By evening she had well over two hundred. By eleven the next morning she had reached three hundred. The sea was calm. That helped. The last eleven were difficult. Six of them were three honeymoon couples. She questioned room stewardesses in her fluent, grammatical and badly pronounced Italian, and got the names and room numbers, and eliminated the gentlemen on the basis of age. Four were desperately seasick — three ladies and one very, very elderly gentleman. The final male was in the ship’s infirmary, and he turned out to be twelve years old.
At three o’clock she went back to the purser. “Mr. Metucci, I wish to speak to you very seriously.”
“But of course, madame.”
“I have listed here every passenger apparently aboard. Three hundred and eleven. Here is my list. Names and cabin numbers.”
“My God, madame, you have covered them all? But why?”
“I watched the arrivals. I saw a man come aboard. He presented a ticket. Apparently he is not now aboard. I watched until the mooring lines were cast off. I did not notice him leave.”
“But... a moment of inattention... surely you...”
“Did anyone with a ticket leave the ship?”
“No, but...”
“Do you have 312 passengers?”
“Absolutely no. It has been checked and...”
“I saw you checking people aboard. You seemed to have a special greeting for Mrs. Corto.”
“Ah yes, of course. They have sailed with us before. But I do not see what—”
“Visitors use the other gangplank, further forward?”
“But yes. I do not—”
“Now I wish to ask you what is perhaps the most important question of all. On sailing, did you find one visitor’s pass had not been surrendered?”
He stared at her intently, in reappraisal. “You are quite right. We thought someone might attempt to hide aboard. We conducted a thorough search, in a quiet way. But how could you know that?”
“Mr. Metucci, I have seen Mr. Corto wearing two sports shirts which are not only too small for him, but are of a more sedate pattern than I imagine he would buy — or any woman would give him.”
Mr. Metucci wiped a hand slowly across his eyes. “Miss Mint, if you could possibly be more careful to stay on one subject at a time, perhaps I could—”
“Mr. Metucci. I am an observant woman. I seek reasons for everything.” She paused. “Once I have eliminated all probable explanations, I am then willing to accept the improbable. The Cortos eat like wolves and do not get seasick, yet they missed dinner on the first night out.”
“Please, Miss Mint!”
“If you would stop interrupting! I believe Mrs. Corto talked a lonely and vulnerable man into buying cruise tickets for the two of them under the supposedly assumed name of Martin Corto. Then Mr. Corto came aboard as a visitor, probably at a crowded moment. Mrs. Corto gave the lonely man a reason why they should not board together, possibly a jealous friend she was trying to avoid. They met in their cabin. Possibly she dragged a drink. Then the real Mr. Corto joined her. They locked the door. In the small hours of the morning, perhaps, they hurled the lonely man overboard. They missed dinner because they could not leave him there alone. Now Corto, both cheap and ignorant, wears the dead man’s shirts.”
Mr. Metucci hit himself in the forehead with his fist. “I beg you—”
“Mr. Metucci! Have you had police inquiries regarding men in their middle years who were reputed to have sailed with you, yet there was no trace of them in your records or your memory?”
The purser seemed to listen to distant sounds. His lips made a whistle-shape. “It has happened,” he said.
“And the Cortos were on those cruises.”
“Perhaps.”
She gave him that smile which had turned very lazy young ladies into straight-A scholars. “I believe your captain will invite the Cortos to the bridge while you and I see if their cabin contains anything... equivalently implausible.”
The stocky Captain of the Margaretta, in tropic whites, stood on the shoreward wing of his bridge with the curious Miss Mint and in silence watched the Cortos being bundled by proper authorities into a vehicle bound for the airport. The Captain sighed. “True villainy presupposes the imagination to comprehend the horror of the act. Those two are mindless urchins.”
“My dear Captain, the worst villainy comes from childish callousness.”
He smiled at her. “It could be argued at length, perhaps over wine. Please humor me. I so seldom find a passenger who can converse.”
“My pleasure,” said Miss Mint, with a rabbity smile, adjusting the tilt of her baseball hat.