot book and looked up Murder Cay, but found no listing for the grimly named island. “Try Sister Island,” Ellen suggested laconically.
    It seemed a perverse suggestion, but Ellen’s perversity was often justified, so I duly looked up Sister Island and discovered that was the new name for Murder Cay. The Pilot Book offered no explanation for that change of name, which seemed a deal of trouble for what must be one of the smallest inhabited islands in all the Bahamas. Sister Island was only three miles long and was never more than a half-mile wide. The island’s southernmost promontory was marked with a white light which was meant to flash three times every fifteen seconds and be visible up to five miles away, but the book ominously reported that the light was ‘unreliable’. The whole island was surrounded by coral reefs called the Devil’s Necklace, and I wondered what unfortunate sailor had given the island and its reefs their macabre names. The deep-water access to Murder Cay lay through a dog-legged and unbuoyed passage to the west of the island. The best guide to the deep-water approach seemed to be a tall skeleton radio mast that was conveniently opposite the passage entrance and was supposedly marked with red air-warning beacons. There was an airstrip on the island which should have displayed a flashing green