Devices & Desires

BOOK THREE. Sunday 25 September

By a quarter past eight on Sunday night Theresa had finished the last of her long-deferred homework and thought she could safely put away her arithmetic book and tell her father that she was tired and ready for bed. He had earlier helped her wash up after supper, the last of the Irish stew to which she had added extra carrots from a tin, and had settled as he always did in front of the television, slumped back in the battered armchair by the empty fire grate with his bottle of whisky on the floor by his side. Here, she knew, he would sit until the last programme had ended, staring fixedly at the screen but not, she felt, really watching those black and white flickering images. Sometimes it was almost dawn when, awake, she would hear his heavy feet on the stairs.

Mr Jago had rung just after half-past seven and she had answered the telephone and taken a message saying that Daddy was in his painting shed and couldn't be disturbed. It wasn't true. He had been in the privy at the bottom of the garden. But she hadn't liked to tell that to Mr Jago and she wouldn't have dreamed of fetching her father, of knocking on the privy door. Sometimes she thought, with a curiously adult perception, that he took his torch and went there when he didn't really need to, that the ramshackle hut with its cracked door and wide comfortable seat was a refuge for him from the cottage, from the mess and muddle, Anthony's crying, her own ineffectual efforts to take her mother's place. But he must have been on his way back. His ears had caught the ring and, coming in, he had asked her who had telephoned.

'It was a wrong number, Daddy,' she had lied, and from habit made a quick act of contrition. She was glad that he hadn't spoken to Mr Jago. Daddy might have been tempted to meet him at the Local Hero knowing that it would be safe to leave her in charge for an hour or two, and tonight it was vitally important that he didn't leave the cottage. He had only half a bottle of whisky left, she had checked on that. She would be gone for only forty minutes or so and if there were a fire, the secret fear which she had inherited from her mother, he wouldn't be too drunk to save Anthony and the twins.

She kissed him briefly on a cheek which was prickly to her lips and smelt the familiar smell of whisky, turpentine and sweat. As always, he put up his hand and gently ruffled her hair. It was the only gesture of affection which he now made to her. His eyes were still on the old black and white screen where the familiar Sunday faces could be glimpsed through an intermittent snowstorm. He wouldn't, she knew, disturb her once the door to the back bedroom she shared with Anthony was closed. Since her mother's death he had never entered her bedroom when she was there, either by night or day. And she had noticed the difference in his attitude towards her, almost a formality, as if in a few short weeks she had grown into womanhood. He would consult her as if she were an adult about the shopping, the next meal, the twins' clothes, even the problem with the van. But there was one subject he never mentioned: her mother's death.

Her narrow bed was directly under the window. Kneeling on it, she gently drew back the curtains letting moonlight stream into the room, seeking out the corners, laying its swathes of cold, mysterious light on the bed and across the wooden floor. The door to the small box room at the front of the cottage where the twins slept was open and she passed through and stood for a moment looking down at the small humps closely curved together under the bedclothes then, bending low, listened for the regular hiss of their breath. They wouldn't wake now until the morning. She closed the door and went back into her own room. Anthony lay, as he always did, on his back, his legs splayed like a frog, his head to one side and both arms stretched high as if trying to seize the bars of the cot. He had wriggled free of his blanket and she drew it up gently over his sleeping suit. The impulse to snatch him into her arms was so strong that it was almost a pain. But, instead, she carefully let down the side of the cot and, for a moment, laid her head beside his. He lay as if drugged, his mouth pursed, his eyelids delicately veined films under which she could imagine the upturned, unseeing eyes.

Returning to her own bed, she pushed the two pillows down under the blankets and moulded them to the semblance of her body. Her father was very unlikely to look in, but if the unexpected should happen at least he wouldn't see in the moonlight an obviously empty bed. She felt beneath it for the small canvas shoulder bag in which she had placed ready what she knew she would need; the box of matches, the single white household candle, the sharp penknife, the pocket torch. Then she climbed on the bed and opened wide the casement window.

The whole headland was bathed in the silver light which she and her mother loved. Everything was transformed into magic; the outcrops of rock floated like islands of crumpled foil above the still grasses and the broken ill-kept hedge at the bottom of the garden was a mystic thicket woven from thin shafts of light. And beyond it, like a silken scarf, lay the wide untrammelled sea. She stood for a moment transfixed, breathing quickly, gathering up her strength, then climbed out on to the flat roof over the extension. It was covered with shingles and she crept forward with infinite care, feeling the grittiness of the stones through the soles of her plimsolls. It was a drop of only six feet and, with the help of the drainpipe, she made it easily, then scurried down the garden, stooping low, to the rotting wooden lean-to at the rear of her father's painting shed where she and her father kept their bicycles. In the moonlight streaming through the open door she disentangled hers, then wheeled it across the grass and lifted it through a gap in the hedge to avoid using the front gate. It was not until she reached the safety of the sunken lane where the old coastal railway had once run that she dared mount, and began bumping over the humpy grass northwards, towards the fringe of pine trees and the ruined abbey.

The old railway track ran behind the wood of pines which fringed the shore, but here it was less sunken, no more than a gentle depression in the headland. Soon, that too would flatten and there would be nothing, not even the rotting planks of old sleepers, to show where the coastal railway had once run, taking Victorian families with their spades and buckets, their nursemaids, their great portmanteaux, for their summer holiday by the sea. Less than ten minutes later she was in the open headland. She switched off the bicycle lamp, dismounted to check that there was no one in sight, and began bumping across the tough turf towards the sea.

And now the five broken arches of the abbey ruins came into sight, gleaming in the moonlight. She stood for a moment and stared in silence. It looked unreal, ethereal, an insubstantial edifice of light which would dissolve at a touch. Sometimes when, as now, she came to it by moon or starlight, the feeling was so strong that she would put out a hand and touch the stones and feel a physical shock at their rough hardness. Propping her bicycle against the low stone wall, she walked into the space where the great west door must once have been and into the body of the abbey.

It was on calm moonlit nights like this when she and her mother would make their little expeditions together. Her mother would say, 'Let's go and talk to the monks', and they would cycle here together and walk in companionable silence among the ruined arches or stand hand in hand where the altar must once have stood, hearing what those long-dead monks had once heard, but more remotely: the melancholy booming of the sea. It was here, she knew, where her mother liked best to pray, feeling more at home on this rough age-hallowed earth than in that ugly red-brick building outside the village where Father McKee visited every Sunday to say Mass.

She missed seeing Father McKee, missed his jokes, his praise, his funny Irish accent. But since her mother's death he visited only rarely and was never made welcome.

She remembered the last time, the briefness of the visit, her father seeing him out of the door, Father McKee's parting words: 'Her dear mother, God rest her, would want Theresa to be regular at Mass and confession. Mrs Stoddard-Clark would be glad to call for her in the car next Sunday and she could go back to the Grange afterwards for lunch. Now wouldn't that be nice for the child?'

And her father's voice: 'Her mother isn't here. Your God has chosen to deprive her of her mother. Tess is on her own now. When she feels like going to Mass, she'll go, and she'll go to confession when she has something to confess.'

The grass had grown high here, spiked with tall weeds and dried flower-heads, the ground so humpy that she had to walk with-care. She moved up under the highest arch of all where the great eastern window had once shone in an imagined miracle of coloured glass. Now it was an empty eye through which she could see the gleam of the sea and above it the sailing moon. And now, by the light of her torch and very quietly, she began her task. She went over to the wall, knife in hand, and began searching for a large, flat-surfaced stone which would form the basis of her altar. Within minutes she had found one and had prised it loose with her penknife. But there was something hidden in the crevice behind it, a thin piece of cardboard pushed deep into the crevice. She took it out and unfolded it. It was half of a coloured postcard of the west front of Westminster Abbey. Even with the right-hand side cut away she recognized the familiar twin towers. She turned it over and saw that there were a few lines of message which she couldn't read by moonlight and felt no particular curiosity to decipher. It seemed quite new, but with the date stamp unreadable there was no way of knowing how long it had lain there. Perhaps it had been hidden during the summer season as part of a family game. It didn't worry her, indeed, preoccupied as she was, it hardly interested her. This was the kind of secret message her friends left for each other at school, hidden in the bicycle shed, slipped into a blazer pocket. She hesitated for a moment, started to tear it, then smoothed it out and put it carefully back.

Working her way along the wall, she found another suitable stone and the few smaller ones she needed to prop up the single candle. The altar was soon complete. She lit the candle, the hiss of the match sounding unnaturally loud and the sudden flare of the light almost too bright for her eyes. She let the first blobs of wax fall on the stone, then wedged the candle into it, propping it up with pebbles. Then she sat cross-legged before it and gazed into the candle's steady glow. She knew that her mother would come, unseen but known to be present, silent but speaking clearly. She had only to wait in patience and gaze steadily into the candle's unflickering light.

She tried to empty her mind of everything except the questions which she was here to ask. But her mother's death was too recent, the memory too painful to be shut out of her thoughts.

Mummy hadn't wanted to die in hospital and Daddy had promised that she wouldn't. She had heard his whispered assurances. She knew that Dr Entwhistle and the district nurse had opposed them both. There were snatches of conversation she wasn't supposed to overhear but which, standing silently in the darkness of the stairs behind the oak door which led to the sitting room, came to her clearly as if she was standing by her mother's bed.

'You really need twenty-four-hour nursing, Mrs Blaney, more care than I can give. And you'd be more comfortable in hospital.'

'I am comfortable. I have Ryan and Theresa. I have you. You're all so good to me. I don't need anyone else.'

'I do what I can, but twice a day isn't enough. It's a lot to expect of Mr Blaney and Theresa. It's all right saying you've got her, but she's only fifteen.'

'I want to be with them. We want to be together.'

'But if they're frightened… it's difficult for children.'

Then that gentle implacable voice, thin and unbreakable as a reed, carrying the obstinate selfishness of the dying. 'They won't be frightened. Do you think we'd let them be frightened? There isn't anything frightening about birth or death if they've been properly taught.'

'There are things you can't teach children, Mrs Blaney, things you can only experience.'

And she, Theresa, had done her best to convince everyone that they were all right, that they could manage. There had been small subterfuges. Before Nurse Pollard and the doctor arrived she would wash the twins, put on clean dresses, change Anthony's nappy. It was important that everything looked under control, so that Dr Entwhistle and the nurse couldn't say that Daddy couldn't cope. One Saturday she cooked buns and handed them gravely round on a plate, the best plate, her mother's favourite, with the delicately painted roses and the holes in the border where you could thread a ribbon. She remembered the doctor's embarrassed gaze as he said, 'No thank you, Theresa, not just now.'

'Please have one. Daddy made them.'

And as he left he had said to her father: 'You may be able to bear this, Blaney, I'm not sure that I can.'

Only Father McKee seemed to notice her efforts. Father McKee

, who spoke so like an Irishman on the telly that Theresa thought he was doing it on purpose as a joke and tried always to reward him with a laugh.

'My and isn't it grand the way you have this cottage shining. Couldn't the blessed Virgin herself eat off that floor now? Made by your dad, are they? And very nice too.

See, I'm putting one in my pocket for later. Now you be making a nice cup of tea, that's a good girl, while I chat to your ma.'

She tried not to think about the night when they had taken her mother away; waking to hear those awful groaning noises which had made her think that there was an animal in agony snuffling round the cottage; realizing that the noise wasn't outside at all; the sudden terror; her father's figure in the bedroom doorway commanding her to stay there, not to come out, to keep the children quiet. Watching at the window of the little front bedroom with the twins' frightened faces staring from the bed and seeing the ambulance arrive; the two men with the stretcher; that blanket-shrouded figure, quiet now, being carried down the garden path. It was then that she had rushed down the stairs and almost hurled herself at her father's restraining arms.

'Better not, better not. Get her inside.'

She wasn't sure who had spoken the words. Then she was breaking free and running after the ambulance as it turned at the bottom of the lane, beating her hands against the closed doors. She remembered her father lifting her in his arms, carrying her back into the cottage. She remembered the strength of him, the smell and roughness of his shirt, her impotently flailing arms. She had never seen her mother again. It was how God had answered her prayers, her mother's prayers, to be able to stay at home, her mother who asked for so little. And nothing Father McKee could say would make her forgive God.

The chill of the September night was seeping through her jeans and jumper and the small of her back was beginning to ache. For the first time she felt a prick of doubt. And then, in a tremble of the candle flame, her mother was with her. Everything was all right.

There were so many things she needed to ask. Anthony's nappies. The disposable ones were so expensive and so bulky to carry, and Daddy didn't seem to realize how much they cost. Her mother said she should use the terries and rinse them out. Then the twins didn't really like Mrs Hunter who came and collected them to take them to the playgroup. The twins must be polite to Mrs Hunter and not mind. She was doing her best. It was important that they kept going to the playgroup for Daddy's sake. Theresa must tell them that. And then there was Daddy. There was so much to say about him. He didn't go to the pub often because he didn't like to leave them, but there was always whisky in the house. Her mother said that she was not to worry about the whisky. He needed it now, but soon he would begin painting again and then he wouldn't need it so much. But if he really became drunk and there was another bottle in the house she had better pour it away. She needn't be frightened that it would make him angry. He would never be angry with her.

The silent communication went on. She sat as if in a trance, watching while the wax of the candle slowly burned down. And then there was nothing. Her mother had gone away. Before blowing out the candle she scraped away the traces of wax from the stone with her knife. It was important that no evidence remained. Then she replaced the stones in the wall. The ruins held nothing for her now but a cold emptiness. It was time to go home.

Suddenly she was overcome with tiredness. It seemed impossible that her legs would carry her as far as the bicycle and she couldn't face the thought of the bumpy ride across the headland. She didn't know what impulse led her through the great east window to stand on the edge of the cliff. Perhaps it was the need to gather her strength, to look out over the moonlit sea and recapture for a moment that lost communion with her mother. But instead her mind was seized with a very different memory, as recent as that afternoon, and one that was still so frightening that she hadn't spoken of it, even to her mother. She saw again the red car, moving at speed down the lane towards Scudder's Cottage, called the children from the garden, bundled them upstairs and shut the sitting-room door. But later she had stood behind it and listened. It seemed to her that no word of that conversation would ever be forgotten.

First Hilary Robarts's voice: 'This place was totally unsuitable for a sick woman who had to undergo long journeys for radiotherapy. You must have known she was ill when you took it. She couldn't manage.'

And then her father: 'And I suppose you thought that after she'd gone I wouldn't be able to manage either. How many months did you give her? You used to pretend that you were concerned but she knew what you were at. Watching how much weight she was losing each week, more bone showing through, wrists like sticks, the cancer skin. Not much longer now, you thought. You made a bloody good investment in this cottage. You invested in her death and you made her life a bloody misery for her last weeks.'

'That isn't true. Don't load your guilt on me. I had to come here, there were things I had to see. That patch of damp in the kitchen, the problem with rain coming in the roof. You wanted them seen to, presumably. You were the first to point out that I had obligations as a landlady. And if you won't get out I shall have to apply for a rise in the rent. What you pay is derisory. It doesn't even cover repairs.'

'Try. Go to the Rent Tribunal. Let them come and see for themselves. The freehold may be yours but I'm the man in possession. And I pay the rent regularly. You can't get me out, I'm not that daft.'

'You pay the rent, but for how long? You could get by when you had that part-time teaching job, but I can't see you managing now. I suppose you call yourself an artist, but what you are is a cheap hack painter turning out rubbish for undiscriminating tourists who think any fourth-rate original is better than a first-rate print. But they aren't selling as well now, are they? Those four watercolours Ackworth has in his window have been there for weeks. They're beginning to brown. Even tourists are getting a little particular these days. Junk doesn't sell just because it's cheap.'

But the twins, tired of incarceration, began quarrelling and she had to hurry upstairs to tell them it wouldn't be long now, that they mustn't come out until the witch had gone. Then she crept down again. But it wasn't necessary to descend further than the fourth step. The voices were shouting now.

'I want to know if you sent that woman here, that bloody social worker from the local authority who came to spy on me and question my children about me. Did you send her?'

The witch's voice was cool, but she could hear every word: 'I'm not required to answer that. If I did alert them, then it was about time someone did.'

'My God, you're evil, aren't you? You'd do anything to get me and my children out of this cottage. They used to burn people like you four hundred years ago. If it wasn't for the children I'd kill you. But I'm not having them taken into so-called care just for the satisfaction of putting my hands round your throat. But, by God, don't tempt me, don't tempt me. So get out. Get out of my cottage and off my ground. Take your rent and be thankful you're alive to take it. And don't ever interfere with my life again. Not ever, not ever.'

The witch said: 'Don't be hysterical. That's all you're good for, threats and violence. If the local authority took those children into care it would be the best thing for them. Oh, I dare say you'd like to kill me. Your sort always react to reason with threats and violence. Kill me and expect the state to support your children for the next fifteen years. You're ridiculous and pathetic'

And then her father's voice, not shouting any more but so quiet that she could only just catch the words: 'If I do kill you, no one will lay their hands on me or my children. No one.'

With the reliving of that last awful encounter came anger and the anger flowing into her legs seemed to give them strength. She could cope now with the ride home. And it was time she was leaving. And then she saw that the beach was no longer empty. Suddenly she began shaking like a young puppy and then backed into the shelter of the arch. To the north, running down from the pine trees towards the sea, was a woman, her dark hair streaming, her white body almost naked. And she was shouting, shouting in triumph. It was the witch, Hilary Robarts.

Hilary ate an early supper. She wasn't hungry but she took a French roll from the freezer and heated it in the oven, then made herself a herb omelette. She washed up and left the kitchen tidy, then took papers from her briefcase and settled down at the sitting-room table to work. There was a paper to be written about the implications of the reorganization for her department, figures to be collated and presented, an argument for the redeployment of staff logically and elegantly presented. The task was important to her and normally she would have enjoyed it. She knew that she could be faulted when it came to personnel management but no one had been able to criticize her as organizer and administrator. Shuffling the papers she wondered how much, if at all, she would miss it when she and Alex were married and in London. She was surprised how little she cared. This part of her life was over and she would relinquish it without regret, this over-tidy cottage which had never been her own and never could be, the power station, even her job. And now there would be a different life, Alex's job, her status as his wife, entertaining the right people in the right way, some carefully chosen voluntary work, travel. And there would be a child, his child.

This overpowering need for a child had strengthened in the last year, growing in intensity as his physical need for her decreased. She tried to persuade herself that a love affair, like a marriage, couldn't always be maintained at the same pitch of sexual or emotional excitement, that essentially nothing had changed between them and nothing really could. How much commitment, physical or emotional, had there been at the start of the relationship? Well, that had suited her all right at the time; she hadn't wanted any more than he was prepared to give, a mutually satisfactory exchange of pleasure, the kudos of being his half-acknowledged mistress, the careful dissimulation when they were in company together which was hardly necessary or successful and wasn't seriously meant to be but which, for her part at least, had held a powerful erotic charge. It was a game they played; their almost formal greeting before meetings or in the presence of strangers, his twice weekly visits to her cottage. When she had first come to Larksoken she had looked for a modern flat in Norwich and had, for a time, rented one close to the city centre. But once the affair began it was necessary to be near him and she had found a holiday cottage less than a quarter of a mile from Martyr's Cottage. He was, she knew, both too proud and too arrogant to visit her surreptitiously, sneaking out at night like a randy schoolboy. But no degrading pretence was necessary; the headland was invariably deserted. And he never stayed the night. The careful rationing of her company seemed almost a necessary part of the relationship. And in public they behaved as colleagues. He had always discouraged informality, too many first names, except to his immediate colleagues, too much easy camaraderie. The station was as disciplined as a tightly run ship in wartime.

But the affair, begun with such discipline, such emotional and social propriety, had deteriorated into messiness and longing and pain. She thought she knew the moment when the need for a child had begun to grow into an obsession. It was when the theatre sister at that expensive and discreet nursing home, only half concealing her disapproval and disgust, had taken away the kidney-shaped bowl with that quivering mass of tissue which had been the foetus. It was as if her womb, so clinically robbed was taking its revenge. She hadn't been able to conceal her longing from Alex even though she knew that it repelled him. She could hear again her own voice, truculent, whining, an importunate child, and could see his look, half laughing, of simulated dismay which she knew concealed a genuine repugnance. 'I want a child.'

'Don't look at me, darling. That's one experiment I'm not prepared to repeat.'

'You have a child, healthy, living, successful. Your name, your genes will go on.'

'I've never set store on that. Charles exists in his own right.'

She had tried to argue herself out of the obsession, forcing the unwelcome images on her unreceptive mind, the broken nights, the smell, the constant demands, the lessening of freedom, the lack of privacy, the effect on her career. It was no good. She was making an intellectual response to a need where intellect was powerless. Sometimes she wondered if she was going mad. And she couldn't control her dreams, one in particular. The smiling nurse, gowned and masked, placing the newborn baby in her arms, herself looking down at the gentle, self-contained face bruised with the trauma of birth. And then the sister, grim-visaged, rushing in, snatching the bundle away. 'That isn't your baby, Miss Robarts. Don't you remember? We flushed yours down the lavatory.'

Alex didn't need another child. He had his son, his living hope, however precarious, of vicarious immortality. He might have been an inadequate and scarcely known parent, but he was a parent. He had held in his arms his own child. That wasn't unimportant to him, whatever he might pretend. Charles had visited his father last summer, a golden-bronzed, hefty-legged, sun-bleached giant who had seemed in retrospect to blaze through the station like a meteor, captivating the female staff with his American accent, his hedonistic charm. And Alex, she saw, had been surprised and slightly disconcerted by his pride in the boy, attempting unsuccessfully to conceal it with heavy-handed banter.

'Where is the young barbarian, swimming? He'll find the North Sea an unwelcome change from Laguna Beach.'

'He tells me he proposes to read law at Berkeley. There's a place waiting for him in step-papa's firm, apparently, once he qualifies. Next thing Liz will be writing to say that he's engaged to some socially acceptable sophomore, or do I mean preppy?'

'I'm managing to feed him, by the way. Alice has left me a recipe for hamburgers. Every shelf of the refrigerator is stuffed with ground beef. His vitamin C requirements seem abnormally high even for a boy of his height and weight. I press oranges constantly.'

She had squirmed in a mixture of embarrassment and resentment, the pride and the juvenile humour had both seemed so out of character, almost demeaning. It was as if he, as much as the typists, had been captivated by his son's physical presence. Alice Mair had left for London two days after Charles had arrived. Hilary wondered whether this had been perhaps a ploy to give father and son some time alone together or whether, and more likely from what she knew or guessed of Alice Mair, it had been a reluctance both to spend time cooking for the boy and to witness his father's embarrassing excess of paternalism.

She thought again of his last visit when he had walked home with her after the dinner party. She had deliberately sounded reluctant to be escorted, but he had come and she had meant that he should. After she had finished speaking he had said quietly: 'That sounds like an ultimatum.'

*I wouldn't call it that.'

'What would you call it then, blackmail?'

'After what's happened between us, I'd call it justice.'

'Let's stick to ultimatum. Justice is too grandiose a concept for the commerce between us two. And like every ultimatum it will have to be considered. It's usual to set a time limit. What's yours?'

She had said: 'I love you. In this new job you're going to need a wife. I'm the right wife for you. It could work. I'd make it work. I could make you happy.'

'I'm not sure how much happiness I'm capable of. Probably more than I've any right to. But it isn't in anyone's gift, not Alice's, not Charles's, not Elizabeth's, not yours. It never has been.'

Then he had come over to her and kissed her on the cheek. She had turned to cling to him but he had put her gently aside. 'I'll think about it.'

'I'd like to announce it soon, the engagement.'

'You're not thinking of a church wedding, I suppose. Orange blossom, bridesmaids, Mendelssohn's "Wedding March", "The voice that breathed o'er Eden".'

She had said: 'I'm not thinking of making either of us ridiculous, now or after marriage. You know me better than that.'

'I see, just a quick, painless turning-off at the local registrar's office. I'll give you my decision next Sunday night after I get back from London.'

She had said: 'You make it sound so formal.'

And he had replied: 'But it has to be formal, doesn't it, the response to an ultimatum?'

He would marry her and, within three months, he would know that she had been right. She would win because, in this, her will was stronger than his. She remembered the words of her father. 'There's only this one life, girlie, but you can live it on your own terms. Only the stupid and the weak need to live like slaves. You've got health, looks, brains. You can take what you want. All you need is the courage and the will.' The bastards had nearly got him in the end, but he had lived life on his own terms and so would she.

Now she tried to put thoughts of Alex, of their future, on one side and concentrate on the task in hand. But she couldn't settle. Restless, she went through the kitchen into the small back parlour which held her wine store and brought out a bottle of claret. She took down a glass from the dresser and poured. Taking her first mouthful, she felt on the corner of her lip the minute scrape of a chip. It was intolerable to her to drink from a chipped glass. Instinctively she took down another and emptied the first glass into it. She was about to throw the defective glass away when she hesitated, her foot on the pedal of the refuse bin. It was one of a set of six that Alex had given her. The defect, unnoticed before, was slight, little more than a roughness on the brim. The glass could be used to hold flowers. She had a picture of them, snowdrops, primroses, small sprigs of rosemary. When she had finished drinking she washed up both glasses and turned them over to drain. The bottle of claret she left uncorked on the table. It had really been too cold to drink, but in another hour it would be about right.

It was time for her swim, just after nine, and tonight she wouldn't bother with the news. Upstairs in her bedroom she stripped naked* put on the bottom half of a black bikini and over it her blue and white tracksuit. On her feet she wore old sandals, the leather stained and toughened by sea water. From the hall peg she took down a small steel locket on a leather thong just large enough to hold her Yale key, which she wore round her neck when swimming. It had been Alex's gift for her last birthday. Touching it, she smiled and felt, strong as the metal against her fingers, the certainty of hope. Then she took a torch from the drawer in the hall table and, closing the door carefully behind her, set off for the beach, her towel slung over her shoulder.

She smelt the resin of the pines before she passed between their slim, spiky trunks. There were only fifty yards of sandy path, thick with their fallen needles, between her and the shore. It was dimmer here, the moon glimpsed fitfully, sailing in majestic splendour above the high spires of the trees, now seen and now obscured, so that for a few seconds she had to switch on her torch. And now she passed out of the shadows and saw before her the white moon-bleached sand and the tremble of the North

Sea. Dropping her towel in her usual place, a small hollow on the fringe of the wood, she slipped off her tracksuit and stretched her arms high above her head.

Then she kicked off her sandals and began running, over the narrow band of shingle, over the dusty sand above the watermark, over the smooth, sea-washed eddies of the foam, splashing through the small waves which seemed to be failing without a sound, to hurl herself at last into cleansing peace. She gasped at the coldness of it, fierce as a pain. But almost at once that passed, as it always did, and it seemed to her that the water gliding over her shoulders had taken on her own body warmth and that she swam cocooned in self-sufficiency. With her strong rhythmic crawl she struck out from the shore. She knew how long she could safely stay in; just five minutes before the cold struck again and it was time to return.

And now she stopped swimming and lay for a moment on her back, floating, looking up at the moon. The magic worked again as it always did. The frustrations, the fears, the anger of the day fell away and she was filled instead with a happiness which she would have called ecstasy, except that ecstasy was too ostentatious a word for this gentle peace. And with the happiness came optimism. Everything was going to be all right. She would let Pascoe sweat for another week then withdraw her action. He was too unimportant even to hate. And her solicitor was right, possession of Scudder's Cottage could wait. It was increasing in value every month. The rent was being paid, she was losing nothing. And the daily irritations of the job, the professional jealousies, the resentments, what did they matter now? That part of her life was coming to an end. She loved Alex, Alex loved her. He would see the sense of everything she had said. They would be married. She would have his child. Everything was possible. And then, for a moment, there came a deeper peace in which even none of this mattered. It was as if all the petty preoccupations of the flesh were washed away and she was a

disembodied spirit floating free, looking down at her body spreadeagled under the moon, and could feel a gentle, undemanding sorrow for this earth-grounded creature who could And only in an alien element this sweet but transitory peace.

But it was time to get back. She gave a vigorous kick, twisted herself over and began her powerful crawl towards the shore, towards that silent watcher waiting for her in the shadow of the trees.

Dalgliesh had spent Sunday morning revisiting Norwich Cathedral and St Peter Mancroft before lunching at a restaurant on the outskirts of the city where he and his aunt two years previously had eaten an unpretentious but excellently cooked meal. But here, too, time had wrought its changes. The exterior and the decor were deceivingly the same but it was quickly apparent that both proprietor and chef had changed. The meal, arriving with suspicious promptness, had obviously been cooked elsewhere and heated up, the grilled liver a grainy slab of indistinguishable grey meat blanketed with a synthetic, glutinous sauce and accompanied by potatoes which were underdone and cauliflower which was a mush. It was not a luncheon to deserve a wine, but he fortified himself with Cheddar and biscuits before setting out on the afternoon's programme, a visit to the fifteenth-century church of St Peter and St Paul at Salle.

During the last four years it had been rare for him to visit his aunt without driving with her to Salle, and she had left with her will a request that her ashes should be strewn in the churchyard there without ceremony and by him on his own. He knew that the church had exerted a powerful influence on her but she had not, as far as he knew, been a religious woman and the request had a little surprised him. It had seemed so much more likely that she would have wanted her physical remains thrown to the winds on the headland, or that she would have left no instructions, regarding this as a simple matter of expedient disposal requiring neither thought on her part nor ceremony on his. But now he had a task to perform and one of surprising importance to him. In recent weeks he had been visited by the nagging guilt of a duty unfulfilled, almost a spirit unpropitiated. He found himself wondering, as he had before in his life, at man's insistent need for ritual, for the formal acknowledgement of each rite of passage. Perhaps this was something his aunt had understood and in her quiet way had made provision for.

He turned off the B149 at Felthorpe to take the country roads across the flat country. It was unnecessary to consult the map. The magnificent fifteenth-century tower with its four pinnacles was an unmistakable landmark and he drove towards it along the almost deserted roads with the familiar sense of coming home. It seemed strange that his aunt's angular figure wasn't beside him, that all that remained of that secretive but powerful personality was a plastic package, curiously heavy, of white grit. When he reached Salle he parked the Jaguar a little down the lane and made his way into the churchyard. As always, he was struck that a church as magnificent as a cathedral could be so isolated yet seem utterly right among these quiet fields where its effect was less of grandeur and majesty than of an unpretentious and reassuring peace. For a few minutes he stood quietly listening and heard nothing, not even a bird song or the rustle of an insect in the tall grasses. In the frail sunlight the surrounding trees were flushed with the first gold of autumn. The ploughing was over and the brown crust of the crumbled fields stretched in their Sunday calm towards the far horizon. He walked slowly round the church feeling the weight of the package dragging at his jacket pocket, glad that he had chosen a time between services and wondering whether it might not have been courteous, perhaps even necessary, to obtain the consent of the parish priest before carrying out his aunt's wishes. But he told himself that it was too late to think of that now, glad to be spared explanations or complications. Making his way to the eastern fringe of the churchyard he opened the package and tipped out the ground bones like a libation. There was a flash of silver and all that remained of Jane Dalgliesh sparkled among the brittle autumn stalks and the tall grasses. He knew the customary words for such an occasion; he had heard them often enough on his father's lips. But the ones which came unbidden to his mind were the verses from Ecclesiastes carved on the stone outside Martyr's Cottage and in this timeless place beside the dignity of the great church it seemed to him that they were not inappropriate.

The west door was unlocked and before leaving Salle he spent fifteen minutes in the church revisiting old pleasures: the carvings on the oak stalls, peasants, a priest, animals and birds, a dragon, a pelican feeding its young; the medieval wineglass pulpit, which after five hundred years still showed traces of its original colouring; the chancel screen; the great east window which once had glowed in the glory of red, green and blue medieval glass but which now let in only the clear Norfolk light. As the west door clanged gently behind him he wondered when he would return, or if he would return at all.

It was early evening before he got home. What he had eaten of lunch had been stodgily filling so that he was less hungry than he had expected. He heated up the last of yesterday's home-made soup and followed it with biscuits and cheese and fruit and then kindled the fire and sat on the low chair before it, listening to Elgar's Cello Concerto and making a start on the job of sorting out his aunt's photographs. Tipping them out of their faded envelopes he sorted them with his long fingers on the low mahogany table. It was a task which induced a gentle melancholy from which an occasional scribbled identification on the back of a print, a remembered face or incident, would stab him into pain. And the Elgar was an appropriate accompaniment, the plaintive notes evoking those long, hot Edwardian summers known to him only from novels and poetry, the peace, the certainty, the optimism of the England into which his aunt had been born. And here was her fiancé, looking ridiculously young in his captain's uniform. The photograph was dated 4 May 1918, only a week before he was killed. He gazed for a moment intently at that handsome, debonair young face which, God knew, must by then have seen enough of horror, but it told him nothing. Turning it over Dalgliesh saw that it bore a pencilled message written in Greek. The young man was to have read Classics at Oxford and his aunt had studied Greek with her father. But he knew no Greek; their secret was safe enough with him and soon would be safe for ever. The hand which had formed these fading characters had been dead now for seventy years, the mind that had first created them for nearly two thousand. And here, in the same envelope, was one of his aunt herself at about the same age. It must have been one she had sent to her fiancé at the Front or given to him before he left for war. One corner was stained browny-red with what must be his blood; perhaps the photograph had been returned to her with the rest of his effects. She stood in her long skirt with the high-buttoned blouse, laughing, her hair in two wings on either side and bound above the temples. Over the years her face had always had distinction, but he saw, almost with a shock of surprise, that once she had been beautiful. And now her death had freed him for a voyeurism which in her life would have been repugnant to them both. And yet she hadn't destroyed the photographs. She must have known, realist that she was, that other eyes than hers would eventually see them. Or did extreme old age free one from all such petty considerations of vanity or self-esteem, as the mind gradually distanced itself from the devices and desires of the flesh? It was with a sense of irrational reluctance, almost of betrayal, that eventually he threw both photographs into the fire and watched them curl, blacken and finally flare into ash.

And what was he to do with all these undocumented strangers, the women, sloping-bosomed, under immense hats piled with ribbons and flowers, the cycling parties, the men knickerbockered, the women with their long, bell-shaped skirts and their straw boaters; the wedding parties, bride and bridesmaids almost hidden behind their immense bouquets, the chief participants grouped in recognized hierarchy and staring into the lens as if the click of the shutter could for a second halt time, hold it in thrall, proclaiming that this rite of passage at least had importance, binding the ineluctable past to the unseeable future? As an adolescent boy he had been obsessed with time. For weeks before the summer holidays he would feel a sense of triumph that now he had time by the forelock and could say, 'Go as quickly as you like and the holiday will be here. Or if you must, go slowly, and the summer days will last longer.' Now, in middle age, he knew of no contrivance and no promised pleasure which could halt the inexorable thudding of those chariot wheels. And here was a photograph of himself in his prep-school uniform, taken in the rectory garden by his father, a stranger ridiculously over-clad in cap and striped blazer standing almost to attention, facing the lens as if defying the terror of leaving home. That, too, he was glad to see the end of.

When the concerto was finished, the half-bottle of claret empty, he shuffled the remaining photographs together, placed them in the bureau drawer and decided to shake off melancholy with a brisk walk by the sea before bed. The night was too calm and beautiful to be wasted in nostalgia and futile regrets. The air was extraordinarily still and even the sound of the sea was muted as it stretched, pale and mysterious, under the full moon and the bright pattern of stars. He stood for a moment under the soaring wings of the mill then began walking vigorously over the headland towards the north, past the fringe of pines, until, three-quarters of an hour later, he decided to make for the beach. He half slid down the sandy decline and saw before him the great square hunks of concrete half buried in the sand, the curls of rotting iron springing from them like bizarre antennae. Moonlight, strong as the last light of the setting sun, had changed the texture of the beach so that each grain of sand seemed separately illuminated, every pebble mysteriously unique. Suddenly he had a childish impulse to feel the sea washing over his feet and, taking off his shoes and socks, he stuffed the socks in his jacket pocket and, tying the laces, slung the shoes round his neck. The water, after the first sting of cold, was almost blood-warm and he splashed vigorously along the fringe of the waves, pausing from time to time to look back at his footprints as he had as a child. Now he had reached the narrow strip of pine trees. There was, he knew, a narrow path which cut inland through them past Hilary Robarts's cottage to the road. It was the simplest way of regaining the headland without having to scramble up the friable cliffs to the south. Sitting on a ridge of shingle, he tackled the familiar problem of the paddler: how, with an inadequate handkerchief, to rid the spaces between his toes of the gritty dusting of tenacious sand. That achieved, socks and shoes replaced, he trudged through the pebbles to the shore line.

When he reached the powdery sand on the upper reaches of the beach he saw that someone had been here before him; to his left was a double line of naked footprints, the mark of running feet. These, of course, would be Hilary Robarts's. She must, as usual, have taken her nightly swim. Subconsciously he noticed how distinct they were. She must have left the beach nearly an hour and a half ago, yet on this windless night the indentations were as plain in the dry sand as if they had just been made. The path through the trees lay in front of him leading out of moonlight into the enclosing shadows of the pine wood. And the night was suddenly darker. A low blue-black cloud had momentarily covered the moon, its ragged edges silvered with light.

He switched on his torch and played it over the path. It caught the gleam of something white to his left, a sheet of newspaper, perhaps, a handkerchief, a discarded paper bag. Feeling no more than mild curiosity he stepped from the path to investigate. And then he saw her. Her distorted face seemed to leap up at him and hang suspended in the bright glare of the torchlight like a vision from a nightmare.

Staring down, and for a moment transfixed, he felt a shock in which incredulity, recognition and horror fused into a second which made his heart leap. She was lying in a shallow depression of flattened marram grass, hardly a hollow but deep enough for the grasses on each verge to shield her body until he was almost on top of her. To her right, and partly beneath her, was a crumpled beach towel, striped in red and blue, and above it, placed precisely side by side, a pair of open sandals and a torch. Beside them, neatly folded, was what looked like a blue and white tracksuit. It must have been the edge of this which had first caught his eye. She lay on her back, the head towards him, the dead eyes upturned as if they had been fixed on him in a last mute appeal. The small bush of hair had been pushed under the upper lip, exposing the teeth, and giving the impression of a snarling rabbit. A single black hair lay across her cheek and he had an almost irresistible impulse to kneel and pluck it away. She was wearing only the bottom half of a black bikini and that had been pulled down over her thighs. He could clearly see where the hair had been sliced away. The letter L precisely in the centre of the forehead looked as if it had been cut with deliberation, the two thin lines precisely at right angles. Between the splayed and flattened breasts with their dark areolas and pointed nipples, milk-white against the brown skin of her arms, rested a key-shaped metal locket on a chain. And as he gazed down, slowly moving the torchlight over her body, the cloud moved from the face of the moon and she lay stretched out before him clearly, the naked limbs pale and bloodless as the bleached sands and as clearly visible as if it were day.

He was inured to horror; few manifestations of human cruelty, violence or desperation were unfamiliar to his practised eye. He was too sensitive ever to view a violated body with crude indifference but only in one recent case, his last, had this sensitivity caused him more than momentary inconvenience. And with Paul Berowne at least he had been warned. This was the first time he had almost stumbled over a murdered woman. Now, as he looked down on her, his mind analysed the difference between the reaction of an expert summoned to the scene of crime knowing what to expect and this sudden exposure to ultimate violence. He was interested both in the difference and in the detachment which could so coolly analyse it.

Kneeling, he touched her thigh. It felt icy cold and as synthetic as inflated rubber. If he prodded it the mark of his fingers would surely remain. Gently he ran them through her hair. It was still slightly damp at the roots but the ends were dry. The night was warm for September. He looked at his watch: ten thirty-three. He remembered being told, he couldn't recall when or by whom, that it was her practice to take her nightly swim shortly after nine o'clock. The physical signs confirmed what he thought most likely, that she had been dead for less than two hours.

He had seen no footprints on the sand but his and hers. But the tide was ebbing; it must have been high at about nine, although the dustiness of the upper reaches of the beach suggested that it didn't reach the hollow where she lay. But the most likely path for the murderer to have taken was the one through the wood which she herself must have used. He would have had the protection of the trees and a place in their shadow where he could watch and wait unseen. The ground with its mat of pine needles on the sand was unlikely to yield footprints but it was important that it shouldn't be disturbed. Moving carefully, he backed away from the body then walked about twenty yards to the south along a ridge of fine shingle. By the light of his torch, half crouching, he tracked his way through the densely planted pine trees, snapping off the brittle lower twigs as he passed. At least he could be certain that no one had recently passed this way. Within minutes he had gained the road; another ten of brisk walking and he would be at the mill. But the nearest telephone would be at Hilary Robarts's cottage. The probability was that the cottage was locked and he had no intention of breaking in. It was almost as important to leave the victim's house undisturbed as it was not to violate the scene of the crime. There had been no handbag beside her body, nothing but the shoes and torch neatly placed at the head of the hollow, the tracksuit and the brightly striped red and blue beach towel on which she partly lay. Perhaps she had left the key at home, the cottage unlocked. On the headland, after dark, few people would worry if they left a cottage unlocked for half an hour. It was worth taking five minutes to look.

Thyme Cottage, seen from the windows of the mill, had always struck him as the least interesting house on the headland. It faced inland, a square, uncompromising building with a cobbled yard instead of a front garden and picture windows in modern glass which destroyed any period charm it once might have had and made it look like a modern aberration more appropriate to a rural housing estate than to this sea-scarred and remote headland. On three sides the pines grew so closely that they almost touched the walls. He had wondered from time to time why Hilary Robarts should have chosen to live here despite its convenient distance from the power station. After Alice Mair's dinner party he thought he knew why. Now all the lights were blazing in the ground-floor rooms, the large rectangle of the picture window to the left reaching almost to the ground and the smaller square to the right which he thought was probably the kitchen. Normally they would have been a reassuring signal of life, normality and welcome, of a refuge from the atavistic fears of the enclosing wood, the empty moonlit headland. But now those bright, uncurtained windows added to his mounting unease and as he approached the cottage it seemed to him that there floated between him and those bright windows, like a half-developed print, the mental picture of that dead and violated face.

Someone had been here before him. He vaulted over the low stone wall and saw that the pane of the picture window had been almost completely smashed. Small slivers of glass gleamed like jewels on the cobbled yard. He stood and gazed between the jagged edges of the broken glass into the brightness of the sitting room. The carpet was littered with glass fragments like winking beads of silver light. It was obvious that the force of the blow had come from outside the cottage and he saw at once what had been used. Below him, face upwards on the carpet, was the portrait of Hilary Robarts. It had been slashed almost to the frame with two right-angled cuts forming the letter L.

He didn't try the door to see if it was unlocked. It was more important not to contaminate the scene than to save ten or fifteen minutes in ringing the police. She was dead. Speed was important, but it was not vital. Regaining the road he set off towards the mill, half running, half walking. And then he heard the noise of a car and, turning, saw the lights coming at him fast from the north. It was Alex Mair's BMW. Dalgliesh stood in the middle of the road and waved his torch. The car slowed and stopped. Looking up to the open right-side window he saw Mair, his face bleached by moonlight, regarding him for a moment with an unsmiling intensity as if this encounter were an assignation.

Dalgliesh said: 'I'm afraid I have shocking news for you. Hilary Robarts has been murdered. I've just found the body. I need to get to a telephone.'

The hand lying casually on the wheel tightened then relaxed. The eyes fixed on his grew wary. But when Mair spoke his voice was controlled. Only in that involuntary spasm of the hand had he betrayed emotion. He said: 'The Whistler?'

'It looks like it.'

'There's a telephone in the car.'

Without another word he opened the door, got out and stood silently aside while Dalgliesh spent an irritating two minutes getting through to Rickards's headquarters. Rickards wasn't there but the message given, he rang off. Mair had moved about thirty yards from the car and was staring back at the glitter of the power station as if dissociating himself from the whole procedure.

Now, walking back, he said: 'We all warned her not to swim alone but she wouldn't listen. But I didn't really believe there was any danger. I suppose all the victims thought that until it was too late. "It can't happen to me." But it can and it does. But it's still extraordinary, almost unbelievable. The second victim from Larksoken. Where is she?'

'On the fringe of the pines, where she usually swam, I imagine.' As Mair made a move towards the sea, Dalgliesh said: 'There's nothing you can do. I'll go back and wait for the police.'

'I know there's nothing I can do. I want to see her.'

'Better not. The fewer people who disturb the scene the better.'

Suddenly Mair turned on him. 'My God, Dalgliesh, don't you ever stop thinking like a policeman? I said I wanted to see her.'

Dalgliesh thought, this isn't my case and I can't stop him by force. But at least he could ensure that the direct path to the body lay undisturbed. Without another word he led the way and Mair followed. Why this insistence, he wondered, on seeing the body? To satisfy himself that she was, in fact, dead, the scientist's need to verify and confirm? Or was he trying to exorcize a horror which he knew could be more terrible in imagination than in reality? Or was there, perhaps, a deeper compulsion, the need to pay her the tribute of standing over her body in the quietness and loneliness of the night before the police arrived with all the official paraphernalia of a murder investigation to violate for ever the intimacies they had shared.

Mair made no comment when Dalgliesh led him to the south of the well-beaten path to the beach and still without speaking followed him as he plunged into the darkness and began tracking his way between the shafts of the pines. The pool of light from his torch shone on the brittle spars snapped by his previous breakthrough, on the carpet of pine needles dusted with sand, on dried pine cones and the glint of an old battered tin. In the darkness the strong resinous smell seemed to intensify and came up to them like a drug, making the air as heavy to breathe as if it were a sultry night in high summer.

Minutes later they stepped out of stultifying darkness into the white coolness of the beach and saw before them like a curved shield of beaten silver the moonlit splendour of the sea. They stood for a moment side by side, breathing hard as if they had come through some ordeal. Dalgliesh's footprints were still visible in the dry sand above the last ridge of pebbles and they followed them until they stood at the foot of the body.

Dalgliesh thought, I don't want to be here, not with him, not like this, both of us staring down unrebuked at her nakedness. It seemed to him that all his perceptions were preternaturally sharpened in this cold, debilitating light. The blanched limbs, the aureole of dark hair, the gaudy red and blue of the beach towel, the clumps of marram grass, all had the one-dimensional clarity of a colour print. This necessary guard on the body until the police could arrive would have been perfectly tolerable; he was used to the undemanding companionship of the recently dead. But with Mair at his side he felt like a voyeur. It was this revulsion, rather than delicacy, which made him move a little apart and stand looking into the darkness of the pines while remaining aware of every slight move and breath of the tall, rigid figure looking down at her with the concentrated attention of a surgeon.

Then Mair said: 'That locket round her neck, I gave it to her on August the twenty-ninth for her birthday. It's just the right size to hold her Yale key. One of the metal workers in the workshop at Larksoken made it for me. It's remarkable the delicacy of the work they do there.'

Dalgliesh was not inexperienced in the various manifestations of shock. He said nothing. Mair's voice was suddenly harsh.

'For God's sake, Dalgliesh, can't we cover her up?'

With what? thought Dalgliesh. Does he expect me to jerk the towel from under her? He said: 'No, I'm sorry. We mustn't disturb her.'

'But it's the Whistler's work. Dear God, man, it's obvious. You said so yourself.'

'The Whistler is a murderer like any other. He brings something to the scene and leaves something behind him. That something could be evidence. He's a man, not a force of nature.'

'When will the police arrive?'

'They shouldn't be long. I wasn't able to speak to Rickards but they'll be in touch with him. I'll wait if you want to leave. There's nothing you can do here.'

'I can stay until they take her away.'

'That might mean a long wait unless they're able to get the pathologist quickly.'

Then I'll have a long wait.'

Without another word he turned and walked down to the edge of the sea, his footprints parallel with Dalgliesh's own. Dalgliesh moved down to the shingle and sat there, his arms round his knees, and watched while the tall figure paced endlessly, backwards and forwards, along the fringes of the tide. Whatever evidence he had on his shoes, it wouldn't be there now. But the thought was ridiculous. No murderer had ever left his imprint more clearly on a victim than had the Whistler. Why then did he feel this unease, the sense that it was less straightforward than it seemed?

He wriggled his heels and buttocks more comfortably into the shingle and prepared to wait. The cold moonlight, the constant falling of the waves and the sense of that stiffening body behind him induced a gentle melancholy, a contemplation of mortality including his own. Timor mortis conturbat me. He thought: in youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It fs only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage. Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath. How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend. Perhaps this was part of the attraction of his job, that the process of detection dignified the individual death, even the death of the least attractive, the most unworthy, mirroring in its excessive interest in clues and motives man's perennial fascination with the mystery of his mortality, providing, too, a comforting illusion of a moral universe in which innocence could be avenged, right vindicated, order restored. But nothing was restored, certainly not life, and the only justice vindicated was the uncertain justice of men. The job certainly had a fascination for him which went beyond its intellectual challenge, or the excuse it gave for his rigorously enforced privacy. But now he had inherited enough money to make it redundant. Was this what his aunt had intended by that uncompromising will? Was she in fact saying, here is enough money to make any job other than poetry unnecessary? Isn't it time that you made a choice?

It wasn't his case. It would never be his case. But by force of habit he timed the arrival of the police and it was thirty-five minutes before his ears caught the first rustle of movement in the pine wood. They were coming the way he had directed and they were making a great deal of noise about it. It was Rickards who appeared first with a younger but stolidly built man at his shoulders and four heavily laden officers in a straggle behind them. It seemed to Dalgliesh, rising to meet them, that they were immense, huge moon men, their features square and blanched in this alien light, bearing with them their bulky and polluting paraphernalia. Rickards nodded but didn't speak other than briefly to introduce his sergeant, Stuart Oliphant.

Together they approached the body and stood looking down at what had been Hilary Robarts. Rickards was breathing heavily, as if he had been running, and it seemed to Dalgliesh that there emanated from him a powerful surge of energy and excitement. Oliphant and the four other officers dumped their equipment and stood silently, a little apart. Dalgliesh had a sense that they were all actors in a film, waiting for the director to give the command to shoot, or that a voice would suddenly shout 'cut' and the little group would break up, the victim stretch herself and sit up and begin rubbing her arms and legs and complaining of stiffness and the cold.

Then, still gazing down at the body, Rickards asked: 'Do you know her, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'Hilary Robarts, Acting Administrative Officer at Larksoken Power Station. I met her first last Thursday, at a dinner party given by Miss Mair.'

Rickards turned and gazed towards the figure of Mair. He was standing motionless with his back to the sea but so close to the surf that it seemed to Dalgliesh that the waves must be washing over his shoes. He made no move towards them, almost as if he were waiting for an invitation or for Rickards to join him.

Dalgliesh said: 'Dr Alex Mair. He's the Director of Larksoken. I used the telephone in his car to call you. He says he'll stay here until the body is removed.'

'Then he's in for a long wait. So that's Dr Alex Mair. I've read about him. Who found her?'

'I did. I thought I made that plain when I telephoned.'

Either Rickards was deliberately extracting information he already knew or his men were singularly inefficient at passing on a simple message.

Rickards turned to Oliphant. 'Go and explain to him that we'll be taking our time. There's nothing he can do here except to get in the way. Persuade him to go home to bed. If you can't persuade, try ordering. I'll talk to him tomorrow.' He waited until Oliphant had started scrunching over the ridge of shingle then called: 'Oliphant. If he won't move, tell him to keep his distance. I don't want him any closer. Then get the screens round her. That'll spoil his fun.'

It was the kind of casual cruelty which Dalgliesh didn't expect from him. Something was wrong with the man, something that went deeper than professional stress at having to view yet another of the Whistler's victims. It was as if some half-acknowledged and imperfectly suppressed personal anxiety had been violently released by the sight of the body, triumphing over caution and discipline.

But Dalgliesh, too, felt a sense of outrage. He said: 'The man isn't a voyeur. He's probably not altogether rational at present. After all, he knew the woman. Hilary Robarts was one of his senior officers.'

'He can't do her any good now, even if she was his mistress.' Then, as if acknowledging the implied rebuke, he said: 'All right, I'll have a word with him.'

He began running clumsily over the shingle. Hearing him, Oliphant turned and together they went up to that silent, waiting figure on the fringe of the sea. Dalgliesh watched as they conferred together, then they turned and began walking up the beach, Alex Mair between the two police officers as if he were a prisoner under escort. Rickards returned to the body but it was obvious that Oliphant was going to accompany Alex Mair back to his car. He switched on his torch and plunged into the wood. Mair hesitated. He had ignored the body as if it were no longer there but now he looked over at Dalgliesh as if there were unfinished business between them. Then he said a quick 'Goodnight' and followed Oliphant.

Rickards didn't comment on Mair's change of mind or on his methods of persuasion. He said: 'No handbag.'

'Her house key is in that locket round her neck.' 'Did you touch the body, Mr Dalgliesh?' 'Only her thigh and the hair to test its wetness. The locket was a gift from Mair. He told me.' 'Lives close, does she?'

'You'll have seen her cottage when you drove up. It's just the other side of the pine wood. I went there after I found the body, thinking it might be open and I could telephone. There's been an act of vandalism, her portrait thrown through the window. The Whistler and criminal damage on the same night; an odd coincidence.'

Rickards turned and looked full at him. 'Maybe. But this wasn't the Whistler. The Whistler's dead. Killed himself in a hotel at Easthaven, sometime around six o'clock. I've been trying to reach you to let you know.'

He squatted by the body and touched the girl's face, then lifted the head and let it drop. 'No rigor. Not even the beginning of it. Within the last few hours, by the look of her. The Whistler died with enough sins on his conscience but this… this,' he stabbed his finger violently at the dead body, 'this, Mr Dalgliesh, is something different.'

Rickards rolled on his search gloves. The latex sliding over his huge fingers made them look almost obscene, like the udders of a great animal. Kneeling, he fiddled with the locket. It sprang open and Dalgliesh could see the Yale key nestling inside it, a perfect fit. Rickards extracted it, then said: 'Right, Mr Dalgliesh. Let's go and take a look at that criminal damage.'

Two minutes later he followed Rickards up the path to the front door of the cottage. Rickards unlocked it and they passed into a passage running to the stairs and with doors on either side. Rickards opened the door to the left and stepped into the sitting room with Dalgliesh behind him. It was a large room running the whole length of the cottage with windows at each end and a fireplace facing the door. The portrait lay about three feet from the window surrounded by jagged slivers of glass. Both men stood just inside the door and surveyed the scene.

Dalgliesh said: 'It was painted by Ryan Blaney who lives at Scudder's Cottage further south on the headland. I saw it first on the afternoon I arrived.'

Rickards said: 'A funny way of delivering it. Sat for him, did she?'

'I don't think so. It was painted to please himself, not her.'

He was going to add that Ryan Blaney would, in his view, be the last person to destroy his work. But then he reflected that it hadn't, in fact, been destroyed. Two single cuts in the form of an L wouldn't be too difficult to repair. And the damage had been as precise and deliberate as those cuts on Hilary Robarts's forehead. The picture hadn't been slashed in fury.

Rickards seemed for a moment to lose interest in it. He said: 'So this is where she lived. She must have been fond of solitude. That is if she lived alone.'

Dalgliesh said: 'As far as I know she lived alone.'

It was, he thought, a depressing room. It was not that the place was uncomfortable; it held the necessary furniture but the pieces looked as though they were rejects from someone else's house, not the conscious choice of the occupant. Beside the fireplace with its fitted gas fire were two armchairs in synthetic brown leather. In the centre of the room was an oval dining table with four discordant chairs. On either side of the front window were fitted bookshelves, holding what looked like a collection of textbooks and assorted novels. Two of the lower and taller shelves were packed with box files. Only on the longest wall facing the door was there any sign that someone had made this room a home. She had obviously been fond of watercolours and the wall was as closely hung with them as if it had been part of a gallery. There were one or two which he thought he could recognize and he wished he could walk over to examine them more closely. But it was possible that someone other than Hilary Robarts herself had been in this room before them and it was important to leave the scene undisturbed.

Rickards closed the door and opened the opposite one on the right of the passage. This led to the kitchen, a purely functional, rather uninteresting room, well enough equipped but in stark contrast to the kitchen at Martyr's Cottage.

Set in the middle of the room was a small wooden table, vinyl-covered, with four matching chairs all pushed well in. On the table was an uncorked bottle of wine with the cork and the metal opener beside it. Two plain wineglasses, clean and upturned, were on the draining board.

Rickards said: 'Two glasses, both washed, by her or her killer. We'll get no prints there. And an open bottle. Someone was drinking with her here tonight.'

Dalgliesh said: 'If so he was abstemious. Or she was.'

Rickards with his gloved hand lifted the bottle by its neck and slowly turned it. 'About one glass poured. Maybe they planned to finish it after her swim.' He looked at Dalgliesh and said:' 'You didn't come earlier into the cottage, Mr Dalgliesh? I have to ask everyone she knew.'

'Of course. No, I didn't come earlier into the cottage. I Was drinking claret tonight, but not with her.'

'Pity you hadn't been. She'd be alive now.'

'Not necessarily. I might have left when she went to change for her swim. And if she did have someone with her here tonight that's probably what he did.' He paused, wondered whether to speak, then said: 'The left-hand glass is slightly cracked at the rim.'

Rickards lifted it to the central light and turned it slowly.

'I wish I had your eyesight. It's hardly significant, surely.'

'Some people strongly dislike drinking from a cracked glass. I do myself.'

'In which case why didn't she break it and chuck it away? There's no point in keeping a glass you aren't prepared to drink from. When I'm faced with two alternatives I start by taking the more likely. Two glasses, two drinkers. That's the common-sense explanation.'

It was, thought Dalgliesh, the basis of most police work. Only when the obvious proved untenable was it necessary to explore less likely explanations. But it could also be the first fatally easy step into a labyrinth of misconceptions. He wondered why his instinct insisted that she had been drinking alone. Perhaps because the bottle was in the kitchen not in the sitting room. The wine was a '79 Chateau Talbot, hardly an all-purpose tipple. Why not carry it into the sitting room and do it justice in comfort? On the other hand, if she were alone and had needed only a quick swig before her swim she might hardly have bothered. And if two people had been drinking in the kitchen she had been meticulous in pushing back the chairs. But it was the level of the wine that seemed to him almost conclusive. Why uncork a fresh bottle to pour only two half-glasses? Which didn't, of course, mean that she wasn't later expecting a visitor to help finish it.

Rickards seemed to be taking an unnatural interest in the bottle and its label. Suddenly he said gruffly:

'What time did you leave the mill, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'At 9.15. I looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and checked my watch.'

'And you saw no one during your walk?'

'No one, and no footprints other than hers and mine.'

'What were you actually doing on the headland, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'Walking, thinking.' He was about to add: 'And paddling like a boy,' but checked himself.

Rickards said consideringly: 'Walking and thinking.'

To Dalgliesh's oversensitive ears he made the activities sound both eccentric and suspicious. Dalgliesh wondered what his companion would say if he had decided to confide. 'I was thinking about my aunt and the men who loved her, the fiancé who was killed in 1918 and the man whose mistress she might or might not have been. I was thinking of the thousands of people who have walked along that shore and who are now dead, my aunt among them, and how, as a boy, I hated the false romanticism of that stupid poem about great men leaving their footprints on the sands of time, since that was essentially all that most of us could hope to leave, transitory marks which the next tide would obliterate. I was thinking how little I had known my aunt and whether it was ever possible to know another human being except on the most superficial level, even the women I have loved. I was thinking about the clash of ignorant armies by night, since no poet walks by the sea at moonlight without silently reciting Matthew Arnold's marvellous poem. I was considering whether I would have been a better poet, or even a poet at all, if I hadn't also decided to be a policeman. More prosaically, I was, from time to time, wondering how my life would be changed for better or worse by the unmerited acquisition of three-quarters of a million.'

The fact that he had no intention of revealing even the most mundane of these private musings, the childish secrecy about the paddling, induced an irrational guilt, as if he were deliberately withholding information of importance. After all, he told himself, no man could have been more innocently employed. And it was not as if he were a serious suspect. The idea would probably have struck Rickards as too ridiculous even for consideration, although with logic he would have had to admit that no one who lived on the headland and had known Hilary Robarts could be excluded from the inquiry, least of all because he was a senior police officer. But Dalgliesh was a witness. He had information to give or withhold, and the knowledge that he would have no intention of withholding it didn't alter the fact that there was a difference now in their relationship. He was involved, whether he liked it or not, and he didn't need Rickards to point out that uncomfortable reality. Professionally it was none of his business, but it was his business as a man and a human being.

He was surprised and a little disconcerted to discover how much he had resented the interrogation, mild as it had been. A man was surely entitled to walk along the beach at night without having to explain his reasons to a police officer. It was salutary for him personally to experience this sense of privacy violated, of virtuous outrage which the most innocent of suspects must feel when faced with police interrogation. And he realized anew how much, even from childhood, he had disliked being questioned. 'What are you doing? Where have you been? What are you reading? Where are you going?' He had been the much-wanted only child of elderly parents, burdened by their almost possessive parental concern and over-conscientiousness, living in a village where little the rector's son did was safe from scrutiny. And suddenly, standing here in this anonymous, over-tidy kitchen, he recalled vividly and with heart-stopping pain the moment when his most precious privacy had been violated. He remembered that secluded place, deep in the laurels and elderberries, at the bottom of the shrubbery, the green tunnel of leaves leading to his own three square yards of moist, mould-rich sanctuary, remembered that August afternoon, the crackle of bushes, the cook's great face thrust between the leaves. 'Your ma thought you'd be in here, Master Adam. Rector wants you. What do you do in there, hiding yourself away in all those mucky bushes? Better be playing out in the sunshine.' So the last refuge, the one he had thought totally secret, had been discovered. They had known about it all the time.

He said: 'Oh God from You that I could private be.'

Rickards looked at him. 'What was that, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'Just a quotation that came into my mind.'

Rickards didn't reply. He was probably thinking: 'Well, you're supposed to be a poet. You're entitled.' He gave a last searching look around the kitchen as if by the intensity of his gaze he could somehow compel that unremarkable table and four chairs, the opened bottle of wine, the two washed glasses to yield up their secret.

Then he said: 'I'll lock up here and set someone on guard until tomorrow. I'm due to meet the pathologist, Dr Maitland-Brown, over at Easthaven. He'll take a look at the Whistler and then come straight on here. The forensic biologist should have arrived from the lab by then. You wanted to see the Whistler yourself, didn't you, Mr Dalgliesh? This seems as good a time as any.'

It seemed to Dalgliesh a particularly bad time. One violent death was enough in one night and he was seized with a sudden longing for the peace and solitude of the mill. But there seemed no prospect of sleep for him until the early hours of the morning and there was little point in objecting. Rickards said: 'I could drive you over and bring you back.'

Dalgliesh felt an immediate revulsion at the thought of a car journey tete-a-tete with Rickards. He said: 'If you'll drop me at the mill I'll take my own car. There won't be any reason for me to linger at Easthaven and you may have to wait.'

It surprised him a little that Rickards was willing to leave the beach. Admittedly he had Oliphant and his minions; procedures at the scene of a murder were well established, they would be competent to do what was necessary, and until the forensic pathologist arrived the body couldn't be moved. But he sensed that it was important to Rickards that he and Dalgliesh should see the Whistler's body together and he wondered what forgotten incident in their joint pasts had led to that compulsion.

Balmoral Private Hotel was the last house of an undistinguished nineteenth-century terrace at the unfashionable end of the long promenade. The summer lights were still strung between the Victorian lampposts but they had been turned off and now swung in uneven loops like a tawdry necklace which might scatter its blackened beads at the first strong wind. The season was officially over. Dalgliesh drew up behind the police Rover on the left-hand side of the promenade. Between the road and glittering sea was a children's playground, wire-enclosed, the gate padlocked, the shuttered kiosk pasted with fading and half-torn posters of summer shows, bizarrely shaped ice-creams, a clown's head. The swings had been looped high and one of the metal seats, caught by the strengthening breeze, rapped out a regular tattoo against the iron frame. The hotel stood out from its drabber neighbours, sprucely painted in a bright blue which even the dull street lighting could hardly soften. The porch light shone down on a large card with the words 'Under new management. Bill and Joy Carter welcome you to Balmoral'. A separate card underneath said simply 'Vacancies'.

As they waited to cross the road while a couple of cars cruised slowly past, the drivers peering for a parking space, Rickards said: 'Their first season. Done quite well up to now, so they say, despite the bloody awful summer. This won't help. They'll get the ghouls, of course, but parents will think twice before booking in with the kiddies for happy family hols. Luckily the place is half-empty at present. Two cancellations this morning, so they've only got three couples and they were all out when Mr Carter found the body and, so far, we've managed to keep them in happy ignorance. They're in bed now, presumably asleep. Let's hope they stay that way.'

The earlier arrival of the police must have alerted some of the locals but the plainclothes officer unobtrusively on duty inside the porch had dispersed any curious bystanders and now the road was empty except for a little group of four or five people about fifty yards down on the seaward side. They seemed to be muttering together and as Dalgliesh glanced at them they began moving aimlessly as if stirred by the breeze.

He asked: 'Why here, for God's sake?'

'We know why. There's a hell of a lot we don't know but at least we know that. They've got a part-time barman here, Albert Upcraft, seventy-five if he's a day. He remembers. He's a bit vague about what happened yesterday but there's nothing wrong with his long-term memory. The Whistler came here as a kid, apparently. His auntie – his dad's sister – was manager here twenty years ago. Used to take him off his mum's hands for a free holiday when the place was quiet. Mainly when mum had a new man and the new uncle didn't want the kid around. Sometimes he was here for weeks at a time. No trouble to anyone. Helped with the guests, picked up the odd tip, actually went to Sunday school.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Now the Day is Over.'

'Well, his day's over, all right. He booked in at 2.30 this afternoon. Asked for the same room, apparently. Single at the back. Cheapest in the house. The Carters should be grateful for small mercies. He might have chosen to go out in style, best double bedroom, private bathroom, view of the sea, the lot.'

The constable at the door saluted and they passed through the lobby into the hall, and into a smell of paint and polish overlaid with the faint tang of lavender disinfectant. The cleanliness was almost oppressive. The lurid flowered carpet was covered with a narrow strip of perspex. The wallpaper was obviously new, a different pattern on each wall and a glimpse through the open door of the dining room showed tables set for four with shining white cloths and small vases of artificial flowers, daffodils, narcissi and bulbous roses. The couple who came from the back to meet them were as spruce as their hotel. Bill Carter was a dapper little man who looked as if he came fresh from the ironing board, the creases down his white shirt sleeves and the front of his trousers knife sharp, his tie neatly knotted. His wife was wearing a summer dress in a flowered crimplene under a knitted white sweater. She had obviously been crying. Her plump, rather childish face under the carefully set blonde hair was bloated and bruised red as if she had been struck. Her disappointment at seeing just the two of them was pathetically obvious.

She said: 'I thought you'd come to take him away. Why can't you take him away?'

Rickards didn't introduce Dalgliesh. He said soothingly: 'We will, Mrs Carter, as soon as the pathologist has seen him. He shouldn't be long now. He's on his way.'

'Pathologist? That's a doctor, isn't it? Why do you want a doctor? He's dead, isn't he? Bill found him. His throat's cut. How much deader can you get?'

'He won't be with you much longer, Mrs Carter.'

'The sheet's covered with blood, Bill says. He wouldn't let me in. Not that I want to see. And the carpet, ruined. Blood's terrible to get out, everyone knows that. Who's going to pay for the carpet and the bed? Oh God, I thought things were really coming right for us at last. Why did he come back here to do it? Not very nice, was it, not very considerate?'

'He wasn't a considerate man, Mrs Carter.'

Her husband put his arm round her shoulders and led her away. Less than half a minute later he reappeared and said: 'It's the shock, naturally. She's upset. Well, who wouldn't be? You know the way up, Mr Rickards. Your officer is still there. I won't come up with you if you don't mind.'

'That's all right, Mr Carter, I know the way.'

Suddenly he turned and said: 'Get him out soon, sir, for God's sake.'

For a moment Dalgliesh thought that he, too, was crying.

There was no lift. Dalgliesh followed Rickards up three flights of stairs, down a narrow passage towards the back and a short turn to the right. A young detective constable got up from his chair outside the door and with his left hand opened it then flattened himself against the wall. The smell seemed to gust out of the room at them, a strong effluvium of blood and death.

The light was on and the main bulb in its cheap pink shade hung low and shone full on the horror on the bed. It was a very small room, little more than a box room, with a single window too high to give a view of more than the sky and enough space only for the single bed, a chair, a bedside cabinet and a low chest of drawers with a mirror hung above it which served as a dressing table. But this room, too, was obsessively clean, making that unclean thing on the bed even more horrible. Both the gaping throat with its white corrugated vessels and the sagging mouth above it seemed to be stretched in protest or outrage at this violence to decency and order. There were no preliminary cuts visible and that single act of annihilating violence must surely, Dalgliesh thought, have taken more strength than was possible from the childish hand lying, fingers curved, on the sheet and fixed now in its blackening carapace of dried blood. The knife, six inches of bloodied steel, lay close beside it. For some reason he had undressed himself for death and lay now wearing only a vest and pants and a pair of short blue nylon socks which looked like the onset of putrefaction. On the chair beside the bed a dark grey striped suit was neatly folded. A blue-striped drip-dry shirt was hung from the back of the chair with the tie folded over it. Under the chair his shoes, well worn but polished to mirror brightness, were precisely placed side by side. They looked small enough for a girl.

Rickards said: 'Neville Potter, aged thirty-six. Scrawny little sod. You wouldn't believe he'd got the strength in those arms to throttle a chicken. And he came properly dressed in his Sunday best to meet his Maker, but then thought better of it. Probably remembered that his ma wouldn't like him getting blood on his best suit. You should meet Ma, Mr Dalgliesh. She's a real education, that one. She explains a lot. But he's left the evidence. It's all there, all laid out for us. Neat little devil, wasn't he?'

Dalgliesh edged himself round the end of the bed, being careful not to tread in the blood. On the top of the chest of drawers were the Whistler's weapons and his trophies; a leather dog lead, neatly curled, a blond wig and blue beret, a clasp knife, a lamp with a battery ingeniously fixed to the centre of a metal headband. Beside these was a pyramid of tangled bushy hair: blond, dark brown, red. In front of the careful arrangement was a page of paper torn from a notebook with the single written message in biro, printed like a child's. 'It was getting worse. This is the only way I know to stop myself. Please look after Pongo.' The 'Please' was underlined.

Rickards said: 'His dog. Pongo, for God's sake.'

'What did you expect him to be called, Cerberus?'

Rickards opened the door and stood with his back to the gap breathing deeply as if hungry for fresh air. He said: 'He and his ma lived on one of the caravan sites outside Cromer. Been there for twelve years. He was a general handyman, did any easy repairs, kept an eye on the place at night, dealt with complaints. The boss has another site outside Yarmouth and he would go there some nights to relieve the permanent chap. A bit of a loner. Had a small van and the dog. Married a girl he picked up on the site there years ago but it only lasted four months. She walked out on him. Driven out by Ma or by the smell of the caravan. God knows how she stuck it for four months.'

Dalgliesh said: 'He was an obvious suspect. You must have checked him.'

'His ma gave him an alibi for two of the murders. Either she was drunk and didn't know whether he was there or not, or she was covering up for him. Or, of course, she couldn't give a bloody damn one way or the other.' He said with sudden violence, 'I thought we'd learned by now not to take that kind of alibi at its face value. I'm having a word with the DC who interviewed them, but you know how it is. Thousands of interviews, checks, the stuff all put on the computer. I'd give a dozen computers for a DC who can sense when a witness is lying. My God, haven't we learned anything from the Yorkshire Ripper fiasco?'

'Didn't your man search the van?'

'Oh, they searched the van, all right. They showed a modicum of initiative. It was clean. He cached his stuff elsewhere. Probably picked it up every evening, watched, waited, chose his moment.' He gazed down at the head contraption and said: 'Ingenious, isn't it? As his ma says, he was always clever with his hands.'

The small rectangle of sky outside the single high window was blue-black pricked with a single star. It seemed to Dalgliesh that he had experienced half a lifetime of sensations since he had woken that morning to the cool sea-scented autumnal dawn, to the beginning of a day which had included that calm meditative walk under the soaring roof of St Peter Mancroft, the nostalgic self-indulgent pain induced by those faded photographs of the long dead; the rush and pull of the tide over his naked feet, the mingled shock and recognition as his torch shone on Hilary Robarts's body. It was a day which, stretching interminably, seemed to have embraced all seasons. So this was one way of stretching time, time which for the Whistler had stopped with that great gush of blood. And now at the end of the day he had come to this neat box of an execution shed, imposing on his mind as if it were a memory the picture of a skinny child lying supine on that same bed and watching through the high window the same single star while arranged on the chest of drawers with careful art were the trophies of his day: the tips in pennies and sixpences, the shells and coloured stones from the beach, the dried swathe of pustulated seaweed.

And he himself was here because Rickards had willed it, had wanted him here in this room and at this time. He could have viewed the Whistler's body tomorrow in the mortuary, or, since he could hardly claim that he hadn't the stomach for it, on the autopsy table, to confirm what hardly needed confirmation, that this scrawny killer wasn't the once-glimpsed, six-foot, Battersea strangler. But Rickards had needed an audience, had needed him, Dalgliesh, against whose dreadfully experienced and unshockable calm he could hurl the bitterness and frustrations of failure. Five women dead, and the murderer a suspect they had interviewed and cleared early in the inquiry. The smell of that failure would linger at least in his own nostrils long after the media interest, the official inquiries had run their course. And now there was this sixth death, Hilary Robarts who might not have died and certainly wouldn't have died as she had if the Whistler had been stopped in his tracks earlier. But Dalgliesh sensed that something more keenly personal even than professional failure was fuelling Rickards's anger with its uncharacteristic spurts of verbal brutality and he wondered whether it had something to do with his wife and the coming child. He asked: 'What will happen to the dog?'

Rickards seemed not to notice the irrelevance of the question.

'What do you think? Who's going to take on an animal that has been where he's been, seen what he's seen?' He looked down at the stiffening corpse and, turning to Dalgliesh, said harshly: 'You pity him, I suppose.'

Dalgliesh didn't reply. He could have said: 'Yes, I pity him. And his victims. And you. And myself occasionally, come to that.' He thought: Yesterday I was reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Odd. Robert Burton, that seventeenth-century Leicestershire rector, had said all that could be said at such a moment and the words came to him as clearly as if he had spoken them aloud. 'Of their goods and bodies we can dispose; but what shall become of their souls God alone can tell; His mercy may come inter pontem et fontem, inter gladium et jugulum, betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat.'

Rickards shook himself violently as if suddenly seized with cold. It was an odd gesture. Then he said: 'At least he's saved the country his keep for the next twenty years. One argument for keeping his kind alive instead of putting them down is that we can learn from them, stop it happening again. But can we? We've got Straffen banged up, Brady, Nielson. How much have we learned from them?'

Dalgliesh said: 'You wouldn't hang a madman, presumably?'

'I wouldn't hang anyone, I'd find a less barbaric method. But they aren't mad, are they? Not until they're caught. Until then they cope with life like most other people. Then we discover that they're monsters and decide, surprise, surprise, to classify them as mad. Makes it seem more comprehensible. We don't have to think of them as human any more. We don't have to use the word evil. Everyone feels better. Do you want to see the mother, Mr Dalgliesh?'

'There's no point in it. He obviously isn't our man. I didn't for a moment suppose that he would be.'

'You should see the mother. She's a right bitch, that one. And do you know what her name is? Lillian. L for Lillian. That's something for the trick-cyclist to chew over. She made him what he was. But we can't check on people and decide who's fit to have kids, let alone fit to bring them up. And I suppose that when he was born she must have felt something for him, had some hopes for him. She could hardly know what she'd brought forth. You never had a child, did you, Mr Dalgliesh.'

'I had a son. Briefly.'

Rickards kicked the door gently, looking away. He said: 'Bloody hell, I'd forgotten. Sorry. Wrong time to ask, for both of us.'

There were confident footsteps mounting the stairs and now they had reached the passage. Dalgliesh said: 'It sounds as if the pathologist has arrived.'

Rickards made no reply. He had moved over to the chest of drawers and, with his forefinger, gently urged the tangle of hairs across the polished wood.

He said: 'There's one sample which we won't find here. Hilary Robarts. Forensic will look to make doubly sure, but it won't be here. And now I start looking for a very different murderer. And, by God, Mr Dalgliesh, this time I'm going to get him.'

Forty-five minutes later Rickards was back at the scene of the murder. He seemed to have passed beyond conscious tiredness and to be operating in a different dimension of time and space in which his mind worked with unnatural clarity while his body had become almost weightless, a creature of light and air, as insubstantial as the bizarre scene in which he moved and spoke and gave his orders. The pale transparent disc of the moon was eclipsed by the glare of the mounted lights which illumined and solidified the hard outlines of trees and men and equipment, yet paradoxically robbed them of form and essence so that they were, at one and the same time, revealed and clarified and transformed into something alien and strange. And always, beyond the masculine voices, the scrunch of feet on pebbles, the sudden flap of canvas in a tentative breeze, was the continual fall and suck of the tide.

Dr Anthony Maitland-Brown had driven from East-haven to the scene in his Mercedes and had arrived first. He was already gowned and gloved and crouching by the body by the time Rickards caught up with him. Wisely he left him to it. M-B strongly disliked being watched while he made his preliminary examination at the scene and was apt to protest with a peevish 'Do we really need all these people standing around?' if anyone came within ten feet of him, as if the police photographer, scene-of-crime officer and forensic biologist were all so many snap-happy sightseers. He was an elegant and extraordinarily handsome man, over six feet tall, who had once in youth – so it was rumoured – been told that he looked like Leslie Howard and had spent subsequent years sedulously promoting the image. He was amicably divorced, comfortably well-off-his mother had bequeathed him a private income – and well able to indulge his twin passions of clothes and the opera. In his free time he escorted a succession of young and extremely pretty actresses to Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, where they were apparently content to endure three hours of boredom for the prestige of his company or, perhaps, the frisson of knowing that the elegant hands which poured their wine or helped them out of the Mercedes were commonly engaged with more bizarre activities. Rickards had never found him an easy colleague but recognized that he was a first-class forensic pathologist, and God knew they were rare enough. Reading M-B's lucid and comprehensive autopsy reports he could forgive him even his aftershave.

Now, moving away from the body, he stirred himself to greet the recent arrivals, photographer, cameraman, forensic biologist. The stretch of beach fifty yards each side of the murder scene had been efficiently roped off and plastic sheeting laid over the path now lit by a string of overhead lights. He was aware of his sergeant's disciplined excitement at his side.

Stuart Oliphant said: 'We've found a print, sir. About forty yards into the copse.'

'On grass and pine needles?'

'No, sir, on sand. Someone, a kid perhaps, must have tipped it from a bucket. The print's a good one, sir.'

Rickards followed him into the wood. The whole of the path had been protected but at one place a marker had been driven into the soft ground at the right-hand side. Sergeant Oliphant drew back the plastic then lifted the box covering the print. In the glow of the overhead lights slung along the path it showed clearly, a dusting of moist sand over the pine needles and flattened grass, covering no more than six inches by four, and printed on it the intricate pattern of the sole of a right shoe.

Oliphant said: 'We found it soon after you left, sir. Only the one, but it's pretty clear. The photographs have been taken and the measurements will be at the lab this morning. Size ten by the look of it. They'll be able to give us confirmation pretty quickly, but it's hardly necessary. It's a trainer shoe, sir. A Bumble. You know the make, the one that has a picture of a bee on the heel. And it has the outline of a bee on the sole. You can see the curve of the wing here, sir. It's quite unmistakable.'

A Bumble trainer. If you wanted a print you could hardly hope for anything more distinctive. Oliphant voiced his thoughts: 'Common enough, of course, but not all that common. Bumbles are the most expensive on the market, the Porsche of trainers. Most of the kids with money like to have them. It's a bloody silly name. Part of the firm is actually owned by a man called Bumble and they've only been on the market for a couple of years, but he promotes them fairly vigorously. I suppose he hopes that the name will catch on, that people will start yelling for their Bumbles as they do for their wellie-boots.'

Rickards said: 'It looks fresh enough. When did we last get rain? Late on Saturday night, wasn't it?'

'About eleven. It was over by midnight but it was a heavy shower.'

'And there's no tree cover on this part of the path. The print's perfectly smooth. If it were made before midnight on Saturday I'd expect some spotting. Interesting that there's only the one and that it's pointing away from the sea. If someone wearing Bumble trainers came along this path any time on Sunday you'd expect to find at least one similar print on the upper reaches of the beach.'

'Not necessarily, sir. The shingle comes up almost as high as the path in places. We'd get no prints if he stayed on the pebbles. But if it was made on Sunday before she died would it still be here? She must have come along this path.'

'No reason why she would have trodden on it. It's well to the right of the path. It's odd, though. Too plain, too distinctive, too opportune. You could almost believe it's been deliberately made to deceive us.'

'They sell Bumble trainers at the sports shop in Blake-ney, sir. I could send a chap to buy a pair of size ten as soon as they open.'

'See that he's in plain clothes and buys them as an ordinary purchaser. I need confirmation of the pattern before we start asking people to turn out their shoe cupboards. We're going to be dealing with intelligent suspects. I don't want a balls-up at the beginning of the case.'

'Pity to waste time, sir. My brother owns a pair of Bumbles. The print's unmistakable.'

Rickards said obstinately: 'I need confirmation, and I want it fast.'

Oliphant replaced the box and the plastic cover then followed him back to the beach. Rickards was uncomfortably aware of the almost physical weight of resentment, antagonism and slight contempt which seemed to flow from the sergeant. But he was lumbered with the man. Oliphant had been part of the team bearing the brunt of the Whistler investigation and, although this admittedly was a different inquiry, it would be difficult to replace him without causing personal or logistical problems which Rickards was anxious to avoid. During the fifteen-month hunt for the Whistler his mild dislike of the sergeant had grown into an antipathy which he knew to be not wholly reasonable and which he had tried to discipline both in the interests of the investigation and of his own self-regard. A serial murder was difficult enough without personal complications.

He had no real evidence that Oliphant was a bully; he only looked like one. He was six feet of disciplined flesh and muscle, dark and conventionally handsome with rather pudgy features, full-lipped and hard-eyed, with a fleshy chin like a doughnut, dented in the middle with a deep dimple. Rickards found it difficult to keep his eyes off it. His repugnance to the man had elevated it to a deformity. Oliphant drank too much but that was an occupational hazard for a policeman. The fact that Rickards had never seen him actually drunk only increased the offence. A man shouldn't be able to put away that amount of alcohol and still stand firmly on his feet.

He was meticulous in his attitude to senior officers, respectful without being servile, but subtly managed to give Rickards the impression that he wasn't quite measuring up to the standards Oliphant had privately set for him. He was popular enough with the less sensitive probationers; the others wisely kept clear of him. Rickards told himself that if he were ever in trouble, Oliphant was the last police officer he would wish to see on his doorstep. Oliphant would probably regard that sentiment as a compliment. And there had never been from the public even the whisper of a complaint against him. That too, unreasonably, made Rickards suspicious. It suggested that where his interests were at stake the man was devious enough to act against his essential nature. He was unmarried but managed, without the crudity of actual boasting, to give the impression that women found him irresistible. Probably a number did, but at least he kept clear of his colleagues' wives. In all, he represented most of the qualities in a young detective which Rickards disliked: aggression, only controlled because control was prudent, a frank relish for power, too much sexual assurance and an inflated opinion of his own capabilities. But those capabilities weren't negligible. Oliphant would make Chief Inspector at least and might go higher. Rickards had never managed to bring himself to use his sergeant's nickname of Jumbo. Oliphant, so far from resenting a sobriquet both childish and basically unsuitable, seemed to tolerate, even to like it, at least in those colleagues he had privately authorized to use it. Less favoured mortals only used it once.

Maitland-Brown was ready to make his preliminary report. Drawing himself up to his full six feet three inches he peeled off his gloves and tossed them to a DC, rather like an actor casually divesting himself of part of his costume. It wasn't his custom to discuss his findings at the scene. He did, however, condescend to announce them.

'I'll do the autopsy tomorrow and let you have a report by Wednesday. I doubt whether there will be any surprises. On a preliminary examination it's clear enough. Death by strangulation. The implement was smooth and two centimetres in width, perhaps a belt, a strap or a dog lead. She was a tall, well-muscled woman. It would have taken strength but not inordinate strength given the advantage of surprise. He probably stood in the shelter of the pines then stepped out and slung the strap over her head as soon as she got back from the swim. She had just time to pick up her towel. She made one or two convulsive movements with the feet, you can see where the grass is marked. I estimate on the present evidence that she died between 8.30 and ten.'

Maitland-Brown had pronounced and clearly expected no questions. Nor was there need for any. He put out a hand for his coat which was obligingly handed to him by a DC, then took his leave. Rickards almost expected him to bow.

Rickards looked down at the corpse. Now with the head, hands and feet covered with plastic she looked for a second like a gift-wrapped toy, a plaything for someone with expensive and peculiar tastes, an artifice of latex and synthetic hair, glass eyes, a mere simulation of a living woman. Oliphant's voice seemed to come from a far distance.

'Commander Dalgliesh didn't come back with you then, sir?'

'Why should he? This isn't his pigeon. He's probably in bed.'

He thought, And I wish to God I were too. Already the day was crowding in on him as if physical weight were being piled on exhausted body, the press conference about the Whistler's suicide, the Chief Constable, the press officer, this new investigation, suspects to be interviewed, facts established, the whole cumbersome business of a murder investigation set in motion with the knowledge of his previous failure dragging like a stone on his heart. And somehow or other he had to find time to ring Susie.

He said: 'Mr Dalgliesh is a witness, not the investigating officer.'

'A witness, but hardly a suspect.'

'Why not? He lives on the headland, he knew the girl, he knew how the Whistler killed. He may not be a serious suspect in our eyes but he makes his statement like everyone else.'

Oliphant looked at him stolidly. He said: 'That'll be a new experience for him. Let's hope he enjoys it.'