Devices & Desires

BOOK FOUR. Monday 26 September

Anthony woke her, as he usually did, just after 6.30. Theresa wrenched her mind through clogging layers of sleep to the familiar morning sounds, the creak and rock of the cot and the sniffs and grunts as Anthony grasped the rails and pulled himself up. She smelt the familiar nursery smell compounded of baby talc, stale milk and a sodden nappy. She felt for the switch of the bedside light under the grubby shade with its fringe of dancing Bambis and, opening her eyes, stared into Anthony's and was rewarded by his wide, gummy smile and his ritual small bounces of pleasure which shook the cot. Gently opening the door of the twins' room she could see that they were still asleep, Elizabeth a curled lump on the far end of the bed, Marie on her back one arm flung out. If she could change and feed Anthony before he became fretful they would sleep for another half hour, thirty more minutes of peace for her father.

She would look after Elizabeth and Marie for her mother's sake as long as they needed her and with all her strength, but it was Anthony whom she loved. For a moment she lay still regarding him, enjoying this moment of their quiet, mutual pleasure in each other. Then he let go of the cot rail with one hand, raised one leg in a parody of a clumsy ballet dancer, collapsed on to his mattress, then rolled over on to his back, stuffed his fist into his mouth and began noisily sucking. Soon he would tire of this substitute comfort. She swung her legs out of bed, waited for a moment until she felt the physical flow of strength into arms and legs, then went over to the cot, let down the side and gathered him into her arms. She would change him downstairs on newspaper spread on the kitchen table, then strap him into his chair so that he could watch her while she heated his milk. By the time he was fed the twins would be awake and she would be free to help dress them ready for Mrs Hunter from the welfare to collect them and drive them to the playgroup. Then there would be breakfast for her father and herself before it was time to set out with her father and Anthony to walk to the crossroads where she would pick up the school bus.

She had just turned out the gas under the saucepan of milk when the telephone rang. Her heart lurched, then settled into a rhythmic pounding. She snatched at the receiver, hoping that she had been quick enough to stop it waking her father. George Jago's voice came over strongly, conspiratorial, husky with excitement.

'Theresa? Is your dad up yet?'

'No, not yet, Mr Jago. He's still asleep.'

There was a pause as if he were thinking, then he said: 'OK, don't disturb him. When he wakes tell him Hilary Robarts is dead. Last night. Murdered. Found on the beach.'

'You mean the Whistler got her?'

'Looked like that, meant to look like that if you ask me. But it couldn't have been. The Whistler was dead, been dead three hours or more. Like I told you last night. Remember?'

'Yes, I remember, Mr Jago.'

'Good thing I rang last night, isn't it? You told him, your dad? You told your dad about the Whistler?'

She heard under the excitement the insistent note of anxiety. 'Yes,' she said, 'I told him.'

'That's all right then. Now you tell him about Miss Robarts. Ask him to give me a ring. I've got a call to take a party to Ipswich but I'll be back about twelve. Or I could have a word with him now if he's quick.'

'He wouldn't be quick, Mr Jago. He's sound asleep. And I'm trying to feed Anthony.'

'All right. But you tell him, mind.'

'Yes, I'll tell him.'

He said: 'Good thing I rang last night. He'll know why.'

She put down the receiver. Her hands were wet. She wiped them on her nightdress and went over to the stove. But when she picked up the pan of milk her hands were shaking so violently that she knew she wouldn't be able to pour it into the narrow neck of the bottle. She took it over to the sink and, very carefully, managed to half fill it. Then she unstrapped Anthony and seated herself in the low nursing chair before the empty fireplace. His mouth opened and she plugged in the teat of the bottle and watched as he began his vigorous chomping, his eyes, suddenly vacant, fixed on hers, his two chubby hands raised, palms down like the paws of an animal.

It was then that she heard the creak of the stairs, and her father came in. He never appeared in front of her in the mornings without what he used as a dressing gown, an old raincoat buttoned to the neck. Above it his face under the sleep-tousled hair was grey and swollen, the lips unnaturally red.

He said: 'Was that the phone?'

'Yes, Daddy, Mr Jago.'

'What did he want, then, at this hour?'

'He rang to say that Hilary Robarts is dead. She's been murdered.'

Surely he would notice how different her voice sounded. It seemed to her that her lips were so dry that they would look bloated and deformed, and she bent her head low over the baby so that he shouldn't see. But her father didn't look at her and he didn't speak. With his back to her he said: 'The Whistler then, was it? Got her, did he? Well, she was asking for it.'

'No, Daddy, it couldn't have been the Whistler. Remember Mr Jago phoned us last night at half-past seven to say that the Whistler was dead. He said this morning he was glad he rang to tell us and that you would know why.'

Still he didn't speak. She heard the hiss of water from the tap into the kettle and watched him as he took it slowly back to the table and plugged it in, then took down a mug from the shelf. She was aware of the thudding of her heart, of Anthony's warm body against her arm, of her chin gently resting on his downy head. She said: 'What did Mr Jago mean by that, Daddy?'

'He meant that whoever killed Miss Robarts meant to blame it on the Whistler. That means the police will only suspect people who didn't know that the Whistler was dead.'

'But you knew, Daddy, because I told you.'

Then he turned and said without looking at her. 'Your mother wouldn't like you to tell lies.'

But he wasn't cross and he wasn't rebuking her. She heard nothing in his voice but a great weariness. She said quietly: 'But it isn't a lie, Daddy. Mr Jago telephoned when you were out in the privy. When you came back I told you.'

And then he turned and their eyes met. She had never seen him look more hopeless, more defeated. He said: 'That's right, you told me. And that's what you'll tell the police when they ask you.'

'Of course, Daddy. I'll tell them what happened. Mr Jago told me about the Whistler and I told you.'

'And do you remember what I said?'

The teat of the bottle had flattened. She took it from Anthony's mouth and shook the bottle to let in the air. He gave an immediate wail of fury which she plugged with the teat.

She said: 'I think you said that you were glad. We would all be safe now.'

'Yes,' he said, 'we're all safe now.'

'Does that mean that we won't have to leave the cottage?'

'It depends. We shan't have to leave at once anyway.' 'Who will it belong to now, Daddy?' 'I don't know. Whoever she leaves it to in her will, I suppose. They might want to sell it.'

'Could we buy it, Daddy? It would be nice if we could buy it.5

'That would depend on how much they want. There's no point in thinking about that yet. We're all right for the moment anyway.'

She said: 'Will the police be coming here?'

'Sure to. Today, most likely.'

'Why will they be coming here, Daddy?'

'To find out whether I knew if the Whistler was dead. To ask you if I left the cottage last night. They'll be here, most likely, when you get back from school.'

But she wasn't going to school. Today, it was important that she didn't leave her father's side. And she had an excuse ready, a stomach cramp. And that, at least, was true, or partly true. Crouched over the lavatory she had seen that first pink evidence of her monthly period almost with joy.

She said: 'But you didn't leave the cottage, did you, Daddy? I was here until I went to bed at a quarter past eight. I could hear you moving down here. I could hear the television.'

He said: 'The television isn't an alibi.'

'But I came down, Daddy. You remember. I went to bed early at 8.15 but I couldn't sleep and I was thirsty. I came down just before nine o'clock for a drink of water. I sat in Mummy's chair reading. You must remember, Daddy? It was half-past nine before I went back to bed.'

He gave a groan. He said: 'Yes, I remember.'

Suddenly Theresa was aware that the twins had entered the kitchen and were standing silently side by side by the doorway regarding their father expressionlessly. She said sharply: 'Go back and get dressed. You shouldn't be down here undressed like that, you'll catch cold.'

Obediently they turned and padded up the stairs.

The kettle was spouting steam. Her father turned it off but made no move to make the tea. Instead he sat at the table, his head bowed. She thought she heard him whisper:

'I'm no good for you, I'm no good for you.' She couldn't see his face but for one terrible moment she thought that he was crying. Still holding the bottle and feeding Anthony, she got up and moved across to him. She had no free hand but she stood very close. She said: 'It's all right, Daddy. There's nothing to worry about. It's going to be all right.'

On Monday 26 September Jonathan Reeves was working the 8.15 to 14.45 shift and, as usual, he was early at his bench. But it was 8.55 before the telephone rang and he heard the expected voice. Caroline sounded perfectly calm; only the words were urgent.

'I have to see you. Now. Can you get away?'

'I think so. Mr Hammond isn't in yet.'

'Then I'll meet you in the library. At once. It's important, Jonathan.'

She had no need to tell him that. She wouldn't be making an assignation during working hours if it weren't important.

The library was housed in the administration block next to the registry. It was part staff sitting room, part library, with three walls covered with shelves, two free-standing racks, and eight comfortable chairs ranged round low tables. Caroline was already waiting when he arrived, standing at the publications display stand and glancing through the latest copy of Nature. No one else was there. He moved up to her wondering if she expected him to kiss her, but then she turned and looked at him and he saw that it would be a mistake. And yet this was their first meeting since Friday night, the night that had changed everything for him. Surely, when they were alone like this, they needn't meet as strangers.

He said humbly: 'There's something you want to say.'

'In a minute. It's just on nine o'clock. Pray silence for the voice of God.'

His head jerked up at her. He was as surprised at her tone as if she had uttered an obscenity. They had never talked about Dr Mair except on the most superficial level, but he had always taken it for granted that she admired the Director and was happy to be his PA. He recalled overhearing the whispered words of Hilary Robarts when Caroline had walked into a public meeting at Mair's elbow: 'Behold, the handmaid of the Lord.' That was how they had all seen her, the intelligent, discreet, beautiful but subservient handmaid to a man she was content to serve because she found him worthy of service.

The intercom crackled. There was a background, indecipherable voice and then Mair's measured, serious tones.

'There cannot be anyone on the station who doesn't now know that Hilary Robarts was found dead on the beach last night. She had been murdered. It appeared at first that she was the second Larksoken victim of the Norfolk Whistler, but it now seems almost certain that the Whistler himself died before Hilary. We shall in time find a way of expressing our corporate grief at her loss as we shall at Christine Baldwin's. In the meantime her death is a matter for police investigation and Chief Inspector Rickards of the Norfolk CID, who has been responsible for the investigation into the Whistler murders, has taken charge of the case. He will be on the station later in the morning and may ask to interview those of you who knew Hilary best and may be able to help with details of her life. If any of you has any information, however slight, which may assist the police, please get in touch with Chief Inspector Rickards, either when he is here or at the incident room at Hoveton. The telephone number is 499 623.'

The intercom crackled and was silent. She said: 'I wonder how many drafts it took before he got that right. Innocuous, non-committal, nothing crudely stated but everything understood. And he didn't irritate us by saying that he could rely on us all to get on with the job, as if we were a bunch of excitable sixth-formers. He never wastes time and words on inessentials. He'll make a good senior civil servant all right.'

Jonathan said: 'This Chief Inspector Rickards, do you think he'll want to interview all of us?'

'Anyone who knew Hilary. And that will include us.

And that's what I want to talk about. When he sees me I propose telling him that you and I spent the whole of last evening together from six o'clock until about half-past ten. Obviously I'll need you to back me up. And it depends, of course, on whether anyone can disprove it. That's what we have to discuss.'

He stood for a moment appalled. 'But we weren't! You're asking me to lie. This is a murder investigation. It's terribly dangerous to lie to the police, they always find out.'

He knew what he must sound like, a frightened child, petulant, reluctant to take part in a dangerous game. He looked straight ahead, not wanting to meet her eyes, fearful of what he might see there, entreaty, anger, contempt.

She said: 'You told me on Friday that your parents were going to spend Sunday night at Ipswich with your married sister. They went, didn't they?'

He said miserably: 'Yes, they went.'

It was because he knew that they wouldn't be at home that he had hoped, had half expected, that Caroline would suggest that they should be together again in the bungalow. He remembered her words: 'Look, there are times when a woman needs to be on her own. Can't you understand that? What happened yesterday doesn't mean that we have to spend every second of our time together. I've told you that I love you. God knows, I've shown it. Isn't that enough?'

She said: 'So you were alone in the flat yesterday evening. Or weren't you? If anyone called or telephoned, then obviously I've got to think of something else.'

'No one called. I was on my own until after lunch. Then I went for a drive.'

'What time did you get back? Did anyone see you garaging the car? It's not a large block of flats, is it? Did you meet anyone when you got home? And what about lights from the windows?'

'I left the lights on. We always do when the flat is empty. Mother thinks it's safer, makes it look occupied. And I didn't get back until after dark. I wanted to be alone, to think. I drove to Blakeney and walked on the marshes. I wasn't home until 10.45.'

She gave a small contented sigh. 'Then it looks all right. Did you meet anyone on the walk?'

'Only in the distance. A couple with a dog. I don't think they could recognize me even if they knew me.'

'Where did you eat?' Her voice was sharp, the interrogation relentless.

'I didn't. Not until I got home. I wasn't hungry.'

'Well, that's all right then. We're safe. And no one spied on me in the bungalow. And no one would ring or call. No one ever does.'

Spy. It was, he thought, a strange word to use. But she was right. The bungalow, as uninspired as its name, Field View, stood totally isolated on a dull country road outside Hoveton. He had never been inside it, never even been allowed to escort her home before they had arrived together on Friday evening, and it had surprised and a little shocked him. She had told him that it was rented furnished from the owners who had gone to Australia for a year to stay with a married daughter and had decided to stay on. But why had she stayed on, he wondered? Surely there was a more attractive house or cottage somewhere she could have rented, a small flat in Norwich she could have afforded to buy. And following her inside the front door he had been struck by the contrast between its meanness, its vulgarity and her serene loveliness. He could picture it now, the dun-coloured carpet in the hall, the sitting room with two walls papered in pink stripes, the other two with huge clusters of roses, the hard sofa and two chairs with their grubby covers, the small reproduction of Constable's Hay Wain, hung too high to be comfortably seen and placed in incongruous proximity to the ubiquitous print of a yellow-faced Chinese girl, the old-fashioned, wall-mounted gas fire. And she had done nothing to change it, nothing to impress on it her own personality. It was as if she hardly noticed its deficiencies, its ugliness. It served its purpose. She asked no more of it. And it had served theirs. But even the hall had struck him chill. He had wanted to cry out, 'This is our first time together, my first time ever. Can't we go somewhere else? Does it have to be here?'

He said miserably: 'I don't think I can do it, not convincingly. Chief Inspector Rickards will know I'm lying. I'll look guilty, embarrassed.'

But she had decided to be gentle with him, reassuring. She said patiently: 'He'll expect you to be embarrassed. You'll be telling him we spent the evening alone making love. That's convincing enough. That's natural enough. He'd find it more suspicious if you didn't look guilty. Don't you see the guilt and embarrassment will make your story more convincing.'

So even his inexperience, his insecurity, yes, even his shame was to be used for her ends.

She said: 'Look, all we need to do is to transpose the two nights. Friday night becomes yesterday. Don't fabricate, don't invent. Tell them what we did, what we ate, the food, the wine, what we talked about. It will sound true because it will be true. And they can't catch us out by asking about the TV programmes we didn't watch.'

'But what happened was private. It was for us alone.'

'Not any more. Murder destroys privacy. We made love. No doubt the police will use a coarser word. If they don't speak it, then they'll think it. But we made love in my bedroom, on my bed. You do remember?'

Remember. Oh yes, he remembered. His face flamed. He felt as if his whole body was burning. The tears that welled up despite his desperate will to hold them back were scalding tears. He squeezed his eyes shut so that he need not have to wipe them away. Of course, he remembered. That dull, square little back room, anonymous as a room in some cheap hotel, the mixture of excitement and terror which half paralysed him, his incompetent rumblings, the whispered endearments which had become commands. She had been patient, experienced and in the end she had taken charge. Well, he had never been naive enough to suppose that for her it was the first time. For him, but not for her. But what had happened was, he knew, irrevocable. It was she who had possessed him not he her, and that possession was more than physical. For a moment he couldn't speak. It was difficult to believe that those grotesque but controlled writhings had anything to do with the Caroline who stood now so close to him, yet so distanced. He noticed with sharpened perception the pristine cleanness of the grey and white striped shirt, cut like a man's, the sway of the long grey skirt, the black patent court shoes, the simple gold chain and the matching gold cufflinks, the corn-coloured hair sculpted back into the single thick plait. Was this what he had loved, still loved, a boy's romantic ideal, the cold remote perfection of her? And he knew with an almost audible groan that their first coupling had destroyed more than it had affirmed, that what he had yearned for, still yearned for, and had lost for ever, was an unattainable beauty. But he knew, too, that she would only have to stretch out a hand and he would follow her again to that bungalow, to that bed.

He said miserably: 'But why? Why? They won't suspect you, they can't. It's ridiculous even to think it. You got on well with Hilary. You get on well with everyone in the station. You're the last person the police will be interested in. You haven't even a motive.'

'But I have. I've always disliked her and I hated her father. He ruined Mummy, forced her to spend her last years in poverty. And I lost the chance of a decent education. I'm a secretary, essentially a shorthand-typist, and that's all I'll ever be.'

'I've always thought you could be anything you chose.'

'Not without education. All right, I know you can get a grant, but I had to leave school and earn as quickly as possible. And it's not only me, it's what Peter Robarts did to Mummy. She trusted him. She put every penny she'd got, every penny Daddy left, into his plastics company. I've hated him all my life and I hated her because of him. Once the police discover that I'll get no peace. But if I can produce an alibi, that will be the end. They'll leave us alone, both of us. We only need to say that we were together and there will be the end of it.'

'But they can't see what Hilary's father did to your mother as a motive for murder. It's unreasonable. And it was all so long ago.'

'No motive for killing another human being is ever reasonable. People kill for the strangest reasons. And I've got a thing about the police. It's irrational, I know, but I've always had it. That's why I'm so careful when I'm driving. I know I couldn't stand up to a real interrogation. I'm frightened of the police.'

And she was, he remembered, seizing on this demonstrable truth as if it made the whole request legitimate, reasonable. She was obsessive about the speed limit even when the road was clear, obsessive about wearing her seat belt, the state of her car. And he remembered that time three weeks ago, when she had had her handbag snatched while shopping in Norwich and, despite his protest, hadn't even reported it. He remembered her words. 'It's no use, they'll never get it back. We'll only waste their time at the police station. Let it go, there wasn't much in it.' And then he thought, I'm checking up on what she's telling me, verifying it. And he felt an overpowering shame mixed with pity. He heard her voice.

'All right, I'm asking too much. I know how you feel about truth, honesty, your boy scout Christianity. I'm asking you to sacrifice your good opinion of yourself. No one likes doing that. We all need our self-esteem. I suppose yours is knowing that you're morally better than the rest of us. But aren't you a bit of a hypocrite? You say you love me, but you won't lie for me. It's not an important lie. It won't hurt anyone. But you can't do it. It's against your religion. Your precious religion didn't stop you going to bed with me, did it? I thought Christians were supposed to be too pure for casual fornication.'

Casual fornication. Each word was like a blow, not a fierce stabbing pain but a continuous thud like regular deliberate blows on the same bruised flesh. He had never, even in those first marvellous days together, been able to talk to her about his faith. She had made it plain from the beginning that this was a part of his life with which she had neither sympathy nor understanding. And how could he begin to explain that he had followed her into the bedroom without guilt because his need of her was stronger than his love for God, stronger than guilt, stronger than faith, needing no rationalization, no justification other than itself. How, he had told himself, could anything be wrong which every nerve and sinew told him was natural and right, even holy.

She said: 'All right, let it go. I'm asking too much.'

Stung by the contempt in her voice, he said miserably: 'It's not that. I'm not better, I'm not. And you could never ask too much. If it's important to you, of course I'll do it.'

She looked at him sharply as if judging his sincerity, his will. He heard the relief in her voice. She said: 'Look, there's no danger. We're both innocent, we know that. And what we tell the police could so easily have been true.'

But that was a mistake, and he saw the realization of it in her eyes. He said: 'It could have been true, but it isn't.'

'And that's what's important to you, more important than my peace of mind, more important than what I thought we felt for each other.'

He wanted to ask why her peace of mind needed to be built on a lie. He wanted to ask what they did, in fact, feel for each other, what she felt for him.

She said, looking at her watch: 'And after all it will be an alibi for you too. That's even more important. After all, everyone knows how unkind she's been to you since that local radio programme. God's little nuclear crusader. You haven't forgotten that?'

The crudity of the implication, the note of impatience in her voice, all repelled him. He said: 'But suppose they don't believe us.'

'Don't let's go over all that again. Why shouldn't they believe us? And it hardly matters if they don't. They can't ever prove we're lying, that's what's important. And after all it's natural that we should have been together. It isn't as if we've just started seeing each other. Look, I've got to get back to the office now. I'll be in touch, but we'd better not see each other tonight.'

He hadn't expected to see her that night. The news of this latest murder would have been broadcast on local radio, passed from mouth to mouth. His mother would be waiting anxiously for his return from work, avid for news.

But there was something he had to tell her before she left and somehow he found the courage. He said: 'I rang you last night. While I was driving around thinking. I stopped at a phone box and telephoned. You weren't in.'

There was a small silence. He glanced nervously at her face but it was expressionless. She said: 'What time was that?'

'About twenty to ten, perhaps a bit later.' 'Why? Why did you telephone?'

'The need to talk to you. Loneliness. I suppose I half hoped that you might change your mind and ask me to come round.'

'All right. You might as well know. I was on the headland last night. I took Remus for a run. I left the car down a cart track just outside the village and walked as far as the ruined abbey. I suppose I was there just after ten.'

He said in horrified wonder: 'You were there! And all the time she must have been lying dead within a few yards of you.'

She said sharply: 'Not a few yards, more like a hundred.

There was never any chance that I'd find her, and I didn't see her killer if that's what you're thinking. And I stayed on the cliffs. I didn't go down to the beach. If I had, the police would have found my footprints, mine and Remus's.'

'But someone might have seen you. It was bright moonlight.'

The headland was empty. And if the murderer was lurking in the trees and saw me, he's hardly likely to come forward. But it's not the happiest position to be in. That's why I need an alibi. I wasn't going to tell you, but now you know. I didn't kill her. But I was there and I've got a motive. That's why I'm asking you to help.'

For the first time Jonathan detected in her voice a note of tenderness, almost of pleading. She moved as if to touch him and then drew back and the tentative gesture, the withdrawal, was as endearing as if she had laid her hand against his face. The hurt and misery of the last ten minutes were swept away in a rush of tenderness. His lips seemed to have thickened so that speech was difficult, but he found the words. He said: 'Of course, I'll help. I love you. I won't let you down. You can depend on me.'

Rickards had arranged with Alex Mair to be at the power station by nine that morning but had planned to call first at Scudder's Cottage to see Ryan Blaney. The visit was one of some delicacy. He knew that Blaney had children and it would be necessary to question at least the eldest. But this couldn't be done until he had with him a woman police constable and there had been some delay in arranging this. It was one of those comparatively minor irritations which he found difficult to accept, but he knew that it would be unwise to pay more than a brief visit to the Blaneys without a WPC. Whether or not the man proved to be a serious suspect, he couldn't risk a later allegation that information had been extracted from a juvenile without the observance of proper procedures. At the same time Blaney had a right to know what had happened to his picture, and if the police didn't tell him someone else speedily would. And it was important that he was there to see the man's face when he heard the news, both of the slashed portrait and of Hilary Robarts's murder.

He thought that he had seldom seen a more depressing place than Scudder's Cottage. A thin drizzle was falling and he saw the cottage and the neglected garden through a shimmering mist which seemed to absorb shapes and colours so that the whole scene was one damp amorphous grey. Leaving DC Gary Price in the car, Rickards and Oliphant made their way up the weed-infested path to the porch. There was no bell and when Oliphant thudded on the iron knocker the door almost immediately opened. Ryan Blaney stood before them, six foot tall, lank, bleary-eyed and gave them a long unwelcoming stare. The colour seemed to have drained even from his ruddy hair and Rickards thought he had never seen a man look so exhausted and yet still be on his feet. Blaney didn't invite them in and Rickards didn't suggest it. That intrusion had better wait until he was accompanied by a WPC. And Blaney could wait. He was anxious now to get to Larksoken Power Station. He gave the news that the portrait of Hilary Robarts had been slashed and found at Thyme Cottage, but offered no other details. There was no response. He said: 'Did you hear me, Mr Blaney?'

'Yes, I heard you. I knew that the portrait was missing.'

'When?'

'Last night, at about 9.45. Miss Mair called for it. She was going to take it to Norwich with her this morning. She'll tell you. Where is it now?'

'We have it, what remains of it. We shall need it for forensic examination. We'll give you a receipt, naturally.'

'What good will that do? You can keep it, the picture and your receipt. Slashed to pieces, did you say?'

'Not to pieces, in two clean slashes. Perhaps it can be repaired. We'll bring it with us when we come so that you can identify it.'

'I don't want to see it again. You can keep it.'

'We'll need the identification, Mr Blaney. But we'll talk about it when we see you later today. When, incidentally, did you last see the portrait?'

'Thursday evening when I wrapped it and left it in the painting shed. I haven't been in the shed since. And what's the good of talking? It was the best thing I've ever done and that bitch destroyed it. Get Alice Mair or Adam Dalgliesh to identify it. They've both seen it.'

'Are you saying you know who's responsible?' Again there was a silence. Rickards broke it by saying: 'We'll be with you late this afternoon, probably between four and five if that's convenient. And we shall have to talk to the children. We'll have a WPC with us. They're at school, I suppose, the children?'

'The twins are at playgroup, Theresa is here. She isn't well. Look, you're not going to all this trouble about a slashed portrait. Since when have the police cared about pictures?'

'We care about criminal damage. But there is something more. I have to tell you that Hilary Robarts was murdered last night.'

He stared intently at Blaney's face as he spoke. This was the moment of revelation, perhaps the moment of truth. It was surely impossible for Blaney to hear the news without betraying some emotion: shock, fear, surprise, real or simulated. Instead he said calmly: 'You don't have to tell me that either. I knew. George Jago phoned early this morning from the Local Hero.'

Did he indeed, thought Rickards, and mentally added George Jago to his list of people to be questioned as soon as possible. He asked: 'Will Theresa be in and well enough to speak to us this afternoon?'

'She'll be here and she'll be well enough.'

And then the door was closed firmly in their faces.

Oliphant said: 'God knows why Robarts wanted to buy that slum in the first place. And she's been trying to force him and the kids out for months. There's been a great deal of feeling about it in Lydsett as well as on the headland.'

'So you told me on the way here. But if Blaney killed her he'd hardly draw attention to himself by hurling that portrait through the window of Thyme Cottage. And two unrelated criminal acts, murder and malicious damage on the same night, is too great a coincidence to swallow.'

It had been a bad start to the day. The drizzle, seeping coldly under the collar of his coat, added to his mild dejection. He hadn't noticed that it was raining on the rest of the headland and could almost believe that Scudder's Lane and that picturesque but sour little hovel generated their own depressing climate. He had a lot to get through before he returned for a more rigorous confrontation with Ryan Blaney, and he wasn't looking forward to any of it. Forcing the gate shut over a clump of weeds on the path, he took a last look at the cottage. There was no smoke

from the chimney and the windows, hazed with salt, were tightly closed. It was difficult to believe that a family lived here, that the cottage hadn't long been abandoned to damp and decay. And then, at the right-hand window, he glimpsed a pale face framed with red-gold hair. Theresa Blaney was looking down at them.

Twenty minutes later the three police officers were at Larksoken Power Station. A place had been reserved for them in the car park outside the perimeter fence close to the guard house. As soon as they approached the gate it was unlocked and one of the security police came out and removed the cones. The preliminaries took only a little time. They were received with almost impassive civility by the uniformed security guard on duty, signed the book and were issued with their lapel badges. The guard telephoned the news of their arrival, reported that the Director's PA, Miss Amphlett, would be with them very shortly and then appeared to lose interest in them. His companion, who had opened the gates and removed the cones, stood casually chatting to a stocky man dressed as a diver and carrying his helmet under his arm, who had apparently been working on one of the water towers. Neither of them seemed particularly interested in the arrival of the police. If Dr Mair had instructed that they were to be received with courtesy but the minimum of fuss, his staff couldn't have done it better.

Through the window of the guard house they saw a woman, obviously Miss Amphlett, walking unhurriedly down the concrete path. She was a cool, self-possessed blonde who, on arrival, ignored Oliphant's bold stare as if he weren't present and gravely greeted Rickards. But she didn't respond to his smile, either because she thought a smile inappropriate to the occasion or, more likely, because in her view few visitors to Larksoken merited such a personal welcome and a police officer wasn't among them.

She said: 'Dr Mair is ready for you, Chief Inspector,' and turned to lead the way. It made him feel like a patient being shown into the presence of a consultant. You could tell a lot about a man from his PA and what she told him about Dr Alex Mair reinforced his private imaginings. He thought of his own secretary, tousled-haired, nineteen-year-old Kim, who dressed in the more bizarre extreme of contemporary youth fashion, whose shorthand was as unreliable as her timekeeping, but who never greeted even the lowliest visitor without a wide smile and the offer, which they were ill advised to accept, of office coffee and biscuits.

They followed Miss Amphlett between the wide lawns to the administration building. She was a woman who induced unease and Oliphant, obviously feeling the need to assert himself, began to prattle.

'That's the turbine house to our right, sir, and the reactor building and the cooling plant behind it. The workshop is to the left. It's a Magnox thermal reactor, sir, a type first commissioned in 1956. We had it all explained to us when we went round. The fuel is uranium metal. To conserve the neutrons and to allow natural uranium to be used the fuel is clad in a magnesium alloy called Magnox with a low neutron absorption. That's where the reactor gets its name. They extract the heat by passing carbon dioxide gas over the fuel in the reactor core. That transfers its heat to water in a steam generator and the steam drives a turbine coupled to an electric generator.'

Rickards wished that Oliphant didn't feel the need to demonstrate his superficial knowledge of nuclear power in the presence of Miss Amphlett, and only hoped that it was accurate. Oliphant went on: 'Of course this type of reactor is out of date now. It's being replaced by a PWR, pressurized water reactor, like the one being built at Sizewell. I've been shown over Sizewell as well as Larksoken, sir. I thought I might as well learn what's going on in these places.'

Rickards thought, And if you've learned that, Elephant Boy, you're even cleverer than you think you are.

The room on the second floor of the administration block into which they were shown struck Rickards as immense. It was almost empty, an arrangement of space and light deliberately deployed to make a statement about the man who now rose to his feet behind the huge black modern desk and stood gravely waiting while they walked across what seemed endless yards of carpet. Even as their hands touched, and Alex Mair's grasp was firm and disconcertingly cold, Rickards's eyes and mind took in the salient features of the office. Two of the walls were painted a smooth light grey, but to the east and south sheets of plate glass reached from ceiling to floor giving a panorama of sky, sea and headland. It was a sunless morning but the air was suffused with a pale ambiguous light, the horizon blurred so that sea and sky were one shimmering grey. Rickards had for a moment the sensation of being weightlessly suspended in outer space in some bizarre and futuristic capsule. And then another image supervened. He could almost hear the throb of the engines and feel the ship shudder as the great surge of ocean divided under the prow.

There was very little furniture. Alex Mair's uncluttered desk, with a high but comfortable armchair for visitors, faced the southern window before which stood a conference table set with eight chairs. In front of the east window was a display table holding a model of what Rickards presumed was the new pressurized water reactor shortly to be constructed on the site. Even at a glance he could see that it was beautifully made, a marvel in glass and steel and perspex, as intricately crafted as if it were a decorative object in its own right. On the north wall hung the only picture; a large oil showing a man with a rifle on a skinny horse, posed in a bleak landscape of sand and scrubland with, in the background, a range of distant mountains. But the man had no head. Instead he was wearing a huge square helmet of black metal with a slit for the eyes. Rickards found the picture disturbingly intimidating. He had a faint memory that he had seen a copy of it, or of something very like it, before, and that the artist was Australian. He was irritated to find himself thinking that Adam Dalgliesh would have known what it was and who had painted it.

Mair went over to the conference table and lifting one of the chairs, swung it lightly and placed it by the desk. They were to sit facing him. After a moment's hesitation, Gary Price took a chair for himself, placed it behind Mair, and unobtrusively took out his notebook.

Looking into the grey sardonic eyes Rickards wondered how Alex Mair saw him, and a snatch of conversation, overheard some years ago in the mess at New Scotland Yard, came unbidden into his mind. 'Oh, Ricky's nobody's fool. He's a bloody sight more intelligent than he looks.' 'He'd better be. He reminds me of one of those characters you get in every war film. The poor honest son-of-a-bitch who always ends up with his face in the mud and a bullet in his chest.'

Well, he wasn't going to end with his face in the mud in this inquiry. The room might look as if it were specifically designed to intimidate him, but it was only a working office. Alex Mair, for all his assurance, his rumoured brilliance, was only a man and if he had killed Hilary Robarts he would end up, as better men than he had done, looking at the sky through iron bars and watching the changing face of the sea only in his dreams.

As they seated themselves, Mair said: 'I expect you'll need somewhere to interview people. I've made arrangements for a small room in the medical physics department to be made available when you're finished here. Miss Amphlett will show you the way. I don't know how long you'll need it, but we've moved in a small refrigerator and there are facilities for making tea or coffee or, if you prefer, tea and coffee can be brought to you from the canteen. And the canteen staff can, of course, provide you with simple meals. Miss Amphlett will let you have today's menu.'

Rickards said: 'Thank you. We'll make our own coffee.'

He felt at a disadvantage and wondered if this was intended. They would need an interview room and he could hardly complain if this need had been anticipated. But it would have been a better start if he could have taken the initiative and he felt, perhaps illogically, that there was something demeaning to his job in this careful reassurance that he would get his food and drink. The look bent on him across the desktop was unworried, speculative, almost, he could imagine, slightly judgemental. He knew that he was in the company of power and the kind of power with which he was unfamiliar; confident, intellectual authority. A clutch of chief constables would have been less formidable.

Alex Mair said: 'Your Chief Constable has already liaised with the Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary. Inspector Johnston would like a word with you this morning, probably before you begin your general interview. He realizes that the Norfolk Constabulary have the principal responsibility here, but naturally he has an interest.'

Rickards said: 'We recognize that and we shall be glad of his co-operation.'

And it would be co-operation not interference. He had already made himself familiar with the duties of the AEAC and he was aware that there was a potential risk of dissension and overlapping of powers. But this was essentially a matter for the Norfolk CID and was seen as an extension of the Whistler inquiries. If Inspector Johnston was prepared to be reasonable, then so was he, but it was not a problem which he proposed to discuss with Dr Mair.

Mair opened the right-hand drawer of his desk and took out a manila folder. He said: 'This is Hilary Robarts's personnel file. There's no objection to your seeing it, but it merely gives the background information; age, places of education, degrees, career before she came to us in 1984 as deputy to the Administrative Officer. A curriculum vitae from which the vitae is, unusually, conspicuously absent. The dry bones of a life.'

Mair slid it across the desk. The action had a curious finality. A life closed, finished with. Taking it Rickards said: 'Thank you, sir. It will be helpful to have it. Perhaps you could flesh out some of the dry bones for us. You knew her well?'

'Very well. Indeed, for a time we were lovers. That doesn't, I admit, necessarily imply more than physical intimacy but I probably did know her as well as anyone here on the station.'

He spoke calmly and totally without embarrassment, as if it were as unimportant as stating that he and Robarts had shared the same university. Rickards wondered if Mair expected him to seize on the admission. Instead he asked: 'Was she popular?'

'She was highly efficient. The two, I find, do not invariably go together. But she was respected and, I think, generally liked by those staff who had dealings with her. She will be greatly missed, probably more deeply than would be more egregiously popular colleagues.'

'And missed by you?'

'By all of us.'

'When did your affair end, Dr Mair?' 'About three or four months ago.' 'Without rancour?'

'With neither a bang nor a whimper. We had been seeing less of each other for some time before then. My personal future is at present rather unsettled but I am unlikely to continue as Director for very much longer. One comes to the end of a love affair as to the end of a job; a natural feeling that a stage of life has run its course.'

'And she felt the same?'

'I imagine so. We both had some regrets at the break but I don't think either of us ever imagined that we were indulging in a grand passion, or indeed expected our relationship to be lasting.'

'There was no other man?'

'None that I know of, but then there's no reason why I should know.'

Rickards said: 'So you would be surprised to learn that she wrote to her solicitor in Norwich on Sunday morning to make an appointment to discuss her will and that she told him she was expecting shortly to be married? We found the unposted letter among her papers.'

Mair blinked rapidly but otherwise showed no sign of discomposure. He said evenly: 'Yes, it would surprise me, but I'm not sure why. I suppose because she seemed to live rather a solitary life here and it's difficult to see how she could have found time or opportunity to enter into a new relationship. Of course, it's perfectly possible that some man from her past had re-emerged and they had come to an arrangement. I'm afraid I can't help you.'

Rickards changed the tack of his questioning. He said: 'There seems to be a feeling locally that she wasn't much help to you during the public inquiry into the second reactor here. She didn't give evidence to the official inquiry, did she? I can't quite see how she was involved.'

'Officially she wasn't. But at one or two public meetings, unwisely, she got embroiled with hecklers, and on one of our open days the scientist who normally escorts the public was off sick and she took his place. She was, perhaps, less tactful than she should have been with some of the questioners. After that I arranged that she wasn't directly involved with the public'

Rickards said: 'So she was a woman who provoked antagonism?'

'Not enough, I should have thought, to provoke murder. She was dedicated to the work here and found it difficult to tolerate what she saw as wilful obscurantism. She hadn't a scientific training but she did acquire considerable knowledge of the science done here and perhaps undue respect for what she saw as expert scientific opinion. I pointed out that it was unreasonable to expect this to be shared by the general public. After all they've probably been told by experts in recent years that high-rise flats don't collapse, that the London Underground is safe from fire and that cross-channel ferries can't keel over.'

Oliphant, who had until now remained silent, suddenly said: 'I was one of the visitors on that open day. Someone asked her about Chernobyl. She made a remark, didn't she, about "only thirty dead, so what were people worrying about?" Isn't that what she said? It rather begged the question: how many dead would Miss Robarts agree was an acceptable figure?'

Alex Mair looked at him as if surprised that he could actually speak and, after a moment's contemplation, said: ‘In comparing the Chernobyl death toll with fatalities in industry and in mining fossil fuels she was making a perfectly reasonable point, although she could have done it with more tact. Chernobyl is a sensitive subject. We get rather tired of explaining to the public that the Russian RBMK-type of reactor had a number of design weaknesses, notably that it had a fast-acting positive power coefficient when the reactor was at low power. The Magnox, AGR and PWR designs don't have this characteristic at any power level so that a similar accident here is physically impossible. I'm sorry if that sounds over-technical. What I'm saying is: it won't happen here, it can't happen here and, in fact, it didn't happen here.'

Oliphant said stolidly: 'It hardly matters whether it happens here or not, sir, if we get the results of it. Wasn't Hilary Robarts suing someone in the community for alleged libel arising out of the meeting I attended?'

Alex Mair ignored him and spoke to Rickards. 'I think that's generally known. It was a mistake, I think. She had a legitimate case but she wasn't likely to get satisfaction by going to law.'

Rickards asked: 'You tried to persuade her not to in the interests of the station?'

'And in her own. Yes, I tried.'

The telephone on the desk rang. Mair pressed the button. He said: 'This shouldn't take much longer. Tell him I'll ring back in twenty minutes.' Rickards wondered whether he had arranged for the call to be put through. As if in confirmation of the suspicion, Mair said: 'In view of my past relationship with Miss Robarts you'll need to know my movements on Sunday. Perhaps I could give them to you now. Both of us have a busy day ahead, I imagine.' It was a less than subtle reminder that it was time they got down to business.

Rickards kept his voice steady. 'That would be helpful, sir.' Gary Price bent his head over his notebook as assiduously as if he had just been reprimanded for inattention.

'They're hardly relevant until Sunday evening, but I may as well cover the whole of the weekend. I left here just after 10.45 on Friday and drove to London, lunched with an old university friend at the Reform Club and went on at 2.30 to a meeting with the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Energy. I then went to my flat in the Barbican and in the evening attended a performance of The Taming of the Shrew at the Barbican Theatre with a party of three friends. If you later need their corroboration, which seems unlikely, I can of course give you their names. I drove back to Larksoken on Sunday morning, lunched at a pub en route and arrived home at about four. I had a cup of tea and then went for a walk on the headland and got back to Martyr's Cottage about an hour later. I had a quick supper with my sister at about seven and left for the station at 7.30, or soon afterwards. I was working here in the computer room alone until 10.30 when I left for home. I was driving along the coast road when I was stopped by Commander Dalgliesh with the news that Hilary Robarts had been murdered. The rest you know.'

Rickards said: 'Not altogether, Dr Mair. There was some delay before we arrived. You didn't touch the body?'

'I stood and looked down at her but I didn't touch her.

Dalgliesh was rather conscientiously doing his job, or should I say yours. He very rightly reminded me that nothing should be touched and that the scene should be left undisturbed. I went down and walked by the sea until you arrived.'

Rickards asked: 'Do you usually come in to work on Sunday evenings?'

'Invariably if I have had to spend the Friday in London. There is a very heavy pressure of work at present which it is impossible to fit into a five-day week. Actually I stayed for less than three hours, but they were valuable hours.'

'And you were alone in the computer room. Doing what, sir?'

If Mair found the inquiry irrelevant he didn't say so. 'I was engaged on my research which is concerned with the study of reactor behaviour in hypothesized loss-of-coolant accidents. I'm not, of course, the only person working in what is one of the most important areas of research in nuclear reactor design. There's a great deal of international co-operation in these studies. Essentially what I'm doing is evaluating the possible effects of loss of coolant by mathematical models which are then evaluated by numerical analysis and advanced computer programmes.'

Rickards said: 'And you're working here at Larksoken alone?'

'At this station I am. Similar studies are being carried out at Winfrith and in a number of other countries including the USA. As I have said, there's a considerable amount of international co-operation.'

Oliphant asked suddenly: 'Is that the worst thing that can happen, a loss of the coolant?'

Alex Mair looked at him for a moment as if deciding whether the question coming from such a source warranted an answer, then he said: 'The loss of coolant is potentially extremely dangerous. There are, of course, emergency procedures if the normal cooling arrangements fail. The incident at Three Mile Island in the United States has emphasized the need to know more about the extent and nature of the threat posed by that kind of incident. The phenomenon to be analysed is in three main groups: severe fuel damage and core melting, migration of released fission products and aerosols through the primary coolant circuit, and the behaviour of fission products in released fuel and steam in the reactor container building. If you have a genuine interest in the research and enough knowledge to understand it I can provide you with some references, but this hardly seems the time and place for scientific education.'

Oliphant smiled as if gratified by the rebuke. He asked: 'Wasn't the scientist who killed himself, Dr Toby Gledhill, working on the research side here with you? I thought I read something about that in one of the local papers.'

'Yes. He was my assistant here. Tobias Gledhill was a physicist who was also an exceptionally talented computer expert. He is very much missed as a colleague and a man.'

And that, thought Rickards, disposes of Toby Gledhill. From another man the tribute could have been moving in its simplicity. From Mair it sounded like a bleak dismissal. But then, suicide was messy and embarrassing. He would find repugnant its intrusion into his neatly organized world.

Mair turned to Rickards. 'I have a great deal to do this morning, Chief Inspector, and no doubt you have too. Is this really relevant?'

Rickards said stolidly: 'It helps fill in the picture. I suppose you booked in when you arrived here yesterday night and subsequendy booked out?'

'You saw something of the system when you arrived. Every member of the staff has a signed identity badge with a photograph and a personal number which is confidential. The number is electronically registered when the man or woman enters the site and there is, in addition, a visual check of the badge by the gate staff. I have a total staff of five hundred and thirty people working in three shifts covering the twenty-four hours. At the weekend there are two shifts, the day staff coming on from 8.15 until 20.15 and the night from 20.15 until 8.15.'

'And no one could enter or leave undetected, not even the Director?'

'No one, least of all, I imagine, the Director. My check-in time will be recorded and I was seen arriving and leaving by the gate officer on duty.'

'There is no other way into the station except through the guard house?'

'Not unless you emulate the heroes of old war films and tunnel deep under the wire. No one was tunnelling here on Sunday night.'

Rickards said: 'We shall need to know the movements of every member of the staff on Sunday from early evening until 10.30 when Commander Dalgliesh discovered the body.'

'Isn't that an unnecessarily large spread of time? Surely she was killed shortly after nine?'

'That seems the most likely time of death and we expect to get a more accurate estimate from the post-mortem report. At present I prefer to make no assumptions. We have copies of the forms which were distributed in connection with the Whistler inquiry which we would like to issue to all the staff. I imagine that the great majority can be easily eliminated. Most people who have any family or social life can provide an alibi for Sunday evening. Perhaps you could suggest how the forms can be distributed with as little disturbance to the work here as possible.'

Mair said: 'The simplest and most effective way would be to leave them in the guard house. Each member of staff could be given one when he or she checks in. Those staff who are off sick or on leave today will have to receive them at home. I can supply their names and addresses.' He paused and then added: 'It seems to me highly unlikely that this murder has anything to do with Larksoken Power Station, but as Hilary Robarts worked here and you will be interviewing members of staff, it might be helpful if you have some idea of the layout and organization. My PA has put up a file for you with a diagram of the site, a booklet describing the operation of the reactor which will help to give you some idea of the different functions carried out, a list of staff by name and grade and a copy of the existing managerial structure and the operations staff shift rota. If you want to see any particular department I can arrange for you to be escorted. Certain areas cannot, of course, be entered without protective clothing and a subsequent radiological check.'

The file was ready in his right-hand drawer and he handed it over. Rickards took it and studied the organization chart. After a moment he said: 'You have seven divisions, each with a head of department; Medical Physicist, Station Chemist, Operations Superintendent, Maintenance Superintendent, Reactor Physicist, Works Office Engineer and the station Administrative Officer, the post held by Hilary Robarts.'

'Temporarily held. The station Administrative Officer died of cancer three months ago and the post has not yet been filled. We are also about to reorganize the internal administration into three main divisions as at Sizewell where they have what I think is a more effective and rational system. But the future here is uncertain, as you've probably heard, and there may be a case for waiting until a new Director or Station Manager is in post.'

Rickards said: 'And at present the station Administrative Officer is responsible to you through the Deputy Director?'

'Through Dr James Macintosh, that is right. Dr Macintosh is at present in the States studying their nuclear installations and has been for the past month.'

'And the Operations Superintendent – Op. Super, as it says here – is Miles Lessingham, who was one of the guests at Miss Mair's dinner party on Thursday.'

Alex Mair didn't reply.

Rickards went on: 'You've been unfortunate, Dr Mair. Three violent deaths of members of your staff within the space of two months. First Dr Gledhill's suicide, then Christine Baldwin's murder by the Whistler, and now Hilary Robarts.'

Mair asked: 'Have you any doubts that Christine Baldwin was killed by the Whistler?'

'None at all. Her hair was found with that of other victims when he killed himself, and her husband, who would normally be the obvious first suspect, has an alibi. He was driven home by his friends.'

'And Toby Gledhill's death was the subject of an inquest, "death while the balance of his mind was disturbed", that convenient sop to convention and religious orthodoxy.'

Oliphant asked: 'And was the balance of his mind disturbed, sir?'

Mair turned on him his ironic and speculative gaze. 'I have no way of knowing the state of his mind, Sergeant. What I am sure of is that he killed himself and that he did it unaided. No doubt at the time he felt he had sufficient reason. Dr Gledhill was a manic depressive. He coped courageously with his disability and it rarely interfered with his work. But with that psychological make-up, suicide is always an above-average risk. And if you agree that the three deaths are unrelated, then we needn't waste time on the first two. Or was your statement, Chief Inspector, intended as a general commiseration?'

Rickards said: 'Just a comment, sir.' He went on: 'One of your staff, Miles Lessingham, found Christine Baldwin's body. He told us then that he was on his way to have dinner with you and Miss Mair. I suppose he gave you all a graphic description of his experience. Natural I'd say. Difficult thing to keep to yourself

Mair said calmly: 'Virtually impossible, wouldn't you say?' He added: 'Among friends.'

'Which he was, of course. All friends together, including

Miss Robarts. So you got all the gory details fresh from the scene. Including the ones he'd been specifically told to keep to himself.'

'Which were they, Chief Inspector?'

Rickards didn't reply. Instead he asked: 'Could I have the names of everyone who was present in Martyr's Cottage when Mr Lessingham arrived?'

'My sister and I, Hilary Robarts, Mrs Dennison, the housekeeper from the Old Rectory, and Commander Adam Dalgliesh of the Metropolitan Police. And the Blaney child – Theresa, I think she's called – was helping my sister with the meal.' He paused and then added: 'These inquiry forms which you're proposing to issue to all members of staff; I suppose it is necessary to take up their time in this way. Isn't it fairly plain what happened here? Surely this is what your people call a copycat murder.'

Rickards said: 'It was that all right, sir. All the details correct. Very clever, very convincing. Just the two differences. This murderer knew his victim and this murderer is sane.'

Five minutes later, following Miss Amphlett down the corridor to the interviewing room, Rickards thought, And you're a cool customer, mate. No embarrassing expressions of horror and grief which always sounded insincere. No protestations of innocence. The assumption that no one in his rational mind could suspect you of murder. He hadn't asked for his solicitor to be present, but then he didn't need one. But he was far too intelligent to have missed the significance of those questions about the dinner party. Whoever had killed Hilary Robarts had known that she would be swimming by moonlight sometime after nine o'clock yesterday, had known, too, precisely how the Whistler killed his victims. There were quite a number of people who knew one of these facts, but the number who knew both was limited. And six of them had been present at that dinner party at Martyr's Cottage last Thursday night.

The interview room which had been assigned to them was a featureless little office with a view to the west dominated by the great bulk of the turbine house. It was adequately furnished for their purpose, but only just; entirely appropriate, thought Rickards sourly, to visitors whose presence was tolerated but hardly welcomed. There was a modern pedestal desk, obviously brought in from someone's office, three upright chairs and one rather more comfortable one with arms, a small side table with an electric kettle on a tray, four cups and saucers (did Mair expect them to make coffee for the suspects?), a bowl full of wrapped sugar lumps and three caddies.

Rickards said: 'What have they given us, Gary?'

Gary Price busied himself with the tins. 'Coffee bags and tea bags, sir. And there's a tin of biscuits.'

Oliphant asked: 'What kind of biscuits?'

'Digestive, Sarge.'

'Chocolate?'

'No, Sarge, just plain digestives.'

'Well, let's hope they're not radioactive. Better get the kettle on; we may as well start with the coffee. Where do they expect us to get water?'

'Miss Amphlett said there was a tap in the cloakroom at the end of the passage, Sarge. The kettle's filled, anyway.'

Oliphant tried one of the upright chairs, stretching in it as if to assess its comfort. The wood creaked. He said: 'Cold fish, wasn't he? And clever with it. Not much out of him, sir.'

'I wouldn't say that, Sergeant. We've learned more about the victim than he probably realizes. Efficient but not much liked, prone to interfere with matters outside her scope of responsibility, probably because she secretly yearned to be a scientist rather than an administrator.

Aggressive, uncompromising, intolerant of criticism. Antagonized the locals and from time to time did the station a bit of no good. And, of course, the Director's mistress, for what that was worth.'

Oliphant said: 'Until three or four months ago. A natural end with no hard feelings on either side. His version.'

'And we're never going to get hers, are we? But one thing was odd. When Mair met Mr Dalgliesh he was on his way home from here. His sister presumably was expecting him, yet apparently he didn't telephone her. It never seems to have occurred to him.'

'Shocked, sir, something else on his mind. He's just discovered that his ex-girlfriend is the victim of a particularly vicious psychopathic killer. Tends to eclipse brotherly feelings and thoughts of your bedtime cocoa.'

'Maybe. I wonder whether Miss Mair rang here to find out why he was delayed. We'll ask.'

Oliphant said: 'If she didn't ring, I can think of one reason why. She expected him to be late. She thought he was at Thyme Cottage with Hilary Robarts.'

'If she didn't ring because she thought that, then she can't have known that Robarts was dead. Right, Sergeant, let's get started. First of all we'll have a word with Miss Amphlett. The boss's PA usually knows more about the organization than anyone, including her boss.'

But any information of interest that Caroline Amphlett might have she was adept at concealing. She seated herself in the armchair with the calm assurance of an applicant for a job which she has every confidence of getting, and answered Rickards's questions calmly and without emotion except when he attempted to probe into Hilary Robarts's relationship with the Director. Then she permitted herself a moue of distaste that anyone could be so vulgarly inquisitive about matters which were not his concern and answered repressively that Dr Mair had never confided in her about his private life. She admitted that she knew Hilary Robarts made a habit of swimming at night and kept this up well into the autumn months and sometimes later. She thought the fact was generally known at Larksoken. Miss Robarts had been a strong and enthusiastic swimmer. She was not particularly interested in the Whistler except to take reasonable precautions and avoid walking alone at night, and she knew nothing about his methods except what she had read in the newspapers, that he strangled his victims. She had known about the dinner party at Martyr's Cottage on Thursday, she thought Miles Lessingham might have mentioned it, but no one had discussed with her the events of the evening and she saw no reason why they should.

As for her own movements on Sunday, she had spent the whole of the evening from six o'clock at her bungalow with her boyfriend, Jonathan Reeves. They had been together continually until he had left at about 10.30. Her cool glance at Oliphant challenged him to ask her what they had been doing and he resisted the temptation except to ask what they had drunk and eaten. Asked about her relationship with Hilary Robarts, she said that she had greatly respected her but hadn't particularly liked or disliked her. Their professional relationship had been perfectly friendly but as far as she could remember they had never met outside the power station. As far as she knew, Miss Robarts had no enemies and she had no idea who could have wished her dead. When the door had closed after her Rickards said: 'We'll check her alibi, of course, but there's no hurry. Let young Reeves sweat for an hour or so. I want to check first on the staff who actually worked for Robarts.'

But the next hour was unproductive. The people who had worked directly for Hilary Robarts were more shocked than distressed and their evidence strengthened the image of a woman more respected than liked. But none had an obvious motive, none admitted to knowing precisely how the Whistler had killed and, more to the point, all could produce an alibi for Sunday night. Rickards had hardly expected otherwise.

At the end of the sixty minutes he sent for Jonathan Reeves. He came into the room white-faced and as stiffly controlled as if it were an execution shed and Rickards's first reaction was surprise that a woman as attractive as Caroline Amphlett should have chosen such an unlikely mate. It wasn't that Reeves had a particularly unprepossessing face. You couldn't even describe him as plain if you discounted the acne. And his features, taken individually, were good enough. It was the whole face which was somehow unremarkable, ordinary, the kind of face which defeated any attempt at an Identikit image. Rickards decided that it was best described in terms of movement rather than features; the almost continual blinking behind the horn-rimmed spectacles, the nervous sucking of the lips, his habit of suddenly stretching his neck like a TV comedian. He knew from the list Alex Mair had provided that the staff at Larksoken was predominantly male. Was this the best Amphlett could do for herself? But sexual attraction was irrational anyway. Look at him and Susie. Seeing them together, her friends probably felt an equal surprise.

He left most of the detailed questioning to Oliphant, which was a mistake. Oliphant was always at his worst with a frightened suspect and he took his time extracting, not without pleasure, a straightforward story which confirmed Caroline Amphlett's account.

Afterwards, when Reeves had been finally released, Oliphant said: 'He was as jumpy as a cat, sir. That's why I took my time over him. I think he's lying.'

It was, thought Rickards, typical of Oliphant both to assume and hope for the worst. He said curtly: 'Not lying necessarily, Sergeant; just frightened and embarrassed. Tough luck when your first night of passion ends in a not particularly subtle police interrogation. But the alibi seems firm enough and neither of them has an obvious motive.

And there's no evidence that either knew the details of the Whistler's little habits. Let's get on to someone who did. Miles Lessingham.'

Rickards had last seen Lessingham at the scene of Christine Baldwin's murder, since he hadn't himself been at the incident room when Lessingham had called in next morning to sign his statement. He realized that the sardonic attempt at humour, the controlled detachment the man had shown at the scene were mainly due to shock and distaste, but he had sensed, too, that Lessingham had a wariness of the police amounting to dislike. It was not an uncommon phenomenon nowadays, even among the middle classes, and no doubt he had his reasons. But it hadn't made him easy to deal with then and it didn't now. After the usual preliminaries Rickards asked: 'Were you aware of the relationship between Dr Mair and Miss Robarts?'

'He's the Director, she was Acting Administrator.' 'I meant the sexual relationship.'

'No one told me. But not being entirely insensitive to my fellow mortals I thought it likely that they were lovers.'

'And you knew that it had ended?'

'I assumed so. They didn't confide in me when it began and they didn't confide in me when it ended. You'd better ask Dr Mair if you want details of his personal life. I have enough trouble managing my own.'

'But you weren't aware of any difficulties caused by the relationship: resentment, accusations of favouritism, jealousy perhaps?'

'Not from me, I assure you. My interests lie elsewhere.'

'And what about Miss Robarts? Did you get the impression that the affair ended without rancour? Did she seem upset, for example?'

'If she was she didn't weep on my shoulder. But then mine is hardly the shoulder she would have chosen.'

'And you have no idea who killed her?'

'None.'

There was a pause, then Rickards asked: 'Did you like her?' 'No.'

For a moment Rickards was nonplussed. It was a question which he frequently asked in murder investigations and usually to some effect. Few suspects would admit to disliking the victim without blundering into an attempt at explanation or justification. After a moment's silence, during which it was obvious that Lessingham had no intention of amplifying his statement, he asked: 'Why not, Mr Lessingham?'

'There aren't many people I actually like as opposed to tolerate and she didn't happen to be one of them. There was no particular reason. Does there have to be? You and your sergeant may not like each other for all I know. It doesn't mean that either of you is planning murder. And talking about murder, which is why I assume I'm here, I have an alibi for Sunday night. Perhaps I had better give it to you now. I have a thirty-foot sailing boat berthed at Blakeney. I went out with her on the morning tide and stayed out until nearly ten at night. I have a witness to my departure, Ed Wilkinson who berths his fishing smack next to my boat, but no witness to my return. There was enough wind in the morning to sail and then I anchored, caught a couple of cod and some whiting and cooked them for lunch. I had food, wine, books and my radio. There was nothing else I needed. It may not be the most satisfactory of alibis but it has the merit of simplicity and truth.'

Oliphant asked: 'You had a dinghy with you?'

'I had my inflatable dinghy on the cabin roof. And at the risk of exciting you, I have to say that I also carried my collapsible bicycle. But I didn't put ashore either at Larksoken headland or anywhere else, not even for the purpose of murdering Hilary Robarts.'

Rickards asked: 'Did you see Miss Robarts at any time during your trip? Were you in sight of the beach where she died?'

'I didn't go that far south. And I saw no one, dead or alive.'

Oliphant asked: 'Do you make a habit of sailing alone at the weekend?'

'I don't make a habit of anything. I used to sail with a friend. Now I sail alone.'

Rickards asked him next about Blaney's portrait of Miss Robarts. He admitted that he had seen it. George Jago, the publican of the Local Hero at Lydsett, had put it up for a week in the bar, apparently at Blaney's request. He had no idea where Blaney normally kept it and he had neither stolen it nor destroyed it. If anyone had, he thought it was probably Robarts herself.

Oliphant said: 'And thrown it through her own window?'

Lessingham said: 'You think she would have been more likely to slash it and chuck it through Blaney's? I agree. But whoever slashed it, it wasn't Blaney.'

Oliphant asked: 'How can you be so sure?'

'Because a creative artist, whether he's a painter or a scientist, doesn't destroy his best work.'

Oliphant said: 'Miss Mair's dinner party; you gave your fellow guests a description of the WhisUer's methods including information we had specifically asked you not to divulge.'

Lessingham said coolly: 'One could hardly arrive two hours late for a dinner party without some explanation, and mine was, after all, unusual. I thought they were entitled to a vicarious thrill. Apart from that, to keep silent would have needed more self-control than I was capable of at the time. Murdered and mutilated bodies are your trade, of course. Those of us who have chosen less exciting jobs tend to find them distressing. I knew I could trust my fellow guests not to talk to the press and as far as I know none of them did. Anyway, why ask me what happened on

the Thursday night? Adam Dalgliesh was a guest at the dinner party so you have a more experienced and no doubt, from your point of view, a more reliable witness. I won't say a police spy: that would be unfair.'

Rickards spoke for the first time in minutes. He said: 'It would also be inaccurate and offensive.'

Lessingham turned on him with a cool 'Exactly. That's why I haven't used the word. And now, if you've no more questions, I have a power station to run.'

It was after midday before the interviews at the power station were completed and Rickards and Oliphant were ready to leave for Martyr's Cottage. They left Gary Price to cope with the inquiry forms and arranged to pick him up after the interview with Alice Mair which Rickards felt might be more fruitful with two officers rather than three. Alice Mair received them calmly at the door with no apparent sign either of anxiety or of curiosity, glanced perfunctorily at their identity cards and invited them in. They might, Rickards thought, have been technicians arriving later than expected to repair the television set. And they were, he saw, expected to interview her in the kitchen. At first it struck him as an odd choice but then, looking round, he supposed you could hardly call it a kitchen; more like an office, sitting room and kitchen combined. Its size surprised him and he found himself wondering irrelevantly whether she had knocked down a wall to provide such over-generous working space. He wondered, too, what Susie would think of it and decided that she would find it unsettling. Susie liked her house to be clearly defined by functions; the kitchen was for working, the dining room for eating, the lounge for watching television and the bedroom for sleeping and, once a week, for making love. He and Oliphant sat in two cushioned, high-backed wicker chairs on each side of the fireplace. His was extremely comfortable, gently containing his long limbs. Miss Mair took the chair at her desk and swivelled it round to face him.

'My brother, of course, gave me the news of the murder as soon as he got home last night. I can't help you about Hilary Robarts's death, I'm afraid. I was at home the whole of yesterday evening and saw and heard nothing.

But I can tell you a little about her portrait. Would you and Sergeant Oliphant care for coffee?'

Rickards would have cared; he found himself unexpectedly thirsty; but he declined for both of them. The invitation had sounded perfunctory and he hadn't missed her quick glance towards the desktop stacked with orderly piles of printed pages and a typewritten manuscript. It looked as if they had interrupted her in the business of proofreading. Well, if she was busy, so was he. And he found himself irritated, unreasonably, he felt, by her self-possession. He hadn't expected to find her in hysterics or under sedation for grief. The victim wasn't her next of kin. But the woman had worked closely with Alex Mair, had been a guest at Martyr's Cottage, had, according to Daigliesh, dined there only four days ago. It was disconcerting to find that Alice Mair could sit quietly correcting proofs, a job which surely required concentrated attention. The killing of Robarts had taken considerable nerve. His suspicion of her was hardly serious; he didn't really see this as a woman's crime. But he let suspicion enter his mind like a barb and lodge there. A remarkable woman, he thought. Perhaps this interview was going to be more productive than he had expected.

He asked: 'You keep house for your brother, Miss Mair?'

'No, I keep house for myself. My brother happens to live here when he is in Norfolk, which naturally is for most of the week. He could hardly administer Larksoken Power Station from his flat in London. If I'm at home and cook dinner he usually shares it. I take the view that it would be unreasonable to demand that he make himself an omelette merely to affirm the principle of shared domestic responsibilities. But I don't see what relevance my housekeeping arrangements have to Hilary Robarts's murder. Could we, perhaps, get on to what happened last night?'

They were interrupted. There was a knock at the door and, without an apology, Alice Mair got up and went through to the hall. They heard a lighter, feminine voice and a woman followed her into the kitchen. Miss Mair introduced her as Mrs Dennison from the Old Rectory. She was a pretty, gentle-looking woman, conventionally dressed in a tweed skirt and twinset, and was obviously distressed. Rickards approved both of her appearance and of the distress. This was how he expected a woman to look and behave after a particularly brutal murder. The two men had got up at her entrance and she took Oliphant's chair while he moved one for himself from the kitchen table.

She turned to Rickards impulsively: 'I'm sorry, I'm interrupting, but I felt I had to get out of the house. This is appalling news, Inspector. Are you absolutely certain that it couldn't have been the Whistler?'

Rickards said: 'Not this time, madam.'

Alice Mair said: 'The timing's wrong. I told you that when I rang early this morning, Meg. The police wouldn't be here now if it wasn't. It couldn't have been the Whistler.'

'I know that's what you said. But I couldn't help hoping that there'd been a mistake, that he'd killed her and then himself, that Hilary Robarts was his last victim.'

Rickards said: 'In a sense she was, Mrs Dennison.'

Alice Mair said calmly: 'I think it's called a copycat murder. There's more than one psychopath in the world and that kind of madness can be infectious, apparently.'

'Of course, but how horrible! Having started, will he too go on, like the Whistler did, death after death, no one feeling safe?'

Rickards said: 'I shouldn't let that worry you, Mrs Dennison.'

She turned to him almost fiercely. 'But of course it worries me! It must worry us all. We've lived so long with the horror of the Whistler. It's appalling to think that it's started all over again.'

Alice Mair got up. 'You need coffee, Meg. Chief Inspector Rickards and Sergeant Oliphant have declined but I think we need it.'

Rickards wasn't going to let her get away with that. He said firmly: 'If you're making it, Miss Mair, I think I'll change my mind. I'd be glad of a coffee. You too no doubt, Sergeant.'

And now, he thought, there'll be a further delay while she grinds beans and no one can talk above the noise. Why can't she just pour boiling water on coffee grains like everyone else?

But the coffee, when it did come, was excellent and he found it unexpectedly comforting. Mrs Dennison took her mug in her hands and cradled it like a child at bedtime. Then she put it down on the hearth and turned to Rickards.

'Look, perhaps you'd rather I went. I'll just have my coffee and then go back to the rectory. If you want to talk to me I'll be there for the rest of the day.'

Miss Mair said: 'You may as well stay and hear what happened last night. It has its points of interest.' She turned to Rickards. 'As I told you, I was here the whole of the evening from half-past five. My brother left for the power station shortly after 7.30 and I settled down to work on my proofs. I switched on the answerphone to avoid interruptions.'

Rickards asked: 'And you didn't leave the cottage for any purpose during the whole of the evening?'

'Not until after half-past nine when I left for the Blaneys'. But perhaps I could tell the story in sequence, Chief Inspector. At about ten past eight I switched off the machine thinking that there might be an important call for my brother. It was then I heard -George Jago's message that the Whistler was dead.'

'You didn't ring anyone else to let them know?'

'I knew that wasn't necessary. Jago runs his own information service. He'd make sure that everyone knew. I came back into the kitchen and worked on my proofs until about half-past nine. Then I thought that I'd collect Hilary Robarts's portrait from Ryan Blaney. I'd promised to drop it in at the gallery in Norwich on my way to London and I wanted to make an early start next morning. I tend to be a little obsessive about time and didn't want to go even a short distance out of my way. I rang Scudder's Cottage to let him know that I was collecting the portrait but the number was engaged. I tried several times and then got out the car and drove over. I'd written a note to him to slip through the door telling him that I'd taken the picture as arranged.'

'Wasn't that a little unusual, Miss Mair? Why not knock at the cottage and collect it from him personally?'

'Because he had taken the trouble to tell me, when I first saw it, precisely where it was kept and where I could find the light switch to the left of the door. I took that as a reasonable indication that he didn't expect, or indeed want, to be disturbed by a call at the cottage. Mr Dalgliesh was with me at the time.'

'But that was odd, wasn't it? He must have thought it was a good portrait. He wouldn't wish to exhibit it otherwise. You'd think he'd want to hand it over personally.'

'Would you? It didn't strike me that way. He's an extremely private man, more so since the death of his wife. He doesn't welcome visitors, particularly not women who might cast a critical eye on the tidiness of the cottage and the state of the children. I could understand that. I wouldn't have welcomed it myself.'

'So you went straight to his painting shed? Where is that?'

'About thirty yards to the left of the cottage. It's a small wooden shack. I imagine that it was originally a washhouse or a smoking shed. I shone my torch on the path to the door, although that was hardly necessary. The moonlight was exceptionally bright. It was unlocked. And if you're now about to say that that, too, was odd, you don't understand life on the headland. We're very remote here and we get into the habit of leaving doors unlocked. I don't think it would ever occur to him to lock his painting shed. I switched on the light to the left of the door and saw that the picture wasn't where I expected.'

'Could you describe exactly what happened? The details, please, as far as you can recall them.'

'We're talking about last night, Chief Inspector. It would be difficult not to recall them. I left the light on in the shed and knocked on the front door of the cottage. There were lights on, downstairs only, but the curtains were drawn. I had to wait for about a minute before he came. He half opened the door but didn't invite me in. I said, "Good evening, Ryan." He just nodded, but didn't reply. There was a strong smell of whisky. Then I said, "I've come to collect the portrait but it isn't in the shed, or if it is I haven't found it." Then he said, his speech rather slurred, "It's to the left of the door, wrapped in cardboard and brown paper. A brown paper parcel, Sellotaped." I said, "Not now." He didn't reply but came out to me leaving the door open. We went to the shed together.'

'Was he walking steadily?'

'He was very far from steady, but he could certainly keep on his feet. When I said he smelt of drink and his voice was slurred I didn't mean that he was totally incapable. But I got the impression that he had spent the evening in fairly continuous drinking. He stood in the doorway of the shed with me at his shoulder. He didn't speak for about half a minute. Then all he said was, "Yes, it's gone.'"

'How did he sound?' As she didn't reply he asked patiently, 'Was he shocked? Angry? Surprised? Or too drunk to care?'

'I heard the question, Chief Inspector. Hadn't you better ask him how he felt? I'm only competent to describe what he looked like, what he said, and what he did.'

'What did he do?'

'He turned and beat his clenched hands against the lintel of the door. Then he rested his head against the wood for a minute. It seemed at the time a histrionic gesture but I imagine that it was perfectly genuine.' 'And then?'

'I said to him, "Hadn't we better telephone the police? We could do it from here if your telephone is working. I've been trying to get through to you but it's always engaged." He didn't reply and I followed him back to the cottage. He didn't invite me in, but I stood in the doorway. He went over to the recess under the stairs and then said: "The receiver isn't properly on. That's why you couldn't get through." I said again, "Why not telephone the police now? The sooner the theft is reported the better." He turned to me and just said "Tomorrow. Tomorrow." Then he went back to his chair. I persisted. I said, "Shall I ring, Ryan, or will you? This really is important." He said, "I will. Tomorrow. Goodnight." That seemed a clear indication to me that he wanted to be alone, so I left.'

'And during this visit you saw no one other than Mr Blaney. The children weren't up, for example?'

'I took it the children were in bed. I neither saw nor heard them.'

'And you didn't discuss the Whistler's death?'

'I assumed George Jago had telephoned Mr Blaney, probably before he rang me. And what was there to discuss? Neither Ryan nor I were in a mood for doorstep chatting.'

But it was, thought Rickards, a curious reticence on both their parts. Had she been so anxious to get away and he to see her go? Or, for one of them, had an event more traumatic than a missing portrait driven even the Whistler temporarily out of mind?

There was a vital question Rickards needed to ask. The implications were obvious and she was far too intelligent a woman not to see them.

'Miss Mair, from what you saw of Mr Blaney that night, do you think he could have driven a car?'

'Impossible. And he hadn't a car to drive. He has a small van but it has just failed its MOT.' 'Or ridden a bicycle?'

'I suppose he could have tried but he'd have been in the ditch within minutes.'

Rickards's mind was already busy with calculations. He wouldn't get the results of the autopsy until Wednesday but if Hilary Robarts had taken her swim, as was her custom, immediately after the headlines to the main news which, on Sunday, was at 9.10, then she must have died at about half-past nine. At 9.45 or a little later, according to Alice Mair, Ryan Blaney was in his cottage and drunk. By no stretch of the imagination could he have committed a singularly ingenious murder, requiring a steady hand, nerves and the capacity to plan, and been back in his cottage by 9.45. If Alice Mair were telling the truth she had given Blaney an alibi. He, on the other hand, would certainly be unable to give one to her.

Rickards had almost forgotten Meg Dennison, but now he looked across to where she sat like a distressed child, hands in her lap, her untasted coffee still standing in the hearth.

'Mrs Dennison, did you know last night that the Whistler was dead?'

'Oh yes. Mr Jago telephoned me too, about a quarter to ten.'

Alice Mair said: 'He probably tried to get you earlier but you were on the way to Norwich station with the Copleys.'

Meg Dennison spoke directly to Rickards: 'I should have been, but the car broke down. I had to get Sparks and his taxi in a hurry. Luckily he could just do it but he had to go straight on to a job in Ipswich, so he couldn't bring me back. He saw the Copleys safely on the train for me.'

'Did you leave the Old Rectory at any time during the evening?'

Mrs Dennison looked up and met his eyes. 'No,' she said, 'no, after I'd seen them off I didn't leave the house.' Then she paused and said, 'I'm sorry, I did go out into the garden very briefly. It would be more accurate to say that I didn't leave the grounds. And now, if you'll all excuse me, please, I'd like to go home.'

She got up, then turned again to Rickards: 'If you want to question me, Chief Inspector, I'll be at the Old Rectory.'

She was gone before the two men could get to their feet, almost stumbling from the room. Miss Mair made no move to follow her and, seconds later, they heard the front door close.

There was a moment's silence, broken by Oliphant. Nodding towards the hearth he said: 'Funny. She hasn't even touched her coffee.'

But Rickards had a final question for Alice Mair. He said: 'It must have been getting on for midnight when Dr Mair got home yesterday night. Did you ring the power station to find out if he'd left or why he was delayed?'

She said coolly: 'It didn't occur to me, Chief Inspector. Since Alex is neither my child nor my husband I am spared the compulsion of checking on his movements. I am not my brother's keeper.'

Oliphant had been staring at her with his sombre, suspicious eyes. Now he said: 'But he lives with you, doesn't he? You do talk, don't you? You must have known about his relationship with Hilary Robarts, for example. Did you approve?'

Alice Mair's colour didn't change, but her voice was like steel.

'Either to approve or disapprove would have been as presumptuously impertinent as was that question. If you wish to discuss my brother's private life, I suggest that you do so with him.'

Rickards said quietly: 'Miss Mair, a woman has been brutally done to death and her body mutilated. She was a woman you knew. In the light of that outrage, I hope you

won't feel the need to be oversensitive to questions which are bound to seem at times both presumptuous and impertinent.'

Anger had made him articulate. Their eyes met and held. He knew that his were hard with fury, both with Oliphant's tactlessness and her response. But the grey eyes which met his were less easy to read. He thought he could detect surprise, followed by wariness, reluctant respect, an almost speculative interest.

And when, fifteen minutes later, she escorted her visitors to the door he was a little surprised when she held out her hand. As he shook it, she said: 'Please forgive me, Chief Inspector, if I was ungracious. Yours is a disagreeable but necessary job and you are entitled to co-operation. As far as I'm concerned, you will get it.'

Even without the garishly painted sign no one from Norfolk would have been in any doubt about the identity of the local hero after whom the Lydsett pub was named, nor could a stranger fail to recognize the admiral's hat with the star, the much-decorated chest, the black patch over one eye, the pinned-up, empty sleeve. Rickards reflected that he had seen worse paintings of Lord Nelson but not many. This made him look like the Princess Royal in drag.

George Jago had obviously decided that the interview should take place in the saloon bar wrapped now in the dim quietness of the late afternoon doldrums. He and his wife led Rickards and Oliphant to a small pub table, wooden-topped and with ornate cast-iron legs, set close to the huge and empty fireplace. They settled themselves round it rather, thought Rickards, like four ill-assorted people proposing to conduct a seance in appropriately ill-lit seclusion. Mrs Jago was an angular, bright-eyed, sharp-featured woman who looked at Oliphant as if she had seen his type before and was prepared to stand no nonsense. She was heavily made up. Two moons of bright rouge adorned each cheek, her long mouth was painted with a matching lipstick and her fingers, blood-tipped talons, were heavy with a variety of rings. Her hair was so glossily black that it looked unnatural and was piled high in the front in three rows of tight curls and swept upwards and secured with combs at the back and sides. She was wearing a pleated skirt topped with a blouse in some shiny material striped in red, white and blue, buttoned high at the neck and hung about with gold chains in which she looked like a bit-part actress auditioning for the part of a barmaid in an Ealing comedy. No woman could have been less suitably dressed for a country pub, yet both she and her husband, seated side by side with the brightly expectant look of children on their best behaviour, looked perfectly at home in the bar and with each other. Oliphant had made it his business to find out something of their past and had relayed the information to Rickards as they drove to the pub. George Jago had previously been the licensee of a pub in Catford but the couple had moved to Lydsett four years ago partly because Mrs Jago's brother, Charlie Sparks, owned a garage and car-hire business on the edge of the village and was looking for part-time help. George Jago occasionally drove for him leaving Mrs Jago in charge of the bar. They had settled happily in the village, took a lively part in community activities and appeared not to miss the raucous life of the city. Rickards reflected that East Anglia had accepted and absorbed more eccentric couples. Come to that, it had absorbed him.

George Jago looked more the part of a country publican, a stocky, cheerful-faced man with bright, blinking eyes and an air of suppressed energy. He had certainly expended it on the interior of the pub. The low, oak-beamed saloon bar was a cluttered and ill-arranged museum devoted to Nelson's memory. Jago must have scoured East Anglia in his search for objects with even a tenuous relationship with the Admiral. Above the open fireplace was a huge lithograph of the scene in the cockpit of the Victory with Nelson romantically dying in Hardy's arms. The remaining walls were covered with paintings and prints, including the principal sea battles, the Nile, Copenhagen, Trafalgar; one or two of Lady Hamilton including a lurid reproduction of Romney's famous portrait, while commemorative plates were ranged each side of the doors and the blackened oak beams were festooned with rows of decorated memorial mugs, few of them original to judge from the brightness of the decoration. Along the top of one wall a row of pennants spelled out what was presumably the famous signal and a fishing net had been slung across the ceiling to enhance the general nautical atmosphere. And suddenly, looking up into the brown tar-tangled netting, Rickards remembered. He had been here before. He and Susie had stopped here for a drink when they had been exploring the coast one weekend in the first winter of their marriage. They hadn't stayed for long; Susie had complained that the bar was too crowded and smoke-filled. He could recall the bench at which they had sat, the one against the wall to the left of the door. He had drunk half a pint of bitter, Susie a medium sherry. Then, with the fire blazing, the flames leaping from the crackling logs and the bar loud with cheerful Norfolk voices the pub had seemed interestingly nostalgic and cosy. But now, in the dim light of an autumn afternoon, the clutter of artefacts, so few of them either genuine or of particular merit, seemed to Rickards to trivialize and diminish both the building's own long history and the Admiral's achievements. He felt a sudden onrush of claustrophobia and had to resist an impulse to throw open the door and let in fresh air and the twentieth century.

As Oliphant said afterwards, it was a pleasure to interview George Jago. He didn't greet you as if you were a necessary but unwelcome technician of doubtful competence who was taking up your valuable time. He didn't use words as if they were secret signals to conceal thoughts rather than express them, nor subtly intimidate you with his superior intelligence. He didn't see an interview with the police as a battle of wits in which he necessarily had the advantage, nor react to perfectly ordinary questions with a disconcerting mixture of fear and endurance as if you were secret police from a totalitarian dictatorship. All in all, he pointed out, it made a pleasant change.

Jago admitted cheerfully that he had telephoned the Blaneys and Miss Mair shortly after half-past seven on Sunday with news that the Whistler was dead. How did he know? Because one of the police on the inquiry had telephoned home to let his wife know it was all right for their daughter to go alone to a party that night and the wife had telephoned her brother Harry Upjohn who kept the Crown and Anchor outside Cromer and Harry, who was a friend of his, had rung him. He remembered exactly what he had said to Theresa Blaney.

'Tell your dad they've found the Whistler's body. He's dead. Suicide. Killed himself at Easthaven. No need to worry now.'

He had phoned the Blaneys because he knew that Ryan liked his pints at nights but hadn't dared to leave the children while the Whistler was at large. Blaney hadn't come in that evening but that didn't really signify. With Miss Mair he had left the message on her answering machine in much the same terms. He hadn't telephoned Mrs Dennison because he thought she would be on her way to Norwich with the Copleys.

Rickards said: 'But you did ring her later?'

It was Mrs Jago who explained. 'That was after I reminded him. I was at half-past six Evensong and afterwards I went home with Sadie Sparks to settle arrangements for the autumn jumble sale. She found a note from Charlie to say that he'd been called out on two urgent jobs, taking the Copleys to Norwich and then fetching a couple from Ipswich. So when I got back I told George that Mrs Dennison hadn't driven the Copleys to the train and that he ought to phone her straight away to tell her about the Whistler. I mean, she'd be more likely to get a good night's rest knowing he was dead than wondering if he was lurking in the rectory bushes. So George rang.'

Jago said: 'It was close on 9.15 by then, I reckon. I would have telephoned later anyway expecting she'd be back by half-past nine.'

Rickards said: 'And Mrs Dennison answered the phone?'

'Not then she didn't. But I tried again about thirty minutes later and got her then.'

Rickards asked: 'So you didn't tell any of them that the body had been found at the Balmoral Hotel?'

'Didn't know, did I? All I was told by Harry Upjohn was that the Whistler had been found and that he was dead. I dare say the police kept it quiet, where exactly he was found I mean. You wouldn't want a lot of morbid sightseers round the place. Nor would the hotel manager, come to that.'

'And early this morning you rang round again to say that Miss Robarts had been murdered. How did you discover that?'

'Saw the police cars passing, didn't I? So I got on my bike and went up to the gate. Your chaps had left it open so I shut it again and waited. When they came back I opened the gate for them and asked what was up.'

Rickards said: 'You seem to have an extraordinary talent for extracting information from the police.'

'Well, I know some of them, don't I? The local chaps, anyway. They drink in the Hero. The driver of the first car through wouldn't say anything. Nor would the driver of the mortuary van. But when the third car came through and stopped while I opened and shut the gate again I asked who was dead and they told me. I mean, I know a mortuary van when I see one.'

'Who exactly told you?' asked Oliphant belligerently. George Jago turned on him his bright and innocent comedian's gaze.

'Couldn't say, could I? One policeman is much like another. Someone told me.'

'So you rang round early this morning? Why then? Why wait?'

'Because it was after midnight by then. Folk like a bit of news but they like their sleep more. But I rang Ryan Blaney first thing today.'

'Why him?'

'Why not? When you've got news it's human nature to pass it on to an interested party.'

Oliphant said: 'And he was certainly an interested party. Must have come as something of a relief.'

'Might have done, might not. I didn't speak to him. I told Theresa.'

Oliphant said: 'So you didn't speak to Mr Blaney either when you rang on Sunday or this morning. Bit odd wasn't it?'

'Depends how you look at it. The first time he was in his painting shed. He doesn't like being called to the phone when he's working. No point, anyway. I told Theresa and she told him.'

Rickards said: 'How do you know she told him?'

'Because she said so when I rang this morning. Why shouldn't she tell him?'

'But you can't know for certain that she did?'

Mrs Jago said suddenly: 'And you can't know for certain that she didn't. What does it matter, anyway? He knows now. We all do. We know about the Whistler and we know about Miss Robarts. And maybe if you'd caught the Whistler a year ago Miss Robarts would still be alive.'

Oliphant asked quickly: 'What do you mean by that, Mrs Jago?'

'What they call a copycat murder, isn't it? That's the talk in the village, anyway, apart from those who still think the Whistler did it and you've got your times all wrong. And old Humphrey, of course, who thinks it was the Whistler's ghost still on the job.'

Rickards said: 'We're interested in a portrait of Miss Robarts which was painted recently by Mr Blaney. Have either of you seen it? Did he talk about it?'

Mrs Jago said: 'Of course we've seen it. Had it hanging in the bar, didn't we? And I knew that it would bring bad luck. It was an evil picture if ever I saw one.'

Jago turned to his wife and explained with patient emphasis: 'I don't see how you can say a picture is evil, Doris, not a picture. Things can't be evil. An inanimate object is neither good nor evil. Evil is what is done by people.'

'And what is thought by people, George, and that picture came out of evil thoughts, so I say that picture was evil.'

She spoke firmly but with no trace of obstinacy or resentment. Obviously this was the kind of marital argument, conducted without acrimony, and with scrupulous fairness, which they both relished. For a few minutes their attention was solely on each other.

Jago went on: 'Granted it wasn't the kind of picture you'd want to hang on your sitting-room wall.'

'Or in the bar, come to that. Pity you ever did, George.'

'Right enough. Still I reckon it didn't give anyone any ideas they didn't have already. And you can't say that it was evil, not a picture, Doris.'

'AH right, suppose you get an instrument of torture, something used by the Gestapo.' Mrs Jago looked round the bar as if among its clutter she might reasonably expect to find an example. 'I'd say that thing was evil. I wouldn't give it house room.'

'You could say it was used for an evil purpose, Doris, that's different.'

Rickards asked: 'Why exactly did you hang the portrait in the bar?'

'Because he asked me, that's why. I usually find room for one or two of his small watercolours and sometimes he sells them and sometimes not. I always tell him they've got to be seascapes. I mean, it's all the Admiral here, isn't it, it's all nautical. But he was dead keen on having this up and I said I'd keep it for a week. He brought it down on his bike on Monday the twelfth.'

'In the hope of selling it?'

'Oh, it wasn't for sale, not that picture wasn't. He made that very plain.'

Oliphant said: 'So what was the point of putting it up?'

'That's what I said.' Jago turned triumphantly to the sergeant as if recognizing a fellow expert in logic. '"What's the point in putting it up if you don't want to sell it?" I said. "Let them look at it," he said. "I want them to see it.

I want the whole world to see it." A bit optimistic, I thought. After all, we're not the National Gallery.'

'More like the National Maritime Museum really,' said Doris surprisingly and beamed at them happily.

'Where did you find room for it?'

'On that wall opposite the door. Took down the two pictures of the Battle of the Nile, didn't I?'

'And how many people did see it in those seven days?'

'You're asking me how many customers I had. I mean, if they came in they saw it. Couldn't hardly miss it, could they? Doris wanted to take it down but I promised I'd keep it up until the Monday, so I did. Glad when he came and took it away, though. Like I said, it's all commemorative here. It's all the Admiral. It didn't seem to go with the decor. It wasn't here long. He said he'd call for it on the morning of the nineteenth and he did.'

'Did anyone from the headland or the power station see it?'

'Those who came in. The Local Hero isn't really their regular local. Most of them want to get away from the place at the end of the day and who's to blame them? I mean, living over the shop is all right, but not that shop.'

'Was there much talk about it? Did anyone ask where he kept it, for example?'

'Not to me. I reckon most of them knew where he kept it. I mean, he talked a bit about his painting shed. And if he had wanted to sell, he wouldn't have got any offers. I'll tell you someone who did see it, though. Hilary Robarts.'

'When was this?'

'The evening after he brought it in, about seven o'clock. She used to come in here from time to time. Never drank much, just a couple of dry sherries. Took them over to the seat by the fire.'

'Alone?'

'Usually she was. Once or twice she had Dr Mair with her. But she was alone that Tuesday.'

'What did she do when she saw the picture?'

'Stood and looked at it. The pub was pretty full at the time and everyone fell silent. You know how it is. They were all watching. I couldn't see her face because her back was to me. Then she walked over to the bar and said: "I've changed my mind about drinking here. Obviously you don't welcome customers from Larksoken." Then she went out. Well, I welcome customers from anywhere if they can hold their drink and don't ask for credit, but I didn't reckon she'd be much loss.'

'So she wasn't particularly popular on the headland?'

'I don't know about the headland. She wasn't particularly popular in this pub.'

Doris Jago said: 'Scheming she was to turn the Blaneys out of Scudder's Cottage. And him a widower trying to bring up four kids. Where did she think he was going to go? He gets family allowance and other bits of welfare help but that isn't going to find him another cottage. But I'm sorry she's dead, of course. I mean you have to be, don't you? It's not a nice thing to happen to anybody. We'll be sending a wreath from the Local Hero.'

'Was that the last time you saw her?'

Mrs Jago said: 'The last time George did. I saw her on the headland on Sunday. Must have been only a few hours before she died. I said to George, maybe I was the last person to see her alive, well, me and Neil Pascoe and Amy. You don't think at the time, do you? We can't see into the future, nor wouldn't want to. Sometimes I look at that power station and wonder if we'll all end up dead on the beach.'

Oliphant asked how she came to be on the headland.

'Delivering the church magazine, wasn't I? I always do on the last Sunday afternoon in the month. Collect them after morning service then take them round after dinner. Lunch to you, maybe, we call it dinner.'

Rickards had called the main meal dinner all his life and still did despite his mother-in-law's unceasing campaign to raise his social status. Her midday meal was luncheon and her evening meal dinner even if it consisted, as it often did, of sardines on toast. He wondered what they had eaten today. He said: 'I didn't realize that people on the headland were churchgoers, other than the Copleys, of course.'

'And Mrs Dennison. Very regular she is. I can't say the others actually come to church, well, not to say actually attend, not to the services, but they do take the parish magazine.' Mrs Jago's tone suggested that there were depths of irreligion to which even the headlanders would hardly sink. She added: 'All except the Blaneys, of course. Well, they wouldn't, being RC. At least she was RC, poor dear, and the children are of course. I mean they have to be, don't they? I don't think Ryan's anything. He's an artist. I never delivered to Scudder's Cottage even when his wife was alive. Anyway RCs don't have parish magazines.'

George Jago said: 'I wouldn't say that, Doris. I wouldn't go that far. They might.'

'We've lived here for four years, George, and Father McKee

is in the bar often enough and I've never seen one.'

'Well, you wouldn't, would you?'

'I might have, George, if there was one to see. They're different from us. No Harvest Festival and no parish magazines.'

Her husband explained patiently: 'They're different because they have different dogmas. It's all to do with dogma, Doris, it's nothing to do with Harvest Festival and parish magazines.'

'I know it's to do with dogma. The Pope tells them that the blessed Virgin Mary ascended into Heaven and they all have to believe it. I know all about dogma.'

Before Jago could open his mouth to dispute this claim to infallibility Rickards said quickly: 'So you delivered the magazines to the headlanders on Sunday afternoon. When precisely?'

'Well, I reckon I started off at about three, or maybe a bit after. We have a latish dinner on Sundays and we didn't get started on the spotted-dick pudding much before 2.30. And then George loaded the dishwasher and I got ready to go. Say 3.15, if you want to be particular.'

Jago said: 'You were well gone by 3.15, Doris. I'd say it was nearer 3.10.'

Oliphant said impatiently: 'I don't think five minutes matters either way.'

George Jago turned on him a glance of nicely judged surprise and mild rebuke. 'They might. They could be crucial. I'd say five minutes in a murder investigation could be crucial.'

Mrs Jago added her reproof: 'One minute could be crucial if that was the actual minute she died. Crucial for her, anyway. I don't see how you can say they don't matter.'

Rickards thought it was time to intervene: 'I agree that five minutes could be important, Mr Jago, but hardly these five minutes. Perhaps your wife would tell us exactly what she did and saw.'

'Well, I got on my bicycle. George always offers to drive me but he has enough driving in the week and I don't like to bother him to get out the car. Not Sundays. Not after roast beef and spotted dick.'

'It'd be no trouble, Doris. I've told you that. No trouble.'

'I know, George. Haven't I just said you'd be willing enough? I like the exercise and I'm always back before dark.' She turned to Rickards and explained: 'George never liked me to be out after dark, not with the Whistler around.'

Oliphant said: 'So you left between 3.10 and 3.15 and cycled off over the headland.'

'With the church magazines in the basket, same as usual. First I went to the caravan. I always go to the caravan first. It's a bit tricky now with Neil Pascoe.'

'How is it tricky, Mrs Jago?'

'Well, he's asked us more than once to put out his magazine – Nuclear Newsletter he calls it – in the bar for people to buy or maybe read for free. But George and I have always set our faces against it. I mean, we get some of the staff from Larksoken in the pub and it's not nice, is it, to be faced with a paper saying that what you're doing is wicked and ought to be put a stop to. Not when all you want is a quiet drink. Not everybody in Lydsett agrees with what he's doing. You can't deny that Larksoken Power Station has brought more business into the village, and jobs too. And you've got to trust people, haven't you? I mean, if Dr Mair says nuclear power is safe, then it probably is. Then again, you can't help wondering, can you?'

Rickards said patiently: 'But Mr Pascoe took the church magazine?'

'Well, it's only ten pence and I suppose he likes to know what's going on in the parish. When he first arrived on the headland – two years ago it was now – I called on him and asked if he'd like to take the magazine. He seemed a bit surprised but he said he would and paid his ten pence and he's had it ever since. If he doesn't want it he's only got to say so.'

Rickards asked: 'And what happened at the caravan?'

'I saw Hilary Robarts, same as I said. I gave Neil the magazine and collected the money and was having a bit of a chat with him inside the caravan when she drove up in that red Golf of hers. Amy was outside with the kid, bringing in some of his clothes from a washing line they'd rigged up there. When he saw the car Neil got out of the caravan and went over and stood by Amy. Miss Robarts got out of the car and they both stood looking at her, not speaking, just standing side by side watching her. It wasn't much of a welcoming committee, but then what would you expect? Then, when Miss Robarts got within six yards or so of them Timmy trotted over to her and grabbed at her slacks. He's a friendly little beggar and he didn't mean any harm. You know how kids are. But he'd been mucking about in that muddy patch under the tap and started smearing the stuff all over her trousers. She pushed him away none too gently. The kid fell flat on his bum and started bawling, and then all hell was let loose.'

Oliphant asked: 'What was said?'

'Now that I can't exactly remember. There were a lot of words used which you don't expect to hear on a Sunday. Some beginning with f and some beginning with c. Use your imagination.'

Rickards said: 'Were any threats made?'

'Depends what you mean by threats. There was a lot of shouting and screaming. Not Neil. He was just standing there looking so white I thought he was going to faint. It was Amy who was making the most noise. Anyone would think Miss Robarts had gone for the kid with a knife. I can't remember the half of it. Ask Neil Pascoe. Miss Robarts didn't seem to notice that I was there. Ask Amy and Neil. They'll tell you.'

Rickards said: 'You tell me too. It's helpful to get different people's views of an incident. You get a more accurate picture that way.'

Jago interposed: 'More accurate? Different maybe. It'd only be more accurate if they were all telling the truth.'

For a moment Rickards feared that Mrs Jago was prepared to challenge the assertion with another demonstration of semantics. He said: 'Well, I'm sure that you're telling the truth, Mrs Jago. That's why we're starting with you. Can you remember what was actually said?'

'I think Miss Robarts said that she had called to say that she was thinking of dropping her legal action but that now she would bloody well go ahead with it and she hoped it would ruin them both. "You and your whore." Charming wasn't it?'

'She used those precise words?'

'And a good few others which I can't exactly remember.' 'What I mean is, Mrs Jago, Miss Robarts was the one making the threats?'

For the first time Mrs Jago seemed uneasy, then she said: 'Well she always was the one making threats, wasn't she? Neil Pascoe wasn't suing her.' 'What happened next?'

'Nothing. Miss Robarts got into the car and drove away. Amy lugged the kid into the caravan and slammed the door. Neil looked so miserable I thought he'd burst out crying, so I thought I'd say something to cheer him up.'

'What was that, Mrs Jago?'

'I said she was a vicious evil-minded bitch and one day someone would do her in.'

Jago said: 'Not very nice, Doris. Not on a Sunday.'

Doris Jago said complacently: 'Not very nice any day of the week, but I wasn't far wrong, was I?'

Rickards asked: 'What happened then, Mrs Jago?'

'I got on with delivering the magazines, didn't I? First of all I went to the Old Rectory. I don't usually call there because the Copleys and Mrs Dennison are usually at morning service and collect their own magazines, but they weren't there yesterday and I was a bit worried. Thought something might be wrong. But it was just that they were too busy packing to attend. The Copleys were off to stay with their daughter in Wiltshire. Nice for them, I thought, and it'll give Mrs Dennison a bit of a rest. She offered me a cup of tea but I said I wouldn't wait because I could see she was busy getting on with their high tea. But I did sit in the kitchen with her for five minutes and had a bit of a chat. She said that some of the staff at Larksoken had given some very nice children's clothes for the jumble which might fit the Blaney twins and she wondered whether Ryan Blaney would be interested. She'd price them up and then he could have his choice before they were taken off for the sale. We've done that once before but we have to manage it very tactfully. If Ryan thought we were offering charity he wouldn't take the clothes. But it isn't a charity, is it? It's in aid of church funds. I see him when he comes into the pub and Mrs Dennison thought that the suggestion might come better from me.'

'And after calling at the Old Rectory?'

'Then I went on to Martyr's Cottage. Miss Mair has a bill enclosed with the magazine every six months so I never bother to collect the ten pence. Sometimes she's busy and sometimes she just isn't there so I usually just put the magazine through the letter box.'

'Did you see whether she was at home on Sunday?'

'I never saw skin nor hide of her. Then I went on to the last cottage where Hilary Robarts lived. She'd got home by then, of course. I could see the red Golf outside the garage door. But I don't usually knock with her either. She isn't the kind of woman who'd welcome you in for five minutes' chat and a cuppa.'

Oliphant said: 'So you didn't see her?'

'I'd already seen her, hadn't I? If you're asking whether I saw her again the answer is no, I didn't. But I heard her.'

Mrs Jago paused for effect. Rickards asked: 'How do you mean you heard her, Mrs Jago?'

'I heard her through the letter box, didn't I, when I was pushing the magazine through? And a fine old argument she was having with somebody. I'd say it was a real row. The second of the day for her. Or, maybe, the third.'

Oliphant asked: 'What do you mean by that, Mrs Jago?'

'Just wondered, that's all. It struck me when she arrived at the caravan she was pretty wrought up. High colour. Edgy. You know.'

'You could tell that just by looking at her from the caravan door?'

'That's right. Call it a gift.'

Rickards asked: 'Could you tell whether she was speaking to a man or a woman?'

'Could be either. I only heard the one voice and that was hers. But she had someone in with her for certain, unless she was shouting at herself.'

'What time would this be, Mrs Jago?'

'About four, I reckon, or a little after. Say I got to the

caravan at twenty-five past three and away by twenty-five to four. Then there was the quarter of an hour at the Old Rectory which would bring me up to five to four, and then the ride across the headland. It must have been soon after four.'

'And after that you went home?'

'That's right. And I was back here soon after half-past four, wasn't I, George?'

Her husband said: 'You might have been, dear. And then again you might not. I was asleep.'

Ten minutes later Rickards and Oliphant left.

George and Doris watched the police car until it turned the corner of the road and went out of sight.

Doris said: 'I can't say I took to that sergeant.'

'I can't say I took to either of them.'

'You don't think I was wrong, George, telling them about the quarrel?'

'Had no option, did you? This is murder, Doris, and you were one of the last people to see her alive. Anyway, they'll probably get it, or some of it from Neil Pascoe. No point in keeping back what the police will find out in the end. And you only spoke the truth.'

'I wouldn't say that, George, not the whole truth. I may have toned it down a bit. But I didn't tell them any lies.'

For a moment they contemplated this nice distinction in silence. Then Doris said: 'That mud which Timmy smeared on Miss Robarts's trousers, it came from the patch under the outside tap. Been like that for weeks. Be funny, wouldn't it, if Hilary Robarts was murdered because Neil Pascoe couldn't fix a new washer?'

George said: 'Not funny, Doris. I wouldn't exactly say that it was funny.'

Jonathan Reeves's parents had moved from their small terraced house in south London to a flat in a modern block overlooking the sea just outside Cromer. His appointment at the power station had coincided with his father's retirement and the idea had been that they would return to a place that they had known and liked on past holidays and, as his mother had said, 'to provide a home for you until the right girl comes along'. His father had worked for fifty years in the carpet department of a large store in Clapham, starting at fifteen straight from school and rising eventually to be head of the department. The firm let him have carpets at less than cost price; the off-cuts, sometimes large enough for a small room, he got for nothing, so that from childhood Jonathan had never known a room at home which wasn't carpeted from wall to wall.

Sometimes it seemed that their thick-pile wool and nylon had absorbed and deadened not only their footsteps. His mother's calm response to any event was either 'very nice', equally appropriate to an enjoyable dinner, a royal engagement or birth, or a spectacular sunrise, or 'Terrible, terrible, isn't it? You wonder sometimes what the world's coming to', which covered events as diverse as Kennedy's assassination, a particularly gruesome murder, children abused or violated, or an IRA bomb. But she didn't wonder what the world was coming to. Wonder was an emotion long since stifled by Axminster, mohair, underfelt. It seemed to him that they lived together in amity because their emotions, debilitated by under-use or undernourishment, couldn't cope with anything as robust as a row. At the first sign of it his mother would say 'Don't raise your voice, dear, I don't like rows.' Disagreement, never intense, was expressed in peevish resentment which died through lack of energy to keep it going.

He got on well enough with his sister Jennifer, eight years his senior but now married to a local authority officer in Ipswich. Once, watching her bending over the ironing board, her features set in their familiar mask of slightly resentful concentration, he had been tempted to say, 'Speak to me. Tell me what you think, about death, about evil, about what we're doing here.' But her reply was predictable. 'I know what I'm doing here. Ironing Dad's shirts.'

To her acquaintances and to those she might have called friends, his mother would always speak of her husband as Mr Reeves. 'Mr Reeves is very highly thought of by Mr Wainwright.' 'Of course, you could say that Mr Reeves is the carpet department of Hobbs and Wainwright.' The store represented those aspirations, traditions and orthodoxies that others found in their profession, in their school, regiment or religion. Mr Wainwright senior was headmaster, colonel, their high priest; their occasional Sunday attendances at the local United Reform Chapel merely a gesture to a lesser God. And they were never regular worshippers. Jonathan suspected that this was deliberate. People might want to get to know them, involve them in mothers' meetings, whist drives, Sunday-school outings, might even want to visit On the Friday of his first week at secondary school the form bully had said, 'Reeves's dad is shopwalker at Hobbs and Wainwright. He sold my mum a rug last week,' and had minced across the room, hands obsequiously clasped. 'I know madam will find that mixture extremely hardwearing. It's a very popular line.' The laughter had been sycophantic but uneasy and the teasing, for lack of popular support, had quickly died. Most of their fathers had even less prestigious jobs.

Sometimes he thought: We can't be as ordinary, as dull as we seem, and wondered if it were some defect in himself which diminished them all so that he invested them with his own inadequacy, his own pessimism. Sometimes, too, he would take from the bureau drawer the family photograph album which seemed to document their ordinariness: his parents stiffly posed against the rail of Cromer promenade and at Whipsnade Zoo, himself ridiculous in cap and gown at his degree ceremony. Only one held any real interest for him, the sepia studio photograph of his great-grandfather in the First World War, perched sideways on an artificial wall with, beside him, a huge aspidistra in a Benares jar. He would gaze intensely across seventy-four years at that gentle-faced vulnerable boy who looked, in the ill-fitting, high-buttoned serge and the grotesquely over-large cap more like an orphaned poor-law child than a soldier. He must have been under twenty when it was taken. And he had survived Passchendaele, the Ypres Salient, and had been discharged wounded and gassed early in 1918 with strength enough at least to father a son, but for little else. That life, he told himself, could not have been ordinary. His great-grandfather had survived four years of horror with courage, endurance and a stoical acceptance of what his God or luck had dealt him.

But if not ordinary, the life seemed now of absolutely no importance to anyone. It had preserved a family, that was all. And how much did that matter? But now it struck him that his father's life had held a not-dissimilar stoicism. You couldn't, perhaps, equate fifty years with Hobbs and Wainwright with four years in France, but both had required that same dignified and stoical acceptance. He wished that he could talk to his father about his great-grandfather, about his father's early life. But it never seemed possible and he knew that what held him back was less an inhibiting shyness than the fear that, even if he broke through this strange barrier of reticence and inarticulateness, there would be nothing there. And yet surely it hadn't always been like that. He remembered the Christmas of 1968 when his father had bought him his first science book, The Wonder Book of Science for Children. On Christmas morning they had sat for hours together, slowly turning the pages while his father first read and then explained. He still had the book. He still occasionally looked at the diagrams. 'How television works', 'What happens when we are X-rayed', 'Newton and the apple', 'The marvel of modern ships'. And his father had said, 'I would have liked to have been a scientist if things had been different.' It was the only time in his life that his father had given any indication that there could have been for him, for them, a fuller, a different life. But things had not been different and now he knew that they never would be. He thought, 'We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they're small and mean enough so that we can feel in control.'

Only once had the routine of their predictable days been interrupted by an event which was unexpected, dramatic. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday his father had taken the family Morris and had disappeared. Three days later he was found, sitting in the car on the top of Beachy Head, looking out to sea. It had been called a nervous breakdown due to overwork and Mr Wainwright had given him two weeks' holiday. His father had never explained what had happened, colluding in the official view that it had been a temporary amnesia. Neither of his parents had ever referred to it again.

The flat was on the fourth and top floor of a rectangular modern block. The sitting room at the front had a glass door giving on to a narrow balcony sufficient to hold two chairs. The kitchen was small but had a flap which could be lifted to provide a table just large enough for the three of them to eat. There were only two bedrooms, his parents' at the front and his own, much smaller, giving a view of the car park, the row of breeze-block garages and the town. The sitting room had a wall-mounted gas fire to augment the background central heating, and after they had moved in his parents had surrounded this with a false mantelshelf on which his mother could display the small treasures brought from the Clapham home. He remembered the morning when they had viewed the flat, his mother stepping out on to the balcony and saying, 'Look, Father, it's just like being on the deck of a liner', and she had turned almost with animation as if remembering that store of old movie magazines she kept, the pictures of befurred film stars on the gangplanks, the ship festooned with streamers and flags, hearing in imagination the hoots of the pilot boat, the band playing on the quay. And indeed his parents had, from the start, seen the flat as a glamorous change from their small terraced house. In summer they would move the two easy chairs so that they faced the window and the sea. In winter they reversed them and huddled round the gas fire. But neither the winter gales, nor the uncomfortable heat when summer beat on the glass, ever drew from either of them a word of regret for the old life.

They had sold their car when his father retired and the single-car garage was used to house Jonathan's secondhand Ford Fiesta. He garaged it and swung back the door. Locking it he thought how very private the flats were. Nearly all of them were occupied by retired couples whose routine seemed to be to walk during the morning, meet their friends for afternoon tea and to be home before seven. By the time he returned from work the block was quiet and the rear curtains drawn. He wondered if Caroline had guessed or had known just how private his comings and goings could be. Outside the flat he hesitated for a moment, key in hand, wishing he could postpone the moment of meeting. But any longer wait would seem unnatural; they must have been listening for the lift.

His mother almost ran towards him.

'It's terrible, isn't it? That poor girl. Dad and I heard it on the local radio. But at least they found the Whistler. That's one worry over. He'll not go on killing again after her.'

He said: 'They think that he died before Miss Robarts did, so that it may not have been the Whistler.'

'But of course it was the Whistler. She died in the same way, didn't she? Who else would it be?'

'That's what the police are trying to find out. They've been at the station all morning. They didn't get round to seeing me until nearly twelve.'

'What did they want to see you for? They can't think you had anything to do with it?'

'Of course not, Mother. They're interviewing everyone, everyone who knew her, that is. Anyway, I have an alibi.'

'An alibi? What alibi? Why would you want an alibi?'

'I don't want one, but as it happens I have one. I went to supper last night with a girl from the station.'

Immediately her face brightened, pleasure at the news momentarily eclipsing the horror of the murder. She said: 'Who invited you then, Jonathan?'

'A girl at the station. I told you.'

'Well, I know it's a girl. What kind of girl? Why don't you bring her home? You know that this is your home just as much as it is Dad's and mine. You can always bring your friends here. Why not ask her to tea next Saturday or Sunday? I'd have everything very nice, your granny's best tea service, I wouldn't let you down.'

Torn with a dreadful pity he said: 'Perhaps I will one day, Mum. It's a bit early yet.'

'I don't see how it can be too early to meet your friends. It's as well you were with her if they're looking for alibis. What time did you get home, then?'

'About quarter to eleven.'

'Well, that's not so very late. You look tired. It must have been a shock for everyone at Larksoken, a girl you knew, Administrative Officer, too, so it said on the radio.'

Jonathan said: 'Yes, it has been a shock. I suppose that's why I don't feel very hungry. I'd like to wait a little bit before supper.'

'It's all ready, Jonathan. Lamb chops. They're half cooked already. I've only got to slip them under the grill. And the vegetables are cooked. It's only going to spoil.'

'All right. I won't be more than five minutes.'

He hung his jacket in the hall, then went into his own room and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The thought of food nauseated him but he had said five minutes and if he lay there much longer she would be knocking at the door. She always knocked, but very gently, two distinct, discreet taps, like an assignation. What, he wondered, did she fear she might find him doing if she came in unannounced? He made himself sit up and swung his legs over the side of the bed but was immediately seized by nausea and a weakness which made him fear for a moment that he was actually going to faint. But he recognized it for what it was; a mixture of tiredness, fear and sheer misery.

And yet so far it hadn't been too bad. There had been three of them, Chief Inspector Rickards, a thickset serious-faced young man who had been introduced as Detective-Sergeant Oliphant and a younger man in the corner apparently taking notes whom no one had bothered to introduce. The small interviewing room attached to the medical physics department had been set aside for them, and they had been sitting side by side at a small table, both in plain clothes. The room, as always, smelt faintly of disinfectant. He had never understood why since no clinical procedures were carried out there. Two white coats still hung behind the door and someone had left a tray of test tubes on top of the filing cabinet, adding to the air of inadvertence and amateurism. It had all been very low-key, very matter-of-fact. He felt that he was being processed, one of the dozens who had known her or claimed to have known her and who had passed through this or a similar door to answer the same questions. Almost he expected them to ask him to roll up his sleeve and to feel the prick of a needle. He knew that the probing, if there were to be probing, would come later. But he had been surprised at his own initial lack of fear. He had somehow assumed that the police were endowed with an almost supernatural power to sniff out lying, that he would walk into that room bearing an all too visible load of guilt, prevarication and conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice.

At their request he gave his name and address. The sergeant wrote it down. Then he said almost wearily: 'If you could tell us, please, where you were yesterday between six and 10.30.'

He remembered thinking, Why six and 10.30? She had been found on the beach. She liked to swim most nights just after the nine o'clock news; everyone knew that, at least, everyone who knew her. And the news on Sunday was at 9.10. And then he remembered that they would know exactly when she had been found. There wouldn't have been time yet for the autopsy report. Perhaps they were still uncertain about the time of death or were playing it safe. Six to 10.30. But nine, or shortly after, was surely the relevant time. He was surprised that he could work it out so clearly.

He said: 'I was at home with my parents until after dinner, after the one o'clock meal I mean. Then I drove over to spend the evening with my girlfriend Miss Caroline Amphlett. I was with her until just after 10.30. She lives in a bungalow outside Holt. She's PA to the Director, Dr Mair.'

'We know where she lives, sir. And we know who she is. Did anyone see you arrive or leave?'

'I don't think so. The bungalow is very isolated and there weren't many cars on the road. I think someone in the flats may have seen me leave.'

'And you spent the evening doing what?'

The officer in the corner wasn't writing now, only looking, but he didn't seem curious, not even interested, just slightly bored.

'Caroline cooked supper and I helped. She had some home-made soup already made and heated that. We had mushroom omelettes, fruit, cheese, wine. After dinner we chatted. Then we went to bed and made love.'

'I don't think we need go into the more intimate parts of the evening, sir. How long have you and Miss Amphlett been friends?'

'About three months.'

'And when was this evening together planned?'

'A few days before. I can't remember exactly when.'

'And when did you get home, sir?'

'Just after 10.45.' He added, 'I've no witnesses to that, I'm afraid. My parents were away for the night visiting my married sister at Ipswich.'

'Did you know they would be away when you and Miss Amphlett planned your evening together?'

'Yes. They always visit my sister on the last Sunday of the month. But it wouldn't have made any difference. I mean, I'm twenty-eight. I live with them but I don't have to give them an account of my movements.'

The sergeant looked at him and said: 'Free, white and twenty-eight,' as if he were noting it down. He had blushed and thought, That was a mistake. Don't try to be clever, don't explain, just answer their questions.

The Chief Inspector said: 'Thank you, sir, that will be all for now.'

As he reached the door he heard Rickards's voice.

'She wasn't very nice to you, was she, Miss Robarts, about that local radio programme you took part in, My religion and my job? Did you hear it, Sergeant?'

The sergeant said stolidly: 'No, sir, I didn't hear it. Can't think how I came to miss it. Very fascinating, I'm sure.'

He turned and faced them. He said: 'She wasn't very kind about it. I'm a Christian. You don't expect it always to be easy.'

Rickards said: '"Blessed are ye when men revile and persecute you for the gospel's sake." A bit of persecution, was there? Oh well, things could be worse. At least you don't get thrown to the lions any more.'

The sergeant seemed to think that it was very funny.

He wondered, for the first time, how they could have known about Hilary's mild persecution of him over the programme. For some reason his brief, rather pathetic notoriety, his affirmation of faith, had outraged her. Someone at the station must have mentioned it to the police. After all, they had interviewed plenty of people before they got round to him.

But surely it was over now. He had given the police his alibi, his and hers, and there was no reason why they should be questioned again. He must put the whole thing out of his mind. But he knew that this wouldn't be possible. And now, remembering Caroline's story, he was struck with its inconsistencies. Why had she chosen to park the car on an isolated part of the road, down a cart track under the trees? Why had she chosen to drive with Remus to the headland when there were plenty of walks nearer home? He could have understood it if she had wanted to let the dog run on the beach and splash into the sea, but according to her they hadn't gone down to the beach. And what proof was there that she hadn't reached the cliffs until ten o'clock, half an hour after Hilary Robarts was thought to have died?

Then there was that story about her mother. He found that he just didn't believe it, hadn't believed it when she had first told him, and he believed it even less now. But that, surely, was something he might be able to check. There were private detectives, firms in London who could carry out this kind of inquiry. The thought both appalled and excited him. The idea that he might actually get in touch with those kind of people, might pay them money to spy on her, astounded him by its audacity. It wasn't something she would expect him to do, that anyone would expect him to do: but why shouldn't he? He had enough money to pay. There was nothing shameful in the inquiry.

But first he must find out her date of birth. That shouldn't be difficult. He knew Shirley Coles, the junior clerk in the establishment division. Sometimes he even thought that she liked him. She wouldn't let him see Caroline's personal file but she might be willing to look up a harmless piece of information. He could say that he wanted to give Caroline a birthday present and had a feeling that the date was getting close. Then, with her name and date of birth, surely her parents could be traced. It should be possible to know whether her mother was alive, where she was living, her financial circumstances. There would be a copy of the London yellow pages in the library where private detective firms would be listed. He didn't want to do it by letter, but he could telephone with a preliminary inquiry. If necessary he could take a day's leave and go up to London. He thought: I've got to know. If this is a lie, then everything is a lie; the walk on the cliffs, everything she said to me, even her love.

He heard the two knocks on the door. To his horror he found that he was crying, not noisily but with a silent welling forth of tears which no effort could control. He called out, 'I'm coming. I'm coming.' Then he went over to the washbasin and began bathing his face. Looking up, he saw himself in the mirror. It seemed to him that fear and tiredness and a sickness of spirit which lay too deep for healing had stripped away all his pathetic pretences, that the face which had at least been ordinary, familiar, had become as disgusting to him as it must be to her. He stared at his image and saw it through her eyes; the dull brown hair with the clinging specks of scurf which daily shampooing seemed only to exacerbate, the eyes red-rimmed, a little too close together, the damp pale forehead on which the acne pustules stood out like the stigma of sexual shame.

He thought: She doesn't love me and she has never loved me. She chose me for two reasons; because she knew I loved her and because she thought I was too stupid to discover the truth. But I'm not stupid and I shall discover it. And he would begin with the smallest lie, the one about her mother. And what of his own lies, the lie to his parents, the false alibi to the police? And that greatest lie of all. 'I'm a Christian. You don't expect it always to be easy.' He wasn't a Christian any more and perhaps he never had been. His conversion had been no more than the need to be accepted, taken seriously, befriended by that little coterie of earnest proselytizers who had at least valued him for himself. But it wasn't true. None of it was tiue. In one day he had learned that the two most important things in his life, his religion and his love, were delusions.

The two knocks on the door were more insistent this time. His mother called: 'Jonathan, are you all right? The chops are getting overcooked.'

'It's all right, Mother. I'm coming.'

But it took another minute of vigorous splashing before his face looked normal and it was safe to open the door and join them for supper.