Devices & Desires

BOOK TWO. Thursday 22 September to Friday 23 September

It was ten past seven and the saloon bar of the Duke of Clarence pub was already smoke-filled, the noise level rising and the crowd at the bar three feet deep. Christine Baldwin, the Whistler's fifth victim, had exactly twenty minutes to live. She sat on the banquette against the wall, sipping her second medium sherry of the evening, deliberately making it last, knowing that Colin was impatient to order the next round. Catching Norman's eye, she raised her left wrist and nodded significantly at her watch. Already, it was ten minutes past their deadline and he knew it. Their agreement was that this was to be a pre-supper drink with Colin and Yvonne, the limit both of time and alcohol consumption clearly understood between her and Norman before they left home. The arrangement was typical of their nine-month-old marriage, sustained less by compatible interests than by a carefully negotiated series of concessions. Tonight it had been her turn to give way, but agreeing to spend an hour in the Clarence with Colin and Yvonne didn't extend to any pretence that she actually enjoyed their company.

She had disliked Colin since their first meeting; the relationship, at a glance, had been fixed in the stereotyped antagonism between newly acquired fiancée and slightly disreputable old schoolmate and drinking partner. He had been best man at their wedding – a formidable pre-nuptial agreement had been necessary for that capitulation – and had carried out his duties with a mixture of incompetence, vulgarity and irreverence which, as she occasionally enjoyed telling Norman, had spoilt for her the memory of her big day. It was typical of him to choose this pub. God knew, it was vulgar enough. But at least she could be certain of one thing: it wasn't a place where there was a risk of meeting anyone from the power station, at least not anyone who mattered. She disliked everything about the Clarence, the rough scrape of the moquette against her legs, the synthetic velvet which covered the walls, the baskets of ivy spiked with artificial flowers above the bar, the gaudiness of the carpet. Twenty years ago, it had been a cosy Victorian hostelry, seldom visited except by its regulars, with an open fire in winter and horse brasses polished to whiteness hung against the black beams. The lugubrious publican had seen it as his job to repel strangers and had employed to that end an impressive armoury of taciturnity, malevolent glances, warm beer and poor service. But the old pub had burnt down in the 1960s and been replaced by a more profitable and thrusting enterprise. Nothing of the old building remained and the long extension to the bar, dignified by the name Banqueting Hall, provided for the undiscriminating a venue for weddings and local functions and on other nights served a predictable menu of prawns or soup, steak or chicken, and fruit salad with ice-cream. Well, at least she had put her foot down over dinner. They had worked out their monthly budget to the last pound, and if Norman thought she was going to eat this overpriced muck with a perfectly good cold supper waiting in the refrigerator at home and a decent programme on the telly he could forget it. And they had better uses for their money than to sit here drinking with Colin and his latest tart who had opened her legs to half Norwich, if rumour were to be believed. There were the hire purchase repayments on the sitting-room furniture and the car, not to mention the mortgage. She tried again to meet Norman's eye but he was rather desperately keeping his attention on that slut Yvonne. And that wasn't proving difficult. Colin leaned over to her, his bold treacle-brown eyes half mocking, half inviting, Colin Lomas, who thought every woman would swoon when he beckoned.

'Relax, darling. Your old man's enjoying himself. It's your round, Norm.'

Ignoring Colin she spoke to Norman: 'Look, it's time we were going. We agreed we'd leave at seven.'

'Oh, come on, Chrissie, give the lad a break. One more round.'

Without meeting her eyes, Norman said: 'What'll you have, Yvonne? The same again? Medium sherry?'

Colin said: 'Let's get on to spirits. I'll have a Johnny Walker.'

He was doing it on purpose. She knew that he didn't even like whisky. She said: 'Look, I've had enough of this bloody place. The noise has given me a head.'

'A headache? Nine months married and she's started the headaches. No point in hurrying home tonight, Norm.'

Yvonne giggled.

Christine said, her face burning, 'You were always vulgar, Colin Lomas, but now you're not even funny with it. You three can do what you like. I'm going home. Give me the car keys.'

Colin leaned back and smiled. 'You heard what your lady wife said. She wants the car keys.'

Without a word, shamefaced, Norman took them out of his pocket and slid them over the table. She snatched them up, pushed back the table, struggled past Yvonne and rushed to the door. She was almost crying with rage. It took her a minute to unlock the car and then she sat shaking behind the wheel, waiting until her hands were steady enough to switch on the ignition. She heard her mother's voice on the day when she had announced her engagement: 'Well, you're thirty-two and if he's what you want I suppose you know your own mind. But you'll never make anything of him. Weak as water, if you ask me.' But she had thought that she could make something of him and that small semi-detached house outside Norwich represented nine months of hard work and achievement. Next year he was due for promotion at the insurance office. She would be able to give up her job as secretary in the medical physics department at Larksoken Power Station and start the first of the two children she had planned. She would be thirty-four by then. Everyone knew that you shouldn't wait too long.

She had only passed her driving test after her marriage and this was the first time that she had driven unaccompanied by night. She drove slowly and carefully, her anxious eyes peering ahead, glad that at least the route home was familiar. She wondered what Norman would do when he saw that the car had gone. Almost certainly he would expect to find her sitting there, fuming but ready to be driven home. Now he'd have to rely for a lift on Colin who wouldn't be so keen on coming out of his way. And if they thought that she was going to invite Colin and Yvonne in for a drink when they arrived they would get a shock. The thought of Norman's discomfiture at finding her gone cheered her a little and she pressed her foot down on the accelerator, anxious to distance herself from the three of them, to reach the safety of home. But suddenly the car gave a stutter and the engine died. She must have been driving more erratically than she thought for she found herself half skewed across the road. It was a bad place to be stranded, a lonely stretch of country lane with a thin band of trees on either side and it was deserted. And then she remembered. Norman had mentioned that they needed to fill up with petrol and must be sure to call at the all-night garage after they left the Clarence. It was ridiculous to have let the tank get so low but they had had an argument only three days earlier on whose turn it was to call at the garage and pay for the petrol. All her anger and frustration returned. For a moment she sat there, beating her hands impotently on the wheel, desperately turning the key in the ignition, willing the engine to start. But there was no response. And then irritation began to give way to the first tricklings of fear. The road was deserted and even if a motorist came by and drew up, could she be certain that he wasn't a kidnapper, a rapist, even the Whistler? There had been that horrible murder on the A3 only this year. Nowadays you could trust no one. And she could hardly leave the car where it was, slewed across the road. She tried to recall when she had last passed a house, an AA box, a public telephone, but it seemed to her that she had been driving through deserted countryside for at least ten minutes. Even if she left the dubious sanctuary of the car she had no clue to the best direction in which to seek help. Suddenly a wave of total panic swept across her like nausea and she had to resist the urge to dash from the car and hide herself among the trees. But what good would that do? He might be lurking even there.

And then, miraculously, she heard footsteps and, looking round, saw a woman approaching. She was dressed in trousers and a trench-coat and had a mane of fair hair beneath a tight-fitting beret. At her side on a leash trotted a small, smooth-haired dog. Immediately all her anxiety vanished. Here was someone who would help her push the car into the side of the road, who would know in which direction lay the nearest house, who would be a companion on her walk. Without even troubling to slam the door of the car she called out happily and ran smiling towards the horror of her death.

The dinner had been excellent and the wine, a Chateau Potensac '78, an interesting choice with the main course. Although Dalgliesh knew of Alice Mair's reputation as a cookery writer he had never read any of her books and had no idea to what culinary school, if any, she belonged. He had hardly feared being presented with the usual artistic creation swimming in a pool of sauce and accompanied by one or two undercooked carrots and mange-tout elegantly arranged on a side plate. But the wild ducks carved by Alex Mair had been recognizably ducks, the piquant sauce, new to him, enhanced rather than dominated the taste of the birds, and the small mounds of creamed turnip and parsnip were an agreeable addition to green peas. Afterwards they had eaten orange sorbet followed by cheese and fruit. It was a conventional menu but one intended, he felt, to please the guests rather than to demonstrate the ingenuity of the cook.

The expected fourth guest, Miles Lessingham, had unaccountably failed to arrive, but Alice Mair hadn't rearranged her table and the empty chair and unfilled wineglass were uncomfortably evocative of Banquo's ghost. Dalgliesh was seated opposite Hilary Robarts. The portrait, he thought, must have been even more powerful than he realized if it could so dominate his physical reaction to the living woman. It was the first time they had met although he had known of her existence as he had of all the handful of people who lived, as the Lydsett villagers said, 't'other side of the gate'. And it was a little strange that this was their first meeting; her red Golf was a frequent sight on the headland, her cottage had frequently met his eyes from the top storey of the mill. Now, physically close for the first time, he found it difficult to keep his eyes off her, living flesh and remembered image seeming to fuse into a presence both potent and disturbing. It was a handsome face, a model's face, he thought, with its high cheekbones, long, slightly concave nose, wide, full lips and dark, angry eyes deeply set under the strong brows. Her crimped, springing hair, held back with two combs, fell over her shoulders. He could imagine her posed, mouth moistly open, hips jutting and staring at the cameras with that apparently obligatory look of arrogant resentment. As she leaned forward to twitch another grape from the bunch and almost toss it into her mouth he could see the faint freckles which smudged the dark forehead, the glisten of hairs above a carved upper lip.

On the other side of their host sat Meg Dennison, delicately but unfussily peeling her grapes with pink-tipped fingers. Hilary Robarts's sultry handsomeness emphasized her own very different look, an old-fashioned, carefully tended but unselfconscious prettiness which reminded him of photographs of the late thirties. Their clothes emphasized the contrast. Hilary wore a shirtwaister dress in multicoloured Indian cotton, three buttons at the neck undone. Meg Dennison was in a long black skirt and a blue patterned silk blouse with a bow at the neck. But it was their hostess who was the most elegant. The long shift in fine dark brown wool worn with a heavy necklace of silver and amber hid her angularity and emphasized the strength and regularity of the strong features. Beside her Meg Dennison's prettiness was diminished almost to insipidity and Hilary Robarts's strong-coloured cotton looked tawdry.

The room in which they were dining must, he thought, have been part of the original cottage. From these smoke-blackened beams Agnes Ppley had hung her sides of bacon, her bundles of dried herbs. In a pot slung over that huge hearth she had cooked her family's meals and, perhaps, at the end had heard in its roaring flames the crackling faggots of her dreadful martyrdom. Outside the long window had passed the helmets of marching men. But only in the name of the cottage was there a memory of the past. The oval dining table and the chairs were modern as were the Wedgwood dinner service and the elegant glasses. In the drawing room, where they had drunk their pre-dinner sherry, Dalgliesh had a sense of a room which deliberately rejected the past, containing nothing which could violate the owner's essential privacy; no family history in photograph or portrait, no shabby heirlooms given room out of nostalgia, sentimentality or family piety, no antiques collected over the years. Even the few pictures, three recognizably by John Piper, were modern. The furniture was expensive, comfortable, well designed, too elegantly simple to be offensively out of place. But the heart of the cottage wasn't there. It was in that large, warm-smelling and welcoming kitchen.

He had only been half listening to the conversation but now he forced himself to be a more accommodating guest. The talk was general, candlelit faces leaned across the table and the hands which peeled the fruit or fidgeted with the glasses were as individual as the faces. Alice Mair's strong but elegant hands with their short nails, Hilary Robarts's long, knobbled fingers, the delicacy of Meg Dennison's pink-tipped fingers, a little reddened with housework. Alex Mair was saying: 'All right, let's take a modern dilemma. We know that we can use human tissue from aborted foetuses to treat Parkinson's disease and probably Alzheimer's. Presumably you'd find that ethically acceptable if the abortion were natural or legal but not if it were induced for the purpose of providing the tissue. But you can argue that a woman has a right to the use that she makes of her own body. If she's particularly fond of someone who has Alzheimer's and wants to help him by producing a foetus, who has the right to say no? A foetus isn't a child.'

Hilary Robarts said: 'I notice that you assume the sufferer to be helped is a man. I suppose he'd feel entitled to use a woman's body for this purpose as he would any other. But why the hell should he? I can't imagine that a woman who's actually had an abortion wants to go through that again for any man's convenience.'

The words were spoken with extreme bitterness. There was a pause then Mair said quiedy: 'Alzheimer's is rather more than an inconvenience. But I'm not advocating it. In any case, under present law, it would be illegal.'

'Would that worry you?'

He looked into her angry eyes. 'Naturally it would worry me. Happily it isn't a decision that I shall ever be required to make. But we're not talking about legality, we're talking about morality.'

His sister asked: 'Are they different?'

'That's the question, isn't it? Are they, Adam?'

It was the first time he had used Dalgliesh's Christian name. Dalgliesh said: 'You're assuming there's an absolute morality independent of time or circumstance.'

'Wouldn't you make that assumption?'

'Yes, I think I would, but I'm not a moral philosopher.'

Mrs Dennison looked up from her plate a little flushed and said: 'I'm always suspicious of the excuse that a sin is justified if it's done to benefit someone we love. We may think so, but it's usually to benefit ourselves. I might dread the thought of having to look after an Alzheimer patient. When we advocate euthanasia is it to stop pain or to prevent our own distress at having to watch it? To conceive a child deliberately in order to kill it to make use of its tissue, the idea is absolutely repugnant.'

Alex Mair said: 'I could argue that what you are killing isn't a child and that repugnance at an act isn't evidence of its immorality.'

Dalgliesh said: 'But isn't it? Doesn't Mrs Dennison's natural repugnance tell us something about the morality of the act?'

She gave him a brief, grateful smile and went on: 'And isn't this use of a foetus particularly dangerous? It could lead to the poor of the world conceiving children and selling the foetuses to help the rich. Already I believe there's a black market in human organs. Do you think a multi-millionaire who needs a heart-lung transplant ever goes without?'

Alex Mair smiled. 'As long as you aren't arguing that we should deliberately suppress knowledge or reject scientific progress just because the discoveries can be abused. If there are abuses, legislate against them.'

Meg protested: 'But you make it sound so easy. If all we had to do was to legislate against social evils Mr Dalgliesh for one would be out of work.'

'It isn't easy but it has to be attempted. That's what being human means, surely, using our intelligence to make choices.'

Alice Mair got up from the table. She said: 'Well, it's time to make a choice now on a somewhat different level. Which of you would like coffee and what kind? There's a table and chairs in the courtyard. I thought we could switch on the yard lights and have it outside.'

They moved through to the drawing room and Alice Mair opened the french windows leading to the patio. Immediately the sonorous booming of the sea flowed into and took possession of the room like a vibrating and irresistible force. But once they had stepped out into the cool air, paradoxically, the noise seemed muted, the sea no more than a distant roar. The patio was bounded on the road side by a high flint wall which, to the south and east, curved to little more than four feet to give an unimpeded view across the headland to the sea.

The coffee tray was carried out by Alex Mair within minutes and, cups in hand, the little party wandered aimlessly among the terracotta pots like strangers reluctant to be introduced or like actors on a stage set, self-absorbed, pondering their lines, waiting for the rehearsal to begin.

They were without coats and the warmth of the night had proved illusory. They had turned as if by common consent to go back into the cottage when the lights of a car, driven fast, came over the southern rise of the road. As it approached its speed slackened.

Mair said: 'Lessingham's Porsche.'

No one spoke. They watched silently as the car was driven at speed off the road to brake violently on the turf of the headland. As if conforming to some prearranged ceremony they grouped themselves into a semicircle with Alex Mair a little to the front, like a formal welcoming party but one bracing itself for trouble rather than expecting pleasure from the approaching guest. Dalgliesh was aware of the heightening tension: small individual tremors of anxiety which shivered on the still, sea-scented air, unified and focused on the car door and on the tall figure which unwound from the driver's seat, leapt easily over the low stone wall and walked deliberately across the courtyard towards them. Lessingham ignored Mair and moved straight to Alice. He took her hand and gently kissed it, a theatrical gesture which Dalgliesh felt had taken her by surprise and which the others had watched with an unnaturally critical, attention.

Lessingham said gently: 'My apologies, Alice. Too late for dinner, I know, but not, I hope, for a drink. And God, do I need one.'

'Where have you been? We waited dinner for forty minutes.' It was Hilary Robarts who asked the obvious question, sounding as accusatory as a peevish wife.

Lessingham kept his eye on Alice. He said: 'I've been considering how best to answer that question for the last twenty minutes. There are a number of interesting and dramatic possibilities. I could say that I've been helping the police with their inquiries. Or that I've been involved in a murder. Or that there was a little unpleasantness on the road. Actually it was all three. The Whistler has killed again. I found the body.'

Hilary Robarts said sharply: 'How do you mean, "found"? Where?'

Again Lessingham ignored her. He said to Alice Mair:

'Could I have that drink? Then I'll give you all the gory details. After unsettling your seating plan and delaying dinner for forty minutes that's the least I owe you.'

As they moved back into the drawing room Alex Mair introduced Dalgliesh. Lessingham gave him one sharp glance. They shook hands. The palm which momentarily touched his was moist and very cold.

Alex Mair said easily: 'Why didn't you ring? We would have kept some food for you.'

The question, conventionally domestic, sounded irrelevant, but Lessingham answered it. 'Do you know, I actually forgot. Not all the time, of course, but it honestly didn't cross my mind until the police had finished questioning me and then the moment didn't seem opportune. They were perfectly civil but I sensed that my private engagements had a pretty low priority. Incidentally, you get absolutely no credit from the police for finding a body for them. Their attitude is rather, "Thank you very much, sir, very nasty, I'm sure. Sorry you've been troubled. But we'll take over now. Just go home and try to forget all about it." I have a feeling that that isn't going to be so easy.'

Back in the drawing room, Alex Mair threw a couple of thin logs on to the glowing embers and went to get the drinks. Lessingham had refused whisky but had asked for wine. 'But don't waste your best claret on me, Alex. This is purely medicinal.' Almost imperceptibly they edged their chairs closer. Lessingham began his story deliberately, pausing at times to take gulps of the wine. It seemed to Dalgliesh that he was subtly altered since his arrival, had become charged with a power both mysterious and oddly familiar. He thought: He has acquired the mystique of the story-teller and, glancing at the ring of fire-lit and intent faces, he was suddenly reminded of his first village school, of the children clustered round Miss Douglas at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon for the half hour of story-time, and felt a pang of pain and regret for those lost days of innocence and love. He was surprised that the memory should have come back so keenly and at such a moment. But this was to be a very different story and one unsuited to the ears of children.

Lessingham said: 'I had an appointment with my dentist in Norwich at five o'clock and then briefly visited a friend in the Close. So I drove here from Norwich, not from my cottage. I'd just turned right off the B1150 at Fairstead when I nearly crashed into the back of this unlit car skewed across the road. I thought it was a damn silly place to park if someone wanted to take a leak in the bushes. Then it crossed my mind that there could have been an accident. And the right-hand door was open, that seemed a bit odd. So I drew into the side and went to take a look. There was no one about. I'm not sure why I walked into the trees. A kind of instinct I suppose. It was too dark to see anything and I wondered whether to call out. Then I felt a fool and decided to leave it and mind my own business. And it was then that I almost tripped over her.'

He took another gulp of the wine. 'I still couldn't see anything, of course, but I knelt down and groped about with my hands. And it was then that I touched flesh. I think I touched her thigh, I can't be sure. But flesh, even dead flesh, is unmistakable. So I went back to the car and got my torch. I shone it on her feet and then slowly up her body to her face. And then, of course, I saw. I knew it was the Whistler.'

Meg Dennison asked gently: 'Was it very terrible?'

He must have heard in her voice what she obviously felt, not prurience but sympathy, an understanding that he needed to talk. He looked at her for a moment as if seeing her for the first time then paused, giving the question serious thought.

'More shocking than terrible. Looking back my emotions were complicated, a mixture of horror, disbelief and, well, shame. I felt like a voyeur. The dead, after all, are at such a disadvantage. She looked grotesque, a little ridiculous, with thin clumps of hair sticking out of her mouth as if she was munching. Horrible, of course, but silly at the same time. I had an almost irresistible impulse to giggle. I know it was only a reaction to shock but it was hardly admirable. And the whole scene was so, well, banal. If you had asked me to describe one of the Whistler's victims that's exactly how I should have seen her. You expect reality to be different from imaginings.'

Alice Mair said: 'Perhaps because the imaginings are usually worse.'

Meg Dennison said gently: 'You must have been terrified. I know I should have been. Alone and in darkness with such horror.'

He shifted his body towards her and spoke as if it were important that she, of all those present, should understand.

'No, not terrified, that was the surprising part. I was frightened, of course, but only for a second or two. After all, I didn't imagine he'd wait around. He'd had his kicks. He isn't interested in men anyway. I found myself thinking the ordinary, commonplace thoughts. I mustn't touch anything. I mustn't destroy the evidence. I've got to get the police. Then, walking back to the car, I started rehearsing what I'd say to them, almost as if I were concocting my story. I tried to explain why it was that I went into the bushes, tried to make it sound reasonable.'

Alex Mair said: 'What was there to justify? You did what you did. It sounds reasonable enough to me. The car was a danger slewed across the road. It would have been irresponsible just to drive on.'

'It seemed to need a lot of explaining, then and later. Perhaps because all the subsequent police sentences began with "why". You get morbidly sensitive to your own motives. It's almost as if you have to convince yourself that you didn't do it.'

Hilary Robarts said impatiently: 'But the body, when you first went back for the torch and saw her, you were certain she was dead?'

'Oh yes, I knew she was dead.'

'How could you have known? It could have been very recent. Why didn't you at least try to resuscitate her, give her the kiss of life? It would have been worth overcoming your natural repugnance.'

Dalgliesh heard Meg Dennison make a small sound between a gasp and a groan. Lessingham looked at Hilary and said coolly: 'It would have been if there had been the slightest point in it. I knew she was dead, let's leave it at that. But don't worry, if I ever find you in extremis I'll endeavour to overcome my natural repugnance.'

Hilary relaxed and gave a little self-satisfied smile, as if gratified to have stung him into a cheap retort. Her voice was more natural as she said: 'I'm surprised you weren't treated as a suspect. After all, you were the first on the scene, and this is the second time you've been, well almost, in at the death. It's becoming a habit.' ^

The last words were spoken almost under her breath but her eyes were fixed on Lessingham's face. He met her glance and said, with equal quietness: 'But there's a difference, isn't there? I had to watch Toby die, remember? And this time no one will even try to pretend that it isn't murder.'

The fire gave a sudden crackle and the top log rolled over and fell into the hearth. Mair, his face flushed, kicked it viciously back.

Hilary Robarts, perfectly calm, turned to Dalgliesh. 'But I'm right, aren't I? Don't the police usually suspect the person who finds the body?'

He said quietly: 'Not necessarily.'

Lessingham had placed the bottle of claret on the hearth. Now he leaned down and carefully refilled his glass. He said: 'They might have suspected me, I suppose, but for a number of lucky circumstances. I was obviously out on my lawful occasions. I have an alibi for at least two of the previous killings. From their point of view I was depress-ingly free of blood. I suppose they could see I was in a mild state of shock. And there was no sign of the ligature which strangled her, nor of the knife.'

Hilary said sharply: 'What knife? The Whistler's a strangler. Everyone knows that's how he kills.'

'Oh, I didn't mention that, did I? She was strangled all right, or I suppose she was. I didn't keep the torchlight on her face longer than was necessary. But he marks his victims, apart from stuffing their mouths with hair. Pubic hair, incidentally. I saw that all right. There was the letter L cut into her forehead. Quite unmistakable. A detective-constable who was talking to me later told me that it's one of the Whistler's trademarks. He thought that the L could stand for Larksoken and that the Whistler might be making some kind of statement about nuclear power, a protest perhaps.'

Alex Mair said sharply: 'That's nonsense.' Then added more calmly: 'There's been nothing on television or in the papers about any cut on the victims' foreheads.'

'The police are keeping it quiet, or trying to. It's the kind of detail they can use to sort out the false confessions. There have been half a dozen of those already apparently. There's been nothing in the media about the hair either, but that piece of unpleasantness seems to be generally known. After all, I'm not the only one to have found a body. People do talk.'

Hilary Robarts said: 'Nothing has been written or said, as far as I know, about it being pubic hair.'

'No, the police are keeping that quiet too, and it's hardly the sort of detail you print in a family newspaper. Not that it's so very surprising. He isn't a rapist but there was bound to be some sexual element.'

It was one of the details which Rickards had told Dalgliesh the previous evening but one, he felt, which Lessingham could well have kept to himself, particularly at a mixed dinner party. He was a little surprised at his sudden sensitivity. Perhaps it was his glance at Meg Dennison's ravaged face. And then his ears caught a faint sound. He looked across to the open door of the dining room and glimpsed the slim figure of Theresa Blaney standing in the shadows. He wondered how much of Lessingham's account she had heard. However little, it would have been too much. He said, hardly aware of the severity in his voice: 'Didn't Chief Inspector Rickards ask you to keep this information confidential?'

There was an embarrassed silence. He thought, They had forgotten for a moment that I'm a policeman.

Lessingham turned to him. 'I intend to keep it confidential. Rickards didn't want it to become public knowledge and it won't. No one here will pass it on.'

But that single question, reminding them of who he was and what he represented, chilled the room and changed their mood from fascinated and horrified interest to a slightly embarrassed unease. And when, a minute later, he got up to say his goodbyes and thank his hostess, there was an almost visible sense of relief. He knew that the embarrassment had nothing to do with the fear that he would question, criticize, move like a spy among them. It wasn't his case and they weren't suspects, and they must have known that he was no cheerful extrovert, flattered to be the centre of attraction while they bombarded him with questions about Chief Inspector Rickards's likely methods, the chance of catching the Whistler, his theories about psychopathic killers, his own experience of serial murder. But merely by being there he increased their awakening fear and repugnance at this latest horror. On each of their minds was imprinted the mental image of that violated face, the half-open mouth stuffed with hair, those staring, sightless eyes, and his presence intensified the picture, brought it into sharper focus. Horror and death were his trade and, like an undertaker, he carried with him the contagion of his craft.

He was at the front door when, on impulse, he turned back and said to Meg Dennison: 'I think you mentioned that you walked from the Old Rectory, Mrs Dennison.

Gould I walk home with you, that is if it's not too early for you?'

Alex Mair was beginning to say that he, of course, would drive her but Meg extricated herself clumsily from her chair and said, a little too eagerly: 'I'd be grateful if you would. I would like the walk and it would save Alex getting out the car.'

Alice Mair said: 'And it's time Theresa was on her way. We should have driven her home an hour ago. I'll give her father a ring. Where is she, by the way?'

Meg said: 'I think she was next door clearing the table a minute ago.'

'Well, I'll find her and Alex can drive her home.'

The party was breaking up. Hilary Robarts had been slumped back in her chair, her eyes fixed on Lessingham. Now she got to her feet and said: 'I'll get back to my cottage. There's no need for anyone to come with me. As Miles has said, the Whistler's had his kicks for tonight.'

Alex Mair said: 'I'd rather you waited. I'll walk with you once I've taken Theresa home.'

She shrugged and, without looking at him, said: 'All right, if you insist. I'll wait.'

She moved over to the window, staring out into the darkness. Only Lessingham stayed in his chair, reaching again to fill his glass. Dalgliesh saw that Alex Mair had silently placed another opened bottle in the hearth. He wondered whether Alice Mair would invite Lessingham to stay the night at Martyr's Cottage or whether he would be driven home later by her or her brother. He would certainly be in no state to drive himself.

Dalgliesh was helping Meg Dennison into her jacket when the telephone rang, sounding unnaturally strident in the quiet room. He felt her sudden shock of fear and for a moment, almost involuntarily, his hands strengthened on her shoulders. They heard Alex Mair's voice.

'Yes, we've heard. Miles Lessingham is here and gave us the details. Yes, I see. Yes. Thank you for letting me

know.' Then there was a longer silence, then Mair's voice again. 'Completely fortuitous, I should say, wouldn't you? After all, we have a staff of five hundred and thirty. But naturally everyone at Larksoken will find the news deeply shocking, the women particularly. Yes, I shall be in my office tomorrow if there's any help I can give. Her family have been told, I suppose? Yes, I see. Good night, Chief Inspector.'

He put down the receiver and said: 'That was Chief Inspector Rickards. They've identified the victim. Christine Baldwin. She is – she was – a typist at the station. You didn't recognize her then, Miles?'

Lessingham took his time refilling his glass. He said: 'The police didn't tell me who she was. Even if they had, I wouldn't have remembered the name. And no, Alex, I didn't recognize her. I suppose I must have seen Christine Baldwin at Larksoken, probably in the canteen. But what I saw earlier tonight wasn't Christine Baldwin. And I can assure you that I didn't shine the torch on her longer than I needed to satisfy myself that she was beyond any help that I could give.'

Without looking round from the window Hilary Robarts said: 'Christine Baldwin. Aged thirty-three. Actually, she's only been with us for eleven months. Married last year. Just transferred to the medical physics department. I can give you her typing and shorthand speeds if you're interested.' Then she turned round and looked Alex Mair in the face. 'It looks as if the Whistler's getting closer, doesn't it, in more ways than one.'

The final goodbyes were said and they stepped out from the smell of wood smoke, food and wine from a room which Dalgliesh was beginning to find uncomfortably warm into the fresh, sea-scented air. It took a few minutes before his eyes had adjusted to semi-darkness and the great sweep of the headland became visible, its shapes and forms mysteriously altered under the high stars. To the north the power station was a glittering galaxy of white lights, its stark geometric bulk subsumed in the blue-black of the sky.

They stood for a moment regarding it, then Meg Dennison said: 'When I first came here from London it almost frightened me, the sheer size of it, the way it dominates the headland. But I'm getting used to it. It's still disturbing but it does have a certain grandeur. Alex tries to demystify it, says its function is just to produce electricity for the National Grid efficiently and cleanly, that the main difference between this and any other power station is that you don't have beside it a huge pyramid of polluting coal dust. But atomic power to my generation always means that mushroom cloud. And now it means Chernobyl. But if it were an ancient castle standing there against the skyline, if what we looked out at tomorrow morning was a row of turrets, we'd probably be saying how magnificent it is.'

Dalgliesh said: 'If it had a row of turrets it would be a rather different shape. But I know what you mean. I should prefer the headland without it but it's beginning to look as if it had a right to be there.'

They turned simultaneously from contemplating the glittering lights and looked south to the decaying symbol of a very different power. Before them, at the edge of the cliff, crumbling against the skyline like a child's sandcastle rendered amorphous by the advancing tide, was the ruined

Benedictine abbey. He could just make out the great empty arch of the east window and beyond it the shimmer of the North Sea while above, seeming to move through and over it like a censer, swung the smudged yellow disc of the moon. Almost without conscious will they took their first steps from the track on to the rough headland towards it. Dalgliesh said: 'Shall we? Can you spare the time? And what about your shoes?'

'Reasonably sensible. Yes, I'd like to, it looks so wonderful at night. And I don't really need to hurry. The Copleys won't have waited up for me. Tomorrow, when I have to tell them how close the Whistler is getting, I may not like to leave them alone after dark. This may be my last free night for some time.'

'I don't think they'd be in any real danger as long as you lock up securely. So far all his victims have been young women and he kills out of doors.'

'I tell myself that. And I don't think they'd be seriously frightened. Sometimes the very old seem to have moved beyond that kind of fear. The trivial upsets of daily living assume importance but the big tragedies they take in their stride. But their daughter is constantly ringing up to suggest they go to her in Wiltshire until he's caught. They don't want to but she's a strong-minded woman and very insistent, and if she telephones after dusk and I'm not there it will increase the pressure on them.' She paused and then said: 'It was a horrible end to an interesting but rather strange dinner party. I wish Mr Lessingham had kept the details to himself, but I suppose it helped him to talk about it, especially as he lives alone.'

Dalgliesh said: 'It would have needed superhuman control not to have talked about it. But I wish he'd omitted the more salacious details.'

'It will make a difference to Alex, too. Already some of the women staff demand to be escorted home after the evening shifts. Alice has told me that that isn't going to be easy for Alex to organize. They'll only accept a male escort if he has an unbreakable alibi for one of the Whistler murders. People cease to be rational even when they've known and worked with someone for the last ten years.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Murder does that, particularly this kind of murder. Miles Lessingham mentioned another death: Toby. Was that the young man who killed himself at the station? I seem to remember a paragraph in one of the papers.'

'It was an appalling tragedy. Toby Gledhill was one of Alex's most brilliant young scientists. He broke his neck by throwing himself down on top of the reactor.'

'So there was no mystery about it?'

'Oh no, absolutely none, except why he did it. Mr Lessingham saw it happen. I'm surprised you remember it. There was very little about it in the national press. Alex tried to minimize the publicity to protect his parents.'

And to protect the power station, thought Dalgliesh. He wondered why Lessingham had described Gledhill's death as murder but he didn't question his companion further. The allegation had been spoken so quietly that he doubted whether she had in fact heard it. Instead he asked: 'Are you happy living on the headland?'

The question did not appear to surprise her but it did surprise him, as did the very fact that they were walking so companionably together. She was curiously restful to be with. He liked her quiet gentleness with its suggestion of underlying strength. Her voice was pleasant and voices were important to him. But six months ago none of this would have been enough to make him invite her company for longer than was politely necessary. He would have escorted her back to the Old Rectory and then, a minor social obligation performed, turned with relief to walk alone to the abbey, drawing his solitude around him like a cloak. That solitude was still essential to him. He couldn't tolerate twenty-four hours in which the greater part wasn't spent entirely alone. But some change in himself, the inexorable years, success, the return of his poetry, perhaps the tentative beginning of love, seemed to be making him sociable. He wasn't sure whether this was something to be welcomed or resisted.

He was aware that she was giving his question careful thought.

'Yes, I think that I am. Sometimes very happy. I came here to escape from the problems of my life in London and, without really meaning to, I came as far east as I could get.'

'And found yourself confronting two different forms of menace, the power station and the Whistler.'

'Both frightening because both mysterious, both rooted in a horror of the unknown. But the menace isn't personal, isn't directed specifically against me. But I did run away and, I suppose, all refugees carry with them a small burden of guilt. And I miss the children. Perhaps I should have stayed and fought on. But it was becoming a very public war. I'm not suited to the role of popular heroine of the more reactionary press. All I wanted was to be left alone to get on with the job I'd been trained for and loved. But every book I used, every word I spoke was scrutinized. You can't teach in an atmosphere of rancorous suspicion. In the end I found I couldn't even live in it.'

She was taking it for granted that he knew who she was; but then anyone who had read the papers must know that.

He said: 'It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve one's sanity.'

They were approaching the abbey now and the grass of the headland was becoming more hillocky. She stumbled and he put out his hand to steady her. She said: 'In the end it came down to just two letters. They insisted that the blackboard should be called the chalkboard. Black or chalk. I didn't believe, I still don't believe that any sensible person, whatever his colour, objects to the word blackboard. It's black and it's a board. The word black in itself can't be offensive. I'd called it that all my life so why should they try to force me to change the way I speak my own language? And yet, at this moment, on this headland, under this sky, this immensity, it all seems so petty. Perhaps all I did was to elevate trivia into a principle.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Agnes Poley would have understood. My aunt looked up the records and told me about her. She went to the stake, apparently, for an obstinate adherence to her own uncompromising view of the universe. She couldn't accept that Christ's body could be present in the sacrament and at the same time physically in heaven at God's right hand. It was, she said, against common sense. Perhaps Alex Mair should take her as patron of his power station, a quasi-saint of rationality.'

'But that was different. She believed her immortal soul was in jeopardy.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Who knows what she believed? I think she was probably activated by a divine obstinacy. I find that rather admirable.'

Meg said: 'I think Mr Copley would argue that she was wrong, not the obstinacy, but her earthbound view of the sacrament. I'm not really competent to argue about that. But to die horribly for your own common-sense view of the universe is rather splendid. I never visit Alice without standing and reading that plaque. It's my small act of homage. And yet I don't feel her presence in Martyr's Cottage. Do you?'

'Not in the slightest. I suspect that central heating and modern furniture are inimical to ghosts. Did you know Alice Mair before you came here?'

'I knew no one. I answered an advertisement by the Copleys in The Lady. They were offering free accommodation and food to someone who would do what they described as a little gentle housework. It's a euphemism for dusting, but of course it never works out like that. Alice has made a great difference. I hadn't realized how much I was missing female friendship. At school we only had alliances, offensive or defensive. Nothing "ever cut across political divisions.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Agnes Poley would have understood that atmosphere too. It was the one she breathed.'

For a minute they walked in silence hearing the rustle of the long grasses over their shoes. Dalgliesh wondered why it was that, when walking towards the sea, there came a moment when its roar suddenly increased as if a menace, quiescent and benign, had suddenly realized and gathered up its power. Looking up at the sky, at the myriad pinpricks of light, it seemed to him that he could feel the turning earth beneath his feet and that time had mysteriously come to a stop, fusing into one moment the past, the present and the future; the ruined abbey, the obstinately enduring artefacts of the last war, the crumbling cliff defences, the windmill and the power station. And he wondered whether it was in such a disorientating limbo of time, listening to the ever-restless sea, that the previous owners of Martyr's Cottage had chosen their text. Suddenly his companion stopped and said: 'There's a light in the ruins. Two small flashes, like a torch.'

They stood still and watched in silence. Nothing appeared. She said, almost apologetically: 'I'm sure I saw it. And there was a shadow, something or somebody moving against the eastern window. You didn't see it?'

'I was looking at the sky.'

She said, almost with a note of regret: 'Well, it's gone now. I suppose I could have imagined it.'

And when, five minutes later, they made their way cautiously over the humpy grass into the heart of the ruins there was no one and nothing to be seen. Without speaking they walked through the gap of the east window and on to the edge of the cliff and saw only the moon-bleached beach stretching north and south, the thin fringe of white foam. If anyone had been there, thought Dalgliesh, there was plenty of opportunity for concealment behind the hunks of concrete or in the crevices of the sandy cliff. There was little point and no real justification in attempting to give chase, even if they had known the direction in which he had disappeared. People were entitled to walk alone at night. Meg said again: 'I suppose I could have imagined it, but I don't think so. Anyway, she's gone now.' 'She?'

'Oh yes. Didn't I say? I had the distinct impression it was a woman.'

By four o'clock in the morning, when Alice Mair woke with a small despairing cry from her nightmare, the wind was rising. She stretched out her hand to click on the bedside light, checked her watch, then lay back, panic subsiding, her eyes staring at the ceiling while the terrible immediacy of the dream began to fade, recognized for what it was, an old spectre returning after all these years, conjured up by the events of the night and by the reiteration of the word 'murder' which, since the Whistler had begun his work, seemed to murmur sonorously on the very air. Gradually she re-entered the real world, manifested in the small noises of the night, the moan of the wind in the chimneys, the smoothness of the sheet in her clutching hands, the unnaturally loud ticking of her watch and, above all, in that oblong of pale light, the open casement and the drawn curtains which gave her a view of the faintly luminous star-studded sky.

The nightmare needed no interpretation. It was merely a new version of an old horror, less terrible than the dreams of childhood, a more rational, more adult terror. She and Alex were children again, the whole family living with the Copleys at the Old Rectory. That, in a dream, wasn't so surprising. The Old Rectory was only a larger, less pretentious version of Sunnybank – ridiculously named since it had stood on level ground and no sun ever seemed to penetrate its windows. Both were late Victorian, built in solid red brick, both had a strong, curved door under a high, peaked porch, both were isolated, each in its own garden. In the dream she and her father were walking together through the shrubbery. He was carrying his billhook and was dressed as he was on that last dreadful autumn afternoon, a singlet stained with his sweat, the shorts high cut, showing as he walked the bulge of the scrotum, the white legs, matted with black hair from the knees down. She was worried because she knew that the Copleys were waiting for her to cook lunch. Mr Copley, robed in cassock and billowing surplice, was impatiently pacing the back lawn seeming oblivious to their presence. Her father was explaining something to her in that over-loud, careful voice which he used to her mother, the voice which said: 'I know you are too stupid to understand this but I will talk slowly and loudly and hope that you won't try my patience too far.'

He said: 'Alex won't get the job now. I'll see that he doesn't. They won't appoint a man who's murdered his own father.'

And as he spoke he swung the billhook and she saw that its tip was red with blood. Then suddenly he turned towards her, eyes blazing, lifted it, and she felt its point pierce the skin of her forehead, and the sudden spurt of blood gushing into her eyes. Now wide awake, and breathing as if she had been running, she put her hand up to her brow and knew that the cold wetness she felt was sweat not blood.

There was little hope of falling asleep again; there never was when she woke in the early hours. She could get up, put on her dressing gown, go downstairs and make tea, correct her proofs, read, listen to the BBC World Service. Or she could take one of her sleeping tablets. God knew they were powerful enough to knock her into oblivion. But she was trying to wean herself off them and to give in now would be to acknowledge the potency of the nightmare. She would get up and make tea. She had no fear of waking Alex. He slept soundly, even through the winter gales. But first there was a small act of exorcism to be performed. If the dream were to lose its power, if she were somehow to prevent it recurring, she must face again the memory of that afternoon nearly thirty years ago.

It had been a warm autumnal day in early October and she, Alex and her father were working in the garden. He was clearing a thick hedge of brambles and overgrown shrubs at the bottom of the shrubbery and out of sight of the house, slashing at them with a billhook while Alex and she dragged the freed branches clear ready to build a bonfire. Her father was under clad for the time of year but was sweating heavily. She saw the arm lifting and falling, heard the crack of twigs, felt again the thorns cutting her fingers, heard his high commands. And then, suddenly, he gave a cry. Either the branch had been rotten or he had missed his aim. The billhook had sliced into his naked thigh and, turning, she saw the great curve of red blood begin to bubble in the air, saw him slowly sink like a wounded animal, his hands plucking the air. His right hand dropped the billhook and he held it out to her, shaking, palm upward, and looked at her beseechingly, like a child. He tried to speak but she couldn't make out the words. She was moving towards him, fascinated, when suddenly she felt a clutch on her arm and Alex was dragging her with him down the path between the laurels towards the orchard.

She cried: 'Alex, stop! He's bleeding. He's dying. We've got to get help.'

She couldn't remember whether she actually said the words. All she later remembered was the strength of his hands on her shoulders as he forced her back against the bark of an apple tree and held her there, imprisoned. And he spoke a single word.

'No.'

Shaking with terror, her heart pounding, she couldn't have broken free even if she had wanted. And she knew now that this powerlessness was important to him. It had been his act and his alone. Compelled, absolved, she had been given no choice. Now, thirty years later, lying rigid, her eyes fixed on the sky, she remembered that single word, his eyes looking into hers, his hands on her shoulders, the bark of the tree scraping her back through her Aertex shirt. Time seemed to stop. She couldn't remember now how long he had held her imprisoned, only that it seemed an eternity of immeasurable time.

And then, at last, he gave a sigh and said: 'All right. We can go now.'

And that, too, amazed her, that he should have been thinking so clearly, calculating how long it would take. He dragged her after him until they stood over her father's body. And, looking down at the still-outstretched arm, the glazed and open eyes, the great scarlet pool soaking into the earth, she knew that it was a body, that he had gone for ever, that there was nothing she need fear from him ever again. Alex turned to her and spoke each word loudly and clearly as if she were a subnormal child.

'Whatever he's been doing to you, he won't do it again. Ever. Listen to me and I'll tell you what happened. We left him and went down to climb the apple trees. Then we decided that we'd better get back. Then we found him. That's all there is, it's as simple as that. You don't need to say anything else. Just leave the talking to me. Look at me, look at me, Alice. You understand?'

Her voice, when it came, sounded like an old woman's voice, cracked and tremulous, and the words strained her throat. 'Yes, I understand.'

And then he was dragging her by the hands, racing across the lawn, nearly pulling her arm from its socket, crashing through the kitchen door, crying aloud so that it sounded like a whoop of triumph. She saw her mother's face draining as if she too were bleeding to death, heard his panting voice.

'It's Father. He's had an accident. Get a doctor quick.'

And then she was alone in the kitchen. It was very cold. There were cold tiles under her feet. The surface of the wooden table on which she rested her head was cold to her cheeks. No one came. She was aware of a voice telephoning from the hall, and other voices, other steps. Someone was crying. Now there were more footsteps and the crunch of car wheels on gravel.

And Alex had been right. It had all been very simple. No one had questioned her, no one had been suspicious. Their story had been accepted. She didn't go to the inquest but Alex did, although he never told her what happened there. Afterwards some of the people concerned, their family doctor, the solicitor, a few of her mother's friends, came back and there was a curious tea party with sandwiches and home-made fruitcake. They were kind to her and Alex. Someone actually patted her head. A voice said, 'It was tragic that there was no one there. Common sense and a rudimentary knowledge of first aid would have saved him.'

But now the memory deliberately evoked had completed its exorcism. The nightmare had been robbed of its terror. With luck it might not return for months. She swung her legs out of bed and reached for her dressing gown.

She had just poured the boiling water on the tea and was standing waiting for it to brew when she heard Alex's footsteps on the stairs and, turning, she saw his tall figure blocking the kitchen door. He looked boyish, almost vulnerable, in the familiar corded dressing gown. He pushed both hands through his sleep-tousled hair. Surprised, because he was usually a sound sleeper, she said: 'Did I disturb you? Sorry.'

'No, I woke earlier and couldn't get off again. Holding dinner for Lessingham made it too late for comfortable digestion. Is this fresh?'

'About ready to pour.'

He took down a second mug from the dresser and poured tea for them both. She seated herself in a wicker chair and took her mug without speaking.

He said: 'The wind's rising.'

'Yes, it has been for the last hour.'

He went over to the door and unbolted the top wooden panel, pushing it open. There was a sensation of rushing white coldness, scentless, but obliterating the faint tang of the tea and she heard the low growling roar of the sea. As she listened it seemed to rise in intensity so that she could imagine, with an agreeable frisson of simulated terror, that the low friable cliffs had finally crumbled and that the white foaming turbulence was rolling towards them across the headland, would crash against the door and throw its spume on Alex's face. Looking at him as he stared into the night, she felt a surge of affection as pure and as uncomplicated as the flow of cold air against her face. Its fleeting intensity surprised her. He was so much a part of her that she never needed nor wanted to examine too closely the nature of her feeling for him. She knew that she was always quietly satisfied to have him in the cottage, to hear his footfalls on the floor above, to share with him the meal she had cooked for herself at the end of the day. And yet neither made demands of the other. Even his marriage had made no difference. She had been unsurprised at the marriage since she had rather liked Elizabeth, but equally unsurprised when it ended. She thought it unlikely that he would marry again, but nothing between them would change, however many wives entered, or attempted to enter, his life. Sometimes as now she would smile wryly, knowing how outsiders saw their relationship. Those who assumed that the cottage was owned by him, not her, saw her as the unmarried sister, dependent on him for house-room, companionship, a purpose in life. Others, more perceptive but still nowhere near the truth, were intrigued by their apparent independence of each other, their casual comings and goings, their non-involvement. She remembered Elizabeth saying in the first weeks of her engagement to Alex, 'Do you know, you're a rather intimidating couple?' and she had been tempted to reply, 'Oh, we are, we are.'

She had bought Martyr's Cottage before his appointment as Director of the power station and he had moved in by an unspoken agreement that this was a temporary expedient while he decided what to do, keep on the Barbican flat as his main home or sell the flat and buy a house in Norwich and a smaller pied-a-terre in London. He was essentially an urban creature; she didn't see him settling permanently other than in a city. If, with the new job, he moved back to London she wouldn't follow him, and nor, she knew, would he expect her to. Here on this sea-scoured coast she had at last found a place which she was content to call home. That he could walk in and out of it unannounced never made it less than her own.

It must, she thought sipping her tea, have been after one o'clock when he returned from seeing Hilary Robarts home. She wondered what had kept him. Sleeping lightly as always in the early hours, she had heard his key in the lock, his foot on the stairs, before drifting again into sleep. Now it was getting on for five o'clock. He couldn't have had more than a few hours' sleep. Now, as if suddenly aware of the morning chill, he closed the top half of the door, drove home the bolt, then came and stretched himself out in the armchair opposite her. Leaning back, he cradled his mug in his hands.

He said: 'It's a nuisance that Caroline Amphlett doesn't want to leave Larksoken. I don't relish beginning a new job, particularly this job, with an unknown PA. Caroline knows the way I work. I'd rather taken it for granted that she'd come to London with me. It's inconvenient.'

And it was, she suspected, rather more than inconvenient. Pride, even personal prestige, were also at stake. Other senior men took their personal assistants with them when changing jobs. The reluctance of a secretary to be parted from her boss was a flattering affirmation of personal dedication. She could sympathize with his chagrin but it was hardly enough to keep him awake at night.

He added: 'Personal reasons, or so she says. That means Jonathan Reeves, presumably. God knows what she sees in him. The man isn't even a good technician.'

Alice Mair controlled her smile. She said: 'I doubt whether her interest in him is technical.'

'Well, if it's sexual she has less discrimination than I gave her credit for.'

He wasn't, she told herself, a poor judge of men or women. He rarely made fundamental mistakes and never, she suspected, about a man's scientific ability. But he had no understanding of the extraordinary complexities and irrationalities of human motives, human behaviour. He knew that the universe was complex but that it obeyed certain rules, although, she supposed, he wouldn't have used the word 'obey' with its implication of conscious choice. This, he would say, is how the physical world behaves. It is open to human reason and, to a limited extent, to human control. People disconcerted him because they could surprise him. Most disconcerting of all was the fact that he occasionally surprised himself. He would have been at home as a sixteenth-century Elizabethan, categorizing people according to their essential natures; choleric, melancholic, mercurial, saturnine, qualities mirroring the planets that governed their birth. That basic fact established, then you knew where you were. And yet it could still surprise him that a man could be a sensible and reliable scientist in his work and a fool with women, could show judgement in one area of his life and act like an irrational child in another. Now he was peeved because his secretary, whom he had categorized as intelligent, sensible, dedicated, preferred to stay in Norfolk with her lover, a man he despised, rather than follow him to London.

She said: 'I thought you said once that you found Caroline sexually cold.'

'Did I? Surely not. That would suggest a degree of personal experience. I think I said I couldn't imagine ever finding her physically attractive. A PA who is personable and highly efficient but not sexually tempting is the ideal.'

She said drily: 'I imagine that a man's idea of the ideal secretary is a woman who manages to imply that she would like to go to bed with her boss but nobly restrains herself in the interests of office efficiency. What will happen to her?'

'Oh, her job's secure. If she wants to stay at Larksoken there will be plenty of competition to get her. She's intelligent as well as tactful and efficient.'

'But presumably not ambitious, else why should she be content to remain at Larksoken?' She added: 'Caroline may have another reason for wanting to stay in the area. I saw her in Norwich Cathedral about three weeks ago. She met a man in the Lady Chapel. They were very discreet but it looked to me like an assignation.'

He asked, but without real curiosity: 'What kind of man?'

'Middle-aged. Nondescript. Difficult to describe. But he was too old to be Jonathan Reeves.'

She said no more, knowing that he wasn't particularly interested, that his mind had moved elsewhere. And yet, looking back, it had been an odd encounter. Caroline's blonde hair had been bundled under a large beret and she was wearing spectacles. But the disguise, if it were meant as a disguise, had been ineffective. She herself had moved on swiftly, anxious not to be recognized or to seem a spy. A minute later she had seen the girl slowly walking along the aisle, guidebook in hand, the man strolling behind her carefully distanced. They had moved together and had stood in front of a monument, seemingly absorbed. And when, ten minutes later, Alice was leaving the cathedral she had glimpsed him again. This time it was he who was carrying the guidebook.

He made no further comment about Caroline but after a minute's silence he said: 'Not a particularly successful dinner party.'

'An understatement. Beta-minus, except, of course, for the food. What's the matter with Hilary? Is she actually trying to be disagreeable or is she merely unhappy?'

'People usually are when they can't get what they want.'

'In her case, you.'

He smiled into the empty fire grate but didn't reply. After a moment she said: 'Is she likely to be a nuisance?' 'Rather more than a nuisance. She's likely to be dangerous.'

'Dangerous? How dangerous? You mean dangerous to you personally?'

'To rather more than me.'

'But nothing you can't cope with?'

'Nothing I can't cope with. But not by making her Administrative Officer. She'd be a disaster. I should never have appointed her in an acting capacity.'

'When are you making the appointment?'

'In ten days' time. There's a good field.'

'So you've got ten days to decide what to do about her.'

'Rather less than that. She wants a decision by Sunday.'

A decision about what? she wondered. Her job, a possible promotion, her future life with Alex? But surely the woman could see that she had no future with Alex.

She asked, knowing the importance of the question, knowing, too, that only she would dare ask it, 'Will you be very disappointed if you don't get the job?'

'I'll be aggrieved, which is rather more destructive of one's peace of mind. I want it, I need it and I'm the right person for it. I suppose that's what every candidate thinks but in my case it happens to be true. It's an important job, Alice. One of the most important there is. The future lies with nuclear power, if we're going to save this planet, but we've got to manage it better, nationally and internationally.'

'I imagine you're the only serious candidate. Surely this is the kind of appointment which they only decide to make when they know they've got the right man available. It's a new job. They've managed perfectly well without a nuclear supremo up to now. I can see that, given the right man, the job has immense possibilities. But in the wrong hands it's just another public relations job, a waste of public money.'

He was too intelligent not to know that she was reassuring him. She was the only person from whom he ever needed reassurance or would ever take it.

He said: 'There's a suspicion that we could be getting into a mess. They want someone to get us out of it. Minor matters like his precise powers, who he'll be responsible to and how much he'll be paid have yet to be decided. That's why they're taking so long over the job specification.'

She said: 'You don't need a written job specification to know what they're looking for. A respected scientist, a proven administrator and a good public relations expert. They'll probably ask you to take a TV test. Looking good on the box seems to be the prerequisite for anything these days.'

'Only for future presidents or prime ministers. I don't think they'll go that far.'

He glanced at the clock. 'It's already dawn. I think I'll get a couple of hours' sleep.' But it was an hour later before they finally parted and went to their rooms.

Dalgliesh waited until Meg had unlocked the front door and stepped inside before saying his final goodnight, and she stood for a moment watching his tall figure striding down the gravel path and into the darkness. Then she passed into the square, tessellated hall with its stone fireplace, the hall which, on winter nights, seemed to echo faintly with the childish voices of Victorian rectors' children and which, for Meg, had always held a faintly ecclesiastical smell. Folding her coat over the ornate wooden newel post at the foot of the stairs, she went through to the kitchen and the last task of the day, setting out the Copley's early-morning tray. It was a large, square room at the back of the house, archaic when the Copleys had bought the Old Rectory and unaltered since. Against the left-hand wall stood an old-fashioned gas stove so heavy that Meg was unable to move it to clean behind it and preferred not to think of the accumulated grease of decades gumming it to the wall. Under the window was a deep porcelain sink stained with the detritus of seventy years' washing-up and impossible to clean adequately. The floor was of ancient stone slabs, hard on the feet, from which in winter there seemed to rise a damp, foot-numbing miasma. The wall opposite the sink and the window was covered with an oak dresser, very old and probably valuable, if it had been possible to remove it from the wall without its collapse, and the original row of bells still hung over the door each with its Gothic script; drawing room, dining room, study, nursery. It was a kitchen to challenge rather than enhance the skills of any cook ambitious beyond the boiling of eggs. But now Meg hardly noticed its deficiencies. Like the rest of the Old Rectory it had become home.

After the stridency and aggression of the school, the

hate-mail, she was happy to find her temporary asylum in this gentle household where voices were never raised, where no one obsessively analysed her every sentence in the hope of detecting racist, sexist or fascist undertones, where words meant what they had meant for generations, where obscenities were unknown or at least unspoken, where there was the grace of good order symbolized for her in Mr Copley's reading of the Church's daily offices, Morning Prayer and Evensong. Sometimes she saw the three of them as expatriates, stranded in some remote colony, obstinately adhering to old customs, a lost way of life, as they did to old forms of worship. And she had grown to like both her employers. She would have respected Simon Copley more if he had been less prone to venial selfishness, less preoccupied with his physical comfort, but this she told herself was probably the result of fifty years of spoiling by a devoted wife. And he loved his wife. He relied on her. He respected her judgement. How lucky they were, she thought; secure in each other's affection and presumably fortified in increasing age by the certainty that if they weren't granted the grace of death on the same day there would be no lasting separation. But did they really believe this? She would like to have asked them, but knew that it would have been impossibly presumptuous. Surely they must have some doubts, made some mental reservations to the creed they so confidently recited morning and night. But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all.

The job wasn't arduous, but she knew that gradually she was taking on much more than the advertisement had suggested and she sensed that the main anxiety of their life was whether she would stay. Their daughter had provided all the labour-saving devices: dishwasher, washing machine, spin-dryer, all housed in a disused still room near the back door, although until she came the Copleys had been reluctant to use them in case they couldn't turn them off, visualizing the machines whirling away all night, overheating, blowing up, the whole rectory pulsating with an uncontrollable power.

Their only child lived in a manor house in Wiltshire and rarely visited, although she telephoned frequently, usually at inconvenient times. It was she who had interviewed Meg for the Old Rectory and Meg now found it difficult to connect that confident, tweeded, slightly aggressive woman with the two gentle old people she knew. And she knew, although they would never have dreamt of telling her, perhaps didn't even admit it to themselves, that they were afraid of her. She bullied them, as she would have claimed, for their own good. Their second greatest fear was that they might be forced to comply with her frequently telephoned suggestion, made purely from a sense of duty, that they should go to stay with her until the Whistler was caught.

Unlike their daughter, Meg could understand why, after retirement, they had used all their savings to buy the rectory and had in old age burdened themselves with a mortgage. Mr Copley had in youth been a curate at Larksoken when the Victorian church was still standing. It was in that ugly repository of polished pine, acoustic tiles and garish, sentimental stained glass that he and his wife had been married, and in a flat in the rectory, living above the parish priest, that they had made their first home. The church had been partly demolished by a devastating gale in the 1930s, to the secret relief of the Church Commissioners who had been considering what to do with a building of absolutely no architectural merit serving a congregation at the major festivals of six at the most. So the church had been finally demolished and the Old Rectory, sheltering behind it and proving more durable, had been sold. Rosemary Duncan-Smith had made her views plain when driving Meg back to Norwich station after her interview.

'It's ridiculous for them to be living there at all, of course. They should have looked for a two-bedded, well-equipped flat in Norwich or in a convenient village close to the shops and post office, and to a church, of course. But Father can be remarkably obstinate when he thinks he knows what he wants and Mother is putty in his hands. I hope you aren't seeing this job as a temporary expedient.'

Meg had replied: 'Temporary, but not short-term. I can't promise that I'll stay permanently, but I need time and peace to decide on my future. And I may not suit your parents.'

'Time and peace. We'd all be glad of that. Well, I suppose it's better than nothing, but I'd be grateful for a month or two's notice when you do decide to go. And I shouldn't worry about suiting. With an inconvenient house and stuck out on that headland with nothing to look at but a ruined abbey and that atomic power station they'll have to put up with what they can get.'

But that had been sixteen months ago and she was still here.

But it was in that beautifully designed and equipped, but comfortable and homely kitchen at Martyr's Cottage that she had found her healing. Early in their friendship, when Alice had to spend a week in London and Alex was away, she had given Meg one of her spare keys to the cottage so that she could go in to collect and forward her post. On her return, when Meg offered it back, she had said: 'Better keep it. You may need it again.' Meg had never again used it. The door was usually open in summer and, when shut, she would always ring. But its possession, the sight and weight of it on her key ring, had come to symbolize for her the certainty and the trust of their friendship. She had been so long without a woman friend. She had forgotten, sometimes she told herself, that she had never before known the comfort of a close, undemanding, asexual companionship with another woman.

Before the accidental drowning of her husband four years earlier, she and Martin had needed only the occasional companionship of friendly acquaintances to affirm their self-sufficiency. Theirs had been one of those childless, self-absorbing marriages which unconsciously repel attempts at intimacy. The occasional dinner party was a social duty; they could hardly wait to get back to the seclusion of their own small house. And after his death it seemed to her that she had walked in darkness like an automaton through a deep and narrow canyon of grief in which all her energies, all her physical strength, had been husbanded to get through each day. She thought and worked and grieved only for a day at a time. To allow herself even to think of the days, the weeks, the months or years stretching ahead would have been to precipitate disaster. For two years she had hardly been sane. Even her Christianity was of little help. She didn't reject it, but it had become irrelevant, its comfort only a candle which served fitfully to illumine the dark. But when, after those two years, the valley had almost imperceptibly widened and there was for the first time, not those black enclosing cliffs, but the vista of a normal life, even of happiness, a landscape over which it was possible to believe the sun might shine, she had become unwittingly embroiled in the racial politics of her school. The older members of staff had moved or retired, and the new headmistress, specifically appointed to enforce the fashionable orthodoxies, had moved in with crusading zeal to smell out and eradicate heresy. Meg realized now that she had, from the first, been the obvious, the predestined victim.

She had fled to this new life on the headland and to a different solitude. And here she had found Alice Mair. They had met a fortnight after Meg's arrival when Alice had called at the Old Rectory with a suitcase of jumble for the annual sale in aid of St Andrew's Church in Lydsett.

There was an unused scullery leading off a passage between the kitchen and the back door which was used as a collecting point for unwanted items from the headland; clothes, bric-a-brac, books and old magazines. Mr Copley took an occasional service at St Andrew's when Mr Smollett, the vicar, was on holiday, an involvement in church and village life which, Meg suspected, was as important to him as it was to the church. Normally, little jumble could be expected from the few cottages on the headland, but Alex Mair, anxious to associate the power station with the community, had put up a notice on the staff board and the two tea chests were usually fairly full by the time the October sale came round. The back door of the Old Rectory, giving access to the scullery, was normally left open during daylight hours and an inner door to the house locked, but Alice Mair had knocked at the front door and made herself known. The two women, close in age, both reserved, both independent, neither deliberately seeking a friend, had liked each other. The next week Meg had received an invitation to dinner at Martyr's Cottage. And now there was rarely a day when she didn't walk the half mile over the headland to sit in Alice's kitchen and talk and watch while she worked.

Her colleagues at school would, she knew, have found their friendship incomprehensible. Friendship there, or what passed for friendship, never crossed the great divide of political allegiance and in the acrimonious clamour of the staffroom could swiftly deteriorate into gossip, rumours, recriminations and betrayal. This peaceable friendship, asking nothing, was as devoid of intensity as it was of anxiety. It was not a demonstrative friendship; they had never kissed, had never indeed touched hands except at that first meeting. Meg wasn't sure what it was that Alice valued in her, but she knew what she valued in Alice. Intelligent, well-read, unsentimental, unshockable, she had become the focus of Meg's life on the headland.

She seldom saw Alex Mair. During the day he was at the power station and at weekends, reversing the normal peregrination, he was at his London flat, frequently staying there for part of the week if he had a meeting in town. She had never felt that Alice had deliberately kept them apart, fearing that her brother would be bored by her friend. In spite of all the traumas of the last four years Meg's inner self was too confidently rooted to be prone to that kind of sexual or social self-abasement. But she had never felt at home with him, perhaps because, with his confident good looks and the air of arrogance in his bearing, he seemed both to represent and to have absorbed something of the mystery and potency of the power he operated. He was perfectly amiable to her on the few occasions when they did meet; sometimes she even felt that he liked her. But their only common ground was in the kitchen of Martyr's Cottage and even there she was always more at home when he was away. Alice never spoke of him except casually but on the few occasions, like last night's dinner party, when she had seen them together they seemed to have the intuitive mutual awareness, an instinctive response to the other's needs, more typical of a longstanding successful marriage than of an apparently casual fraternal relationship.

And for the first time in nearly three years she had been able to talk about Martin. She remembered that July day, the kitchen door open to the patio, the scent of herbs and sea stronger even than the spicy, buttery smell of newly baked biscuits. She and Alice had sat opposite each other, across the kitchen table, the teapot between them. She could remember every word.

'He didn't get many thanks. Oh, they said how heroic he was and the headmaster said all the right things at the school memorial service. But they thought that the boys shouldn't have been swimming there anyway. The school disclaimed any responsibility for his death. They were more anxious to escape criticism than to honour Martin.

And the boy he saved hasn't turned out very well. I suppose I'm silly to worry about that.'

'It would be perfectly natural to hope that your husband hadn't died for someone second-rate, but I suppose the boy has a point of view. It could be an awesome responsibility knowing that someone has died for you.'

Meg said: 'I tried to tell myself that. For a time I was -well, almost obsessed with that boy. I used to hang about the school waiting for him to come out. Sometimes I had the need almost to touch him. It was as if some part of Martin had passed into him. But he was only embarrassed, of course. He didn't want to see me or talk to me, he or his parents. He wasn't, in fact, a very nice boy, a bully and rather stupid. I don't think Martin even liked him although he never said so. He was spotty, too – oh dear, that wasn't his fault, I don't know why I even mentioned it.'

And she had wondered how it was she was speaking of him at all. For the first time after all these years. And that business about her obsession with him; she had never mentioned that to a living soul.

Alice had said: 'It's a pity your husband didn't leave him to drown and save himself, but I suppose that on the spur of the moment he didn't weigh up the relative value of a useful teaching career and pimpled stupidity.'

'Leave him to drown? Deliberately? Oh Alice, you know you couldn't do that yourself.'

'Perhaps not. I'm perfectly capable of irrational folly. I'd probably pull him out if I could do it without too much danger to myself.'

'Of course you would. It's human instinct, surely, to save others, particularly a child.'

'It's human instinct, and a thoroughly healthy one in my view, to save oneself. That's why, when people don't, we call them heroes and give them medals. We know they're acting against nature. I can't understand how you can have such an extraordinarily benign view of the universe.'

'Have I? I suppose I have. Except for the two years after Martin drowned I've always been able to believe that at the heart of the universe there is love.'

'At the heart of the universe there is cruelty. We are predators and are preyed upon, every living thing. Did you know that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds, piercing the weak spot in their armour? Then the grub grows and feeds on the living ladybird and eats its way out, tying the ladybird's legs together. Whoever thought of that has, you have to admit, a peculiar sense of humour. And don't quote Tennyson at me.'

'Perhaps it doesn't feel anything, the ladybird.'

'Well, it's a comforting thought but I wouldn't bet on it. You must have had an extraordinarily happy childhood.'

'Oh, I did, I did! I was lucky. I would have liked brothers and sisters but I don't remember that I was ever lonely. There wasn't much money but there was a great deal of love.'

'Love. Is that so very important? You were a teacher, you ought to know. Is it?'

'It's vital. If a child has it for the first ten years hardly anything else matters. If he hasn't, then nothing does.'

There had been a moment's silence and then Alice had said: 'My father died, killed in an accident when I was fifteen.'

'How terrible. What kind of accident? Were you there? Did you see it?'

'He cut an artery with a billhook. He bled to death. No, we didn't see it, but we were on the scene soon afterwards. Too late, of course.'

'Alex too, and he was even younger. How awful for you both.'

'It had its effect on our lives undoubtedly, particularly mine. Why don't you try one of those biscuits? It's a new recipe but I'm not sure that it's entirely successful. A little too sweet, and I may have overdone the spice. Tell me what you think.'

Recalled to the present by the cold of the flagstones numbing her feet and automatically aligning the cup handles, she suddenly realized why she had remembered that summer teatime in Martyr's Cottage. The biscuits she would add to the tray next morning were a later batch of the same recipe provided by Alice. But she wouldn't take them from the tin until tomorrow. There was nothing more to do tonight except to fill her hot-water bottle. There was no central heating in the Old Rectory and she seldom switched on the two-bar electric fire in her bedroom, knowing how worried the Copleys were by their fuel bills. Finally, hugging the bottle's warmth to her chest, she checked on the bolts of the front and back doors and made her way up the uncarpeted stairs to bed. On the landing she met Mrs Copley, dressing-gowned, scurrying furtively to the bathroom. Although there was a cloakroom on the ground floor the Old Rectory had only one bathroom, a defect which necessitated embarrassed, low-voiced inquiries before anyone upset their carefully worked out rota by taking an unexpected bath. Meg waited until she heard the main bedroom door shut before going herself to the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later she was in bed. She knew rather than felt that she was very tired and recognized the symptoms of an overstimulated brain in an exhausted body, the restless limbs and inability to get comfortable. The Old Rectory was too far inland for her to hear the crash of the waves but the smell and the throb of the sea were always present. In summer the headland would vibrate with a gentle rhythmic humming which, on stormy nights or at the spring tides would rise to an angry moan. She slept always with her window open and would drift into sleep soothed by that distant murmur. But tonight it had no power to lull her into unconsciousness. Her bedside book, often reread, was Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington but tonight it could no longer translate her to the reassuring, comfortable, nostalgic world of Barsetshire, to croquet on Mrs Dale's lawn and dinner at the squire's table. The memories of the evening were too traumatic, too exciting, too recent to be easily assuaged by sleep. She opened her eyes to the darkness, a darkness too often populated before sleep by those familiar, reproachful, childish faces, brown, black and white, bending over her, asking why she had deserted them when they loved her and thought that she had loved them. Usually it was a relief to be free of those gentle and accusing ghosts, which in the last few months had visited her less often. And sometimes they were replaced by a more traumatic memory. The headmistress had tried to insist that she go on a racial awareness course, she who had taught children of different races for over twenty years. There was one scene which for months she had tried resolutely to put out of her mind, that last meeting in the staffroom, the circle of implacable faces, brown, black and white, the accusing eyes, the insistent questions. And in the end, worn down by bullying, she had found herself helplessly weeping. No nervous breakdown, that useful euphemism, had been more humiliating.

But tonight even that shameful memory was replaced by more recent and more disquieting visions. She glimpsed again that girlish figure momentarily outlined against the walls of the abbey only to slip away like a wraith and be lost among the shadows of the beach. She sat again at the dinner table and saw in the candlelight Hilary Robarts's dark, discontented eyes staring intently at Alex Mair; watched the planes of Miles Lessingham's face fitfully lit by the leaping flames of the fire, saw his long-fingered hands reaching down for the bottle of claret, heard again that measured rather high voice speaking the unspeakable. And then, on the verge of sleep, she was crashing with him through the bushes of that dreadful wood, feeling the briars scratching her legs, the low twigs whipping against

her cheeks, staring with him as the pool of light from the torch shone down on that grotesque and mutilated face. And in that twilight world between waking and sleeping she saw that it was a face she knew, her own. She jerked back to consciousness with a little cry of terror, switched on the bedside lamp, reached out for her book and began resolutely to read. Half an hour later, the book slipped out of her hand and she fell into the first of the night's uneasy periods of slumber.

It took only two minutes of lying stretched and rigid on his bed for Alex Mair to realize that sleep was unlikely to come. To lie in bed wakeful had always been intolerable to him. He could manage with little sleep but that was invariably sound. Now he swung his legs out of bed, reached for his dressing gown and walked over to the window. He would watch the sun rise over the North Sea. He thought back over the last few hours, the acknowledged relief of talking to Alice, the knowledge that nothing shocked her, nothing surprised her, that everything he did, if not right in her eyes, was judged by a different standard from the one she rigorously applied to the rest of her life.

The secret that lay between them, those minutes when he had held her shaking body against the tree trunk and stared into her eyes, compelling obedience, had bound them with a cord so strong that it couldn't be frayed, either by the enormity of their shared guilty secret, or by the small rubs of living together. And yet they had never spoken of their father's death. He didn't know whether Alice ever thought of it, or whether the trauma had erased it from her mind so that she now believed the version he had formulated, had taken the lie into her unconscious and made it her truth. When, quite soon after the funeral, seeing how calm she was, he had imagined that possibility he had been surprised at his reluctance to believe it. He didn't want her gratitude. It was degrading even to contemplate that she would feel an obligation towards him. Obligation and gratitude were words they had never needed to use. But he did want her to know and to remember. The deed was to him so monstrous, so surprising, that it would have been intolerable not to have shared it with a living soul. In those early months he had wanted her to know the magnitude of what he had done and that he had done it for her.

And then, six weeks after the funeral, he had suddenly found himself able to believe that it hadn't happened, not in that way, and that the whole horror was a childhood fantasy. He would lie awake at night and see his father's crumbling figure, the leap of blood like a scarlet fountain, would hear the harshly whispered words. In this revised and comforting version there had been a second of delay, no more, and then he had raced for the house shouting for help. And there was a second and even more admirable fantasy in which he had knelt at his father's side, had pressed his clenched fist hard into the groin, quenching the spurting blood, had whispered reassurance into those dying eyes. It had been too late, of course; but he had tried. He had done his best. The coroner had praised him, that precise little man with his half-moon spectacles, his face like a querulous parrot. 'I congratulate the deceased's son who acted with commendable promptness and courage and did everything possible to try to save his father's life.'

The relief of being able to believe in his innocence was at first so great that temporarily it overwhelmed him. He had lain in bed night after night drifting into sleep on a tide of euphoria. But he had known, even then, that this self-administered absolution was like a drug in the bloodstream. It was comforting and easy, but it wasn't for him. That way lay a danger more destructive even than guilt. He had told himself: 'I must never believe that a lie is the truth. I may tell lies all my life if it's expedient but I must know them for what they are and I must never tell them to myself. Facts are facts. I have to accept them and face them and then I can learn how to deal with them. I can look for reasons for what I did and call those reasons excuses; what he did to Alice, how he bullied Mother, how I hated him. I can attempt to justify his death at least to myself. But I did what I did and he died as he died.'

And with that acceptance came a kind of peace. After a few years he was able to believe that guilt itself was an indulgence, that he didn't need to suffer it unless he chose. And then there came a time when he felt a pride in the deed, in the courage, the audacity, the resolution which had made it possible. But that, too, he knew was dangerous. And for years afterwards he hardly thought of his father. Neither his mother nor Alice ever spoke of him except in the company of casual acquaintances who felt the need to utter embarrassed condolences from which there was no escape. But in the family only once was his name mentioned.

A year after the death his mother had married Edmund Morgan, a widowed church organist of mind-numbing dullness, and had retired with him to Bognor Regis where they lived on his father's insurance money in a spacious bungalow in sight of the sea, in an obsessive mutual devotion which mirrored the meticulous order and tidiness of their world. His mother always spoke of her new husband as Mr Morgan. 'If I don't talk to you about your father, Alex, it isn't that I've forgotten him, but Mr Morgan wouldn't like it.' The phrase had become a catchword between him and Alice. The conjunction of Morgan's job and his instrument offered endless possibilities of adolescent jokes, particularly when he and their mother were on honeymoon. 'I expect Mr Morgan is pulling out all his stops.' 'Do you suppose Mr Morgan is changing his combinations?' 'Poor Mr Morgan, labouring away. I hope he doesn't run out of wind.' They were wary, reticent children, yet this joke would reduce them to screams of helpless laughter. Mr Morgan and his organ releasing them into hysterical laughter had anaesthetized the horror of the past.

And then, when he was about eighteen, reality of another kind intruded itself and he said aloud, 'I didn't do it for Alice, I did it for myself, and thought how extraordinary it was that it had taken four years to discover that fact. And yet was it a fact, was it the truth, or was it merely a psychological speculation which in certain moods he found it interesting to contemplate?

Now, looking out over the headland to the eastern sky already flushed with the first faint gold of dawn, he said aloud: 'I let my father die deliberately. That is a fact. All the rest is pointless speculation.' In fiction, he thought, Alice and I should have been tormented by our joint knowledge, distrustful, guilt-ridden, unable to live apart yet miserable together. Yet since his father's death there had been nothing between him and his sister but companionship, affection, peace.

But now, nearly thirty years later, when he thought he had long come to terms with the deed and his own reaction to it, memory had begun to stir again. It had started with the first Whistler murder. The word 'murder' itself constantly on someone's lips, like a sonorous curse, seemed to have the power to evoke those half-suppressed images of his father's face which had become as unclear, as devoid of any life, as an old photograph. But in the last six months his father's image had begun to intrude on his consciousness at odd moments, in the middle of a meeting, across a boardroom table, in a gesture, the droop of an eyelid, the tone of a voice, the line of a speaker's mouth, the shape of fingers splayed to an open fire. His father's ghost had returned in the tangle of late-summer foliage, the first fall of the leaves, the tentative autumn smells. He wondered if the same thing was happening to Alice. For all their mutual sympathy, for all the sense he had of their being irrevocably bound together, this was the one question he knew he would never ask.

And there were other questions, one question in particular, which he had no need to fear from her. She wasn't in the least curious about his sexual life. He knew enough psychology to have at least some insight into what those early shaming and terrifying experiences had done to her. Sometimes he thought that she regarded his affairs with a casual, slightly amused indulgence as if, herself immune to

a childish weakness, she was nevertheless indisposed to criticize it in others. Once, after his divorce, she had said: 'I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?' And now he found himself wondering whether she knew or guessed about Amy. And then, as the flaming ball rose from the sea, the gears of time slipped, went into reverse and he was back only five days ago lying with Amy in the deep hollow of the dunes, smelling again the scent of sand and grasses and the salt tang of the sea as the late afternoon warmth drained out of the autumn air. He could recall every sentence, every gesture, the timbre of her voice, could feel again the hairs rising on his arms at her touch.

She turned towards him, her head propped on her hand, and he saw the strong afternoon light shafting with gold the cropped brightly dyed hair. Already the warmth was draining from the air and he knew that it was time they were moving. But lying there beside her, listening to the susurration of the tide and looking up at the sky through a haze of grasses he was filled, not with post-coital sadness, but with an agreeable languor as if the long-committed Sunday afternoon still stretched ahead of them.

It was Amy who said: 'Look, I'd better be getting back. I told Neil I wouldn't be more than an hour and he gets fussy if I'm late because of the Whistler.'

The Whistler kills at night not in daylight. And he'd hardly venture on the headland. Too little cover. But Pascoe's right to be concerned. There isn't much danger, but you shouldn't be out alone at night. No woman should until he's caught.'

She said: 'I wish they would catch him. It'd be one thing less for Neil to worry about.'

Making his voice carefully casual, he asked: 'Doesn't he ever ask where you're going when you sneak out on Sunday afternoons leaving him to look after the child?'

'No, he doesn't. And the child is called Timmy. And I don't sneak. I say I'm going and I go.'

'But he must wonder.'

'Oh, he wonders all right. But he thinks people are entitled to their privacy. He'd like to ask but he never will. Sometimes I say to him, "OK, I'm off now to fuck my lover in the sand dunes." But he never says a word, just looks miserable because he doesn't like me saying "fuck".'

'Then why do you? I mean, why torment him? He's probably fond of you.'

'No, he isn't, not very fond. It's Timmy he likes. And what other word is there? You can't call it going to bed. I've only been in your bed with you once and then you were as jumpy as a cat thinking that sister of yours might come back unexpectedly. And you can't say we sleep together.'

He said: 'We make love. Or, if you prefer it, we copulate.'

'Honestly, Alex, that's disgusting. I think that word is really disgusting.'

'And do you do it with him? Sleep, go to bed, make love, copulate?'

'No, I don't. Not that it's any business of yours. He thinks it would be wrong. That means he doesn't really want to. If men want to they usually do.'

He said: 'That has been my experience, certainly.'

They lay side by side like effigies, both staring at the sky. She seemed content not to talk. So the question had at last been put and answered. It had been with shame and some irritation that he had recognized in himself for the first time the nagging of jealousy. More shaming had been his reluctance to put it to the test. And there were those other questions he wanted to ask but daren't. 'What do I mean to you?', 'Is this important?', 'What do you expect of me?' And most important of all, but unanswerable, 'Do you love me?' With his wife he had known precisely where he was. No marriage had begun with a more definite understanding of what each required of the other. Their unwritten, unspoken, only half-acknowledged pre-nuptial agreement had needed no formal ratification. He would earn most of the money, she would work if and when she chose. She had never been particularly enthusiastic about her job as interior designer. In return his home would be run with efficiency and reasonable economy. They would take separate holidays at least once every two years; they would have at most two children and at a time of her choosing; neither would publicly humiliate the other;

the spectrum of marital offences under this heading ranging from spoiling the other's dinner-party stories to a too-public infidelity. It had been a success. They had liked each other, got on with remarkably little rancour and he had been genuinely upset, if principally in his pride, when she had left him. Fortunately marital failure had been mitigated by the public knowledge of her lover's wealth. He realized that to a materialistic society losing a wife to a millionaire hardly counted as failure. In their friends' eyes it would have been unreasonably proprietorial of him not to have released her with a minimum of fuss. But to do her justice, Liz had loved Gregory, would have followed him to California money or no money. He saw again in memory that transformed laughing face, heard her ruefully apologetic voice.

'It's the real thing this time, darling. I never expected it and I can still hardly believe it. Try not to feel too badly, it isn't your fault. There's nothing to be done.'

The real thing. So there was this mysterious real thing before which everything went down, obligations, habit, responsibility, duty. And now, lying in the dunes, seeing the sky through the rigid stalks of marram grasses, he thought about it almost with terror. Surely he hadn't found it at last and with a girl less than half his age, intelligent but uneducated, promiscuous and burdened with an illegitimate child. And he didn't deceive himself about the nature of her hold on him. No lovemaking had ever been as erotic or as liberating as their half-illicit couplings on unyielding sand within yards of the crashing tide.

Sometimes he would find himself indulging in fantasy, would picture them together in London in his new flat. The flat, as yet unsought, no more than a vague possibility among others, would assume dimensions, location, a horribly plausible reality in which he found himself arranging his pictures carefully on a non-existent wall, thinking over the disposal of his household goods, the exact location of his stereo system. The flat overlooked the Thames. He could see the wide windows giving a view over the river as far as Tower Bridge, the huge bed, Amy's curved body striped with bands of sunlight from the slatted wooden blinds. Then the sweet, deluding pictures would dissolve into bleak reality. There was the child. She would want the child with her. Of course she would. Anyway, who else could look after it? He could see the indulgent amusement on the faces of his friends, the pleasure of his enemies, the child lurching, sticky-fingered, about the flat. He could smell in imagination what Liz had never let him know in actuality – the smell of sour milk and dirty nappies, could picture the dreadful lack of peace and privacy. He needed these realities, deliberately emphasized, to bring him back to sanity. He was horrified that even for a few minutes he could seriously have contemplated such destructive stupidity. He thought: I'm obsessed by her. All right, just for these last few weeks I'll enjoy my obsession. This late summer would be brief enough, the warm unseasonable days of mellow sunshine couldn't last. Already the evenings were darkening. Soon he would smell the first sour tang of winter on the sea breezes. There would be no more lying in the warm sand dunes. She couldn't visit Martyr's Cottage again, that would be recklessly stupid. It was easy to convince himself that with care, when Alice was in London and no visitors expected, they could be together in his bedroom perhaps even for a whole night, but he knew that he would never risk it. Little on the headland was private for long. This was his St Martin's summer, an autumnal madness, nothing that the first cold of winter couldn't wither.

But now she said, as if there had been no period of silence between them, 'Neil's my friend, OK? Why do you want to talk about him anyway?'

'I don't. But I wish he'd civilize his living arrangements. That caravan is in direct line of my bedroom windows. It's an eyesore'.

'You'd need binoculars to see it from your windows.

And so is your bloody great power station an eyesore. That's in everyone's direct line; we all have to look at that.'

He put out his hand to her shoulder, warm under the gritty film of sand and said with mock pomposity: 'It's generally agreed that, given the constraints imposed by its function and the site, the power station is rather successful architecturally.'

'Agreed by whom?'

'I think so for one.'

'Well, you would, wouldn't you? Anyway, you ought to be grateful to Neil. If he didn't look after Timmy I wouldn't be here.'

He said: 'That whole thing is primitive. He's got a wood stove in there, hasn't he? If that blows up you won't last a minute, all three of you, particularly if the door jams.'

'We don't lock it. Don't be daft. And we let the fire go out at night. And suppose your place blows up. It won't be just the three of us, will it? Bloody hell it won't. Not only humans either. What about Smudge and Whisky? They've got a point of view.'

'It won't blow up. You've been listening to his scare-mongering nonsense. If you're worried about nuclear power ask me. I'll tell you what you want to know.'

'You mean while you're poking me you'll explain all about nuclear power? Oh boy, I'll certainly be able to take it in.'

And then she turned to him again. The pattern of sand on her shoulder glistened and he felt her mouth moving over his upper lip, his nipples, his belly. And then she knelt over him and the round childish face with its bush of bright hair shut out the sky.

Five minutes later she rolled apart from him and began shaking the sand from her shirt and jeans. Tugging the jeans over her thighs, she said: 'Why don't you do something about that bitch at Larksoken, the one suing Neil? You could stop her. You're the boss.'

The question – or was it a demand – shocked him out of his fantasy as crudely as if, unprovoked, she had suddenly slapped his face. In their four meetings she had never questioned him about his job, had seldom mentioned the power station except, as on this afternoon, to complain half seriously that it spoilt the view. He hadn't made a deliberate decision to keep her out of his private and professional life. When they were together that life hardly entered into his own consciousness. The man who lay with Amy in the dunes had nothing to do with that burdened, ambitious, calculating scientist who ran Larksoken, nothing to do with Alice's brother, with Elizabeth's ex-husband, with Hilary's ex-lover. Now he wondered, with a mixture of irritation and dismay, whether she had deliberately chosen to ignore those invisible keep-out signs. And if he had been unconfiding, then so had she. He knew little more about her now than when they had first encountered each other in the abbey ruins on a blustery August evening less than six weeks earlier, had for a minute stood and gazed and had then moved silently towards each other in a wordless, amazed recognition… Later that evening she had told him that she came from Newcastle, that her widowed father had remarried and that she and her stepmother couldn't get on. She had moved down to London and lived in squats. It had sounded commonplace enough but he hadn't quite believed it and nor, he suspected, did she care whether or not he did. Her accent was more Cockney than Geordie. He had never asked about the child, partly from a kind of delicacy but mainly because he preferred not to think of her as a mother, and she had volunteered no information about Timmy or his father.

She said: 'Well, why don't you? Like I said, you're the boss.'

'Not over my staff's private lives. If Hilary Robarts thinks she has been libelled and seeks redress I can't prevent her from going to law.'

'You could if you wanted to. And Neil only wrote what was true.'

'That is a dangerous defence to a libel action. Pascoe would be ill advised to rely on it.'

'She won't get any money. He hasn't got any. And if he has to pay costs it will ruin him.'

'He should have thought of that earlier.'

She lay back with a little thud and for a few minutes they were both silent. Then she said as casually as if the previous conversation had been trivial small talk which was already half forgotten: 'What about next Sunday? I could get away late afternoon. OK by you?'

So she bore no grudge. It wasn't important to her, or if it was, she had decided to drop it, at least for now. And he could put from him the treacherous suspicion that their first meeting had been contrived, part of a plan devised by her and Pascoe to exploit his influence with Hilary. But that, surely, was ridiculous. He had only to recall the inevitability of their first coming together, her passionate, uncomplicated, animal gusto in their Iove-making to know that the thought was paranoid. He would be here on Sunday afternoon. It might be their last time together. Already he had half decided that it had to be. He would free himself from this enslavement, sweet as it was, as he had freed himself from Hilary. And he knew, with a regret which was almost as strong as grief, that with this parting there would be no protests, no appeals, no desperate clinging to the past. Amy would accept his leaving as calmly as she had accepted his arrival.

He said: 'OK. About 4.30 then. Sunday the twenty-fifth.'

And now time, which in the last ten minutes seemed mysteriously to have halted, flowed again and he was standing at his bedroom window five days later watching the great ball of the sun rise out of the sea to stain the horizon and spread over the eastern sky the veins and arteries of the new day. Sunday the twenty-fifth. He had made that appointment five days ago and it was one that he would keep. But lying there in the dunes he hadn't known what he knew now, that he had another and very different appointment to keep on Sunday, September the twenty-fifth.

Shortly after lunch Meg walked across the headland to Martyr's Cottage. The Copleys had gone upstairs to take their afternoon rest and for a moment she wondered whether to tell them to lock their bedroom door. But she told herself that the precaution was surely unnecessary and ridiculous. She would bolt the back door and lock the front door after her as she left and she wouldn't be gone for long. And they were perfectly happy to be left. Sometimes it seemed to her that old age reduced anxiety. They could look at the power station without the slightest premonition of disaster and the horror of the Whistler seemed as much beyond their interest as it was their comprehension. The greatest excitement in their lives, which had to be planned with meticulous care and some anxiety, was a drive into Norwich or Ipswich to shop.

It was a beautiful afternoon, warmer than most in the past disappointing summer. There was a gentle breeze and from time to time Meg paused and lifted her head to feel the warmth of the sun and the sweet-smelling air moving against her cheeks. The turf was springy beneath her feet and to the south the abbey stones, no longer mysterious or sinister, gleamed golden against the blue untroubled sea.

She did not need to ring. The door at Martyr's Cottage stood open as it often did in sunny weather, and she called out to Alice before, in response to her answering voice, moving down the corridor to the kitchen. The cottage was redolent with the zesty smell of lemon overlaying the more familiar tang of polish, wine and wood smoke. It was a smell so keen that it momentarily brought back the holiday she and Martin had spent in Amalfi, the trudge hand-in-hand up the winding road to the mountain-top, the pile of lemons and oranges by the roadside, putting their noses to those golden, pitted skins, the laughter and the happiness.

The image experienced in a flash of gold, a flush of warmth to her face, was so vivid that for a second she hesitated at the kitchen door as if disorientated. Then her vision cleared and she saw the familiar objects, the Aga and the gas stove with the nearby working surfaces, the table of polished oak in the middle of the room with its four elegantly crafted chairs, and at the far end Alice's office with the walls covered with bookshelves and her desk piled with proofs. Alice was standing working at the table, wearing her long fawn smock.

She said: 'As you can see, I'm making lemon curd. Alex and I enjoy it occasionally and I enjoy making it, which I suppose is sufficient justification for the trouble.'

'We hardly ever had it – Martin and I, that is. I don't think I've eaten it since childhood. Mother bought it occasionally as a treat for Sunday tea.'

'If she bought it, then you don't know what it ought to taste like.'

Meg laughed and settled into the wicker chair to the left of the fireplace. She never asked if she could help in the kitchen since she knew Alice would be irritated by an offer which she knew to be impractical and insincere. Help was neither needed nor welcomed. But Meg loved to sit quietly and watch. Was it perhaps a memory of childhood, she wondered, that made watching a woman cooking in her own kitchen so extraordinarily reassuring and satisfying. If so, modern children were being deprived of yet one more source of comfort in their increasingly disordered and frightening world.

She said: 'Mother didn't make lemon curd but she did enjoy cooking. It was all very simple, though.'

'That's the difficult kind. And I suppose you helped her. I can picture you in your pinafore making gingerbread men.'

'She used to give me a piece of the dough when she was making pastry. By the time I'd finished pounding it, rolling it and shaping it, it was dun-coloured. And I used to cut out shaped biscuits. And yes, I did make gingerbread men with currants for their eyes, didn't you?'

'No. My mother didn't spend much time in the kitchen. She wasn't a good cook and my father's criticism destroyed what little confidence she had. He paid for a local woman to come in daily to cook the evening meal, virtually the only one he ate at home except on Sundays. She wouldn't come at weekends so that family meals then tended to be acrimonious. It was an odd arrangement and Mrs Watkins was an odd woman. She was a good cook but worked in a perpetual lather of bad temper and she certainly didn't welcome children in her kitchen. I only became interested in cookery when I was taking my degree in modern languages in London and spent a term in France. That's how it began. I found my necessary passion. I realized that I didn't have to teach or translate or become some man's over-qualified secretary.'

Meg didn't reply. Alice had only once before spoken of her family or her past life and she felt that to comment or question might cause her friend to regret the moment of rare confidence. She leaned comfortably back and watched as the deft, familiar, long-fingered hands moved confidently about their business. Before Alice on the table were eight large eggs in a blue shallow bowl and, beside it, a plate with a slab of butter and another with four lemons. She was rubbing the lemons with lumps of sugar until the lumps crumbled into a bowl, when she would pick up another and again begin patiently working away.

She said: 'This will make two pounds. I'll give you ajar to take to the Copleys if you think they'd like it.'

'I'm sure they would, but I'll be eating it alone. That's what I've come to tell you. I can't stay long. Their daughter is insisting that they go to her until the Whistler is caught. She rang again early this morning as soon as she heard the news of the latest murder.'

Alice said: 'The Whistler's getting uncomfortably close, certainly, but they're hardly at risk. He only stalks at night and all the victims have been young women. And the Copleys don't even go out, do they, unless you drive them?'

'They sometimes walk by the sea, but usually they take their exercise in the garden. I've tried to persuade Rosemary Duncan-Smith that they're not in danger and that none of us is frightened. But I think her friends are criticizing her for not getting them away.'

'I see. She doesn't want to have them, they don't want to go, but the friends, so-called, must be propitiated.'

'I think she's one of those masterful, efficient women who can't tolerate criticism. To be fair to her, I think she's genuinely worried.'

'So when are they going?'

'Sunday night. I'm driving them to Norwich to catch the eight thirty getting into Liverpool Street at ten fifty-eight. Their daughter will meet them.'

'That's not very convenient, is it? Sunday travel is always difficult. Why can't they wait till Monday morning?'

'Because Mrs Duncan-Smith is staying at her club in Audley Square for the weekend and has taken a room for them there. Then they can all drive down to Wiltshire first thing on Monday morning.'

'And what about you? Will you mind being left alone?'

'Not in the least. Oh, I expect I'll miss them when they've gone, but at present I keep thinking of all the work I'll be able to catch up on. And I'll be able to spend more time here, helping with the proofs. I don't think I'll be afraid. I can understand the fear and sometimes I find myself almost playing at being frightened, deliberately dwelling on the horror as if I'm testing my own nerve. It's all right in the daytime. But when night falls and we're sitting there by the fire, I can imagine him out there in the darkness, watching and waiting. It's that sense of the unseen, unknowable menace which is so disquieting. It's rather like the feeling I get from the power station, that there's a dangerous unpredictable power out on the headland which I can't control or even begin to understand.'

Alice said: 'The Whistler isn't in the least like the power station. Nuclear power can be understood and it can be controlled. But this latest murder is certainly a nuisance for Alex. Some of the secretaries live locally and bus or cycle home. He's arranging for the staff with cars to take them and pick them up in the morning, but with shift work that means more organizing than you'd expect. And some of the girls are beginning to panic and say they'll only be driven by another woman.'

'But they can't seriously think it's a colleague, someone from the power station?'

'They don't seriously think, that's the trouble. Instinct takes over and their instinct is to suspect every man, particularly if he hasn't an alibi for the last two murders. And then there's Hilary Robarts. She swims almost every evening until the end of October, and sometimes through the winter. She still intends to swim. The chances of her getting murdered may be a million to one but it's an act of bravado which sets a bad example. I'm sorry about yesterday evening, by the way. Not a very successful dinner party. I owed a meal to Miles and Hilary but I hadn't realized just how much they dislike each other. I don't know why. Alex probably does, but I'm not really interested enough to ask. How did you get on with our resident poet?'

Meg said: 'I liked him. I thought he'd be rather intimidating but he isn't, is he? We walked together to the abbey ruins. They look so wonderful by moonlight.'

Alice said: 'Appropriately romantic for a poet. I'm glad you didn't find his company disappointing. But I can never look at the moon without visualizing that litter of hardware. Man leaves his polluting mess behind him like metal turds. But it will be full moon on Sunday night. Why not come here for a quiet supper when you get back from the station and we'll walk to the ruins together. I'll expect you at nine thirty. It will probably just be the two of us. Alex usually goes into the station after a weekend in town.'

Meg said regretfully: 'I'd love to, Alice, but I'd better not. The final packing and getting them off will be a formidable business and by the time I get back from Norwich I'll be ready for bed. And I shan't be hungry. I need to make a high tea for them before we leave. I could only stay for an hour, anyway. Mrs Duncan-Smith says that she'll ring from Liverpool Street to say that they've arrived safely.'

Uncharacteristically Alice dried her hands and walked with her to the door. Meg wondered why in chatting about the dinner party and her walk with Adam Dalgliesh, she hadn't mentioned that mysterious female figure glimpsed among the ruins. It wasn't just that she feared to make too much of it; without Adam Dalgliesh's corroboration she could so easily have been mistaken. Something else, a reluctance she could neither explain nor understand, held her back. As they reached the door and Meg gazed out over the curve of the sunlit headland she experienced a moment of extraordinary perception in which it seemed to her that she was aware of another time, a different reality, existing simultaneously with the moment in which she stood. The external world was still the same. She saw every detail with a keener eye; the motes of dust dancing in the swathe of sunlight which fell across the stone floor, the hardness of each time-worn slab beneath her feet, every nail mark pitting the great oak door, each individual grass of the tussock at the fringe of the heath. But it was the other world which possessed her mind. And here there was no sunlight, only an everlasting darkness loud with the sound of horses' hoofs and tramping feet, of rough male voices, of an incoherent babble as if the tide were sucking back the shingle on all the beaches of the world. And then there was a hiss and crackling of faggots, an explosion of

fire, and then a second of dreadful silence broken by the high, long-drawn-out scream of a woman.

She heard Alice's voice: 'Are you all right, Meg?'

'I felt strange for a moment. It's over now. I'm perfectly all right.'

'You've been overworking. There's too much for you to do in that house. And last night was hardly restful. It was probably delayed shock.'

Meg said: 'I told Mr Dalgliesh that I never felt Agnes Poley's presence in this house. But I was wrong. She is here. Something of her remains.'

There was a pause before her friend replied. 'I suppose it depends on your understanding of time. If, as some scientists tell us, it can go backwards, then perhaps she is still here, still alive, burning in an everlasting bonfire. But I'm never aware of her. She doesn't appear to me. Perhaps she finds me unsympathetic. For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that I don't think I could go on living.'

Meg said her final goodbye and walked out resolutely over the headland. The Copleys, facing the formidable decisions of what to pack for an indeterminate visit, would be getting anxious. When she reached the crest of the headland she turned and saw Alice still standing at the open doorway. She raised her hand in a gesture more like a blessing than a wave and disappeared into the cottage.