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Sport 14: Autumn 1995

[section]

We are entering a time of mist.

The ship’s engines throb uneasily.

Amanda, who in a determined effort to be cheerful has chosen a colourful frock and an unusually bright shade of lipstick, has brought her typewriter up onto the deck.

She sits alone by the ship’s pool, where abandoned lilos drift like ghostly waterlilies, casting shadows on the luminous water.

It is no use. Her rapturous phrases have fled.

Her fingers lie, as listless and unmoving as the sea, on the typewriter’s worn keys.

A wind comes stealing across the pool. It sends a shiver running from her slim, crossed ankles, along the length of her uncovered legs.

She has just made up her mind to go inside when a scrap of paper, tightly folded, goes past her in the scurrying wind.

Idly, Amanda reaches out and catches it, just before it is blown overboard.

Carefully she unfolds it.

There is a message on the paper. It consists of a single sentence, scrawled across the page in large, untidy letters.

The plot must thicken.

Amanda looks around for the writer of the mysterious message. She crushes the thin scrap of paper between her nervous fingers. But the deck is empty. She is alone.