Helen Plover looked lazily out through the viewing window of the four-man submarine.   She did her best to seem interested as she studied a pair of silver-red Horned Squirrelfish flitting in and out of the coral of the Great Barrier Reef.

I never should have come this year, she thought, realising that the underwater work was not taking her mind off the recent death of her husband, Joe, as she had hoped it would.   At forty-eight, Helen had been helping Professor Trevane catalogue the marine life of the coral reef over the summer holidays for fourteen years.   Usually accompanied by Joe, sometimes alone when her husband was too busy running the family business.   When Joe had died of a heart attack six months ago, her first instinct had been to cry off this year, but she had convinced herself that the work might help her to forget.   But now she realised it had been a mistake.

Seeing a flash of black and white out of the corner of her left eye, her first thought was that it was a moray eel.   Both the yellow-and-black Abbott’s and the black-and-white Tessellated morays were plentiful around the reef and had taken to mooching around the sub, hoping to be handfed by the divers.

On closer examination though, the black and yellow turned out to be the colours of a man’s wet suit.   Joe’s wet suit was black and white, she thought.   But she realised it couldn’t be her husband outside the sub.   Joe is dead, she reasoned.   Still she wished the man would turn round so she could see his face.

The man was over 190 centimetres tall and his wet suit seemed to bulge from his muscularity.

As it did with Joe, she thought.   For God’s sake turn around, she thought, trying to will the man to move.   But for an agonisingly long time he bobbed about outside the sub examining the coral reef, seemingly unaware of the stationary vehicle only a few metres behind him.

When at last he did turn round, Helen gasped aloud and cried, “Joe!”   Then she flush from embarrassment, knowing the three men behind her must have heard.