Devices & Desires

BOOK SIX. Saturday i October to Thursday 6 October

Jonathan had decided to wait until Saturday to visit London and continue his inquiries. His mother was less likely to question him about a trip on Saturday to visit the Science Museum, while taking a day's leave always provoked inquiries about where he was going and why. But he thought it prudent to spend half an hour in the museum before setting off to Pont Street and it was after three o'clock before he was outside the block of flats. One fact was immediately apparent: no one who lived in this building and employed a housekeeper could possibly be poor. The house was part of an imposing Victorian terrace, half stone, half brick, with pillars each side of the gleaming black door and ornate glass, like green bottle tops, in the two ground-floor windows. The door was open and he could see a square hall tiled with black and white marble, the lower balustrade of an ornate wrought-iron staircase, and the door of a golden cage lift. To the right was a porter's desk with a uniformed man on duty. Anxious not to be seen loitering he walked quickly on considering his next move.

In one sense none was necessary except to find his way to the nearest tube station, return to Liverpool Street and take the first train to Norwich. He had done what he had set out to do; he knew now that Caroline had lied to him. He told himself that he should be feeling shocked and distressed, both at her lie and at his own duplicity in discovering it. He had thought himself in love with her. He was in love with her. For the past year there had been hardly an hour in which she had been absent from his thoughts. That blonde, remote, self-contained beauty had obsessed him. Like a schoolboy he had waited at the corners of corridors where she might pass, had welcomed his bed because he could lie undisturbed and indulge his secret erotic fantasies, would wake wondering where and how they might next meet. Surely neither the physical act of possession nor the discovery of deceit could destroy love. So why was this confirmation of her deception almost agreeable, even pleasant? He should be devastated; instead he was filled with a satisfaction close to triumph. She had lied, almost carelessly, confident that he was too much in love, too enthralled, too stupid even to question her story. But now, with the discovery of the truth, the balance of power in their relationship had subtly shifted. He wasn't sure yet what use he would make of the information. He had found the energy and courage to act but whether he would have the courage to confront her with his knowledge was another matter.

He walked quickly to the end of Pont Street, his eyes on the paving stones, then turned and retraced his steps trying to make sense of his turbulent emotions, so tangled that they seemed to jostle each other for dominance: relief, regret, disgust, triumph. And it had been so easy. Every dreaded obstacle from contacting the detective agency to finding an excuse for this day in London had been surmounted with greater ease than he could believe possible. So why not chance one further step? Why not make absolutely sure? He knew the name of the housekeeper, Miss Beasley. He could ask to see her, say that he had met Caroline a year or two ago, in Paris perhaps, had lost her address, wanted to get in touch. If he kept his story simple, resisted the temptation to embroider, there was no possible danger. He knew that Caroline had taken her summer holiday in France in 1986, the year, he too, had been there. It was one of the facts that had come up in conversation on their early dates together, innocuous chat about travel and paintings, the attempt to find some common ground, a shared interest. Well, at least he had been in Paris. He had seen the Louvre. He could say that that was where they had met.

He would need a false name, of course. His father's Christian name would do. Percival. Charles Percival. It was better to choose something slightly unusual; a too common name would sound obviously false. He would say that he lived in Nottingham. He had been at the university there and knew the town. Somehow being able to picture those familiar streets made the fantasy believable. He needed to root his lies in a semblance of truth. He could say that he worked at the hospital there, a laboratory technician. If there were any other questions he could parry them. But why should there be any other questions?

He made himself walk with confidence into the hall. Only a day ago he would have found difficulty in meeting the porter's eyes. Now, filled with the self-assurance of success, he said: 'I want to visit Miss Beasley in flat three. Would you say that I'm a friend of Miss Caroline Amphlett.'

The porter left the reception desk and went into his office to telephone. Jonathan thought, What's to prevent me just going up the stairs and knocking at the door? Then he realized that the porter would immediately telephone Miss Beasley and warn her not to let him in. There was security of a kind, but it wasn't particularly tight.

Within half a minute the man was back. He said: 'That's all right, sir. You can go up. It's on the first floor.'

He didn't bother to take the lift. The double mahogany door with its numeral of polished brass, its two security locks and central spyhole was at the front of the house. He smoothed back his hair then rang the bell and made himself stare at the peephole with an assumption of ease. He could hear nothing from inside the flat and the heavy door seemed as he waited to grow into an intimidating barricade which only a presumptuous fool would attempt to breach. For a second, picturing that single eyeball scrutinizing him through the peephole, he had to fight an impulse to flee. But then there was the faint clink of a chain, the sound of a lock turning, and the door was opened.

Since his decision to call at the flat he had been too preoccupied with fabricating his story to give much conscious thought to Miss Beasley. The word housekeeper had conjured up a soberly dressed, middle-aged woman, at worst a little condescending and intimidating, at best deferential, chatty, eager to help. The reality was so bizarre that he gave a perceptible start of surprise, then blushed at his own betrayal. She was short and very thin with straight red-gold hair, white at the roots and obviously dyed, falling in a gleaming helmet to her shoulders. Her pale green eyes were immense and shallowly set, the lower lids inverted and bloodshot so that the eyeballs seemed to be swimming in an open wound. Her skin was very white and creped with innumerable small lines except over the jutting cheekbones where it was stretched as fine as paper. In contrast to the skin's unpainted fragility her mouth was a thin gash of garish crimson. She was wearing high-heeled slippers and a kimono and was carrying a small, almost hairless dog with bulging eyes, its thin neck encircled with a jewelled collar. For a few seconds she stood silently regarding him, the dog pressed against her cheek.

Jonathan, his carefully husbanded confidence rapidly draining, said: 'I'm sorry to trouble you. It's just that I'm a friend of Miss Caroline Amphlett and I'm trying to trace her.'

'Well, you won't find her here.' The voice, which he recognized, was unexpected from so frail a woman, deep and husky, and not unattractive.

He said, 'I'm sorry if I've got the wrong Amphlett. You see, Caroline did give me her address two years ago but I've lost it, so I tried the telephone directory.'

'I didn't say that you'd got the wrong Amphlett, only that you won't find her here. But as you look harmless enough and are obviously unarmed you had better come in. One cannot be too careful in these violent times, but Baggott is very reliable. Very few impostors get past Baggott. Are you an impostor, Mr…?'

'Percival. Charles Percival.'

'You must excuse my deshabille, Mr Percival, but I do not normally expect afternoon visitors.'

He followed her across a square hall and through double doors into what was obviously the drawing room. She pointed imperiously to a sofa set in front of the fireplace. It was uncomfortably low and as soft-cushioned as a bed, each drop end festooned with thick tasselled cords. Moving slowly as if deliberately taking her time, she placed herself opposite to him in an elegant high-winged chair, settled the dog on her lap and gazed down on him with the fixed unsmiling intensity of an inquisitor. He knew that he must look as gauche and ungainly as he felt, his thighs enclosed in the softness of the cushion, his sharp knees almost touching his chin. The dog, as naked as if it had been skinned and shivering perpetually like a creature demented with cold, turned first on him and then up at her its pleading exophthalmic eyes. The leather collar, with its great dollops of red and blue stones, lay heavily on the animal's frail neck.

Jonathan resisted the temptation to look round at the room but it seemed that every feature had entered his consciousness; the marble fireplace with above it a full-length oil painting of a Victorian army officer, a pale arrogant face with one lock of blond hair falling almost to the cheek, which bore an uncanny resemblance to Caroline; the four carved chairs with embroidered seats set against the wall; the pale, polished floor with its wrinkled carpets; the drum-shaped table in the centre of the room and the side tables with their photographs in silver frames. There was a strong smell of paint and turpentine. Somewhere in the flat a room was being decorated.

After a moment's silent scrutiny the woman spoke. 'So you're a friend of Caroline's. You surprise me, Mr… Mr… I'm afraid I have already forgotten your name.'

He said firmly: 'Percival. Charles Percival.'

'Mine is Miss Oriole Beasley. I am the housekeeper here. As I said, you surprise me, Mr Percival. But if you say you are Caroline's friend, naturally I accept your word.'

'Perhaps I shouldn't say friend. I only met her once, in Paris in 1986. We went round the Louvre together. But I would like to see her again. She did give me her address, but I lost it.'

'How careless. So you waited two years and then decided to trace her. Why now, Mr Percival? You have managed, apparently, to control your impatience for two years.'

He knew how he must look and sound to her; unconfident, shy, ill at ease. But that, surely, was what she would expect from a man gauche enough to believe that he could revive a dead and fleeting passion. He said: 'It's just that I'm in London for a few days. I work in Nottingham. I'm a technician at the hospital there. I don't often get the chance to come south. It was an impulse really, trying to trace Caroline.'

'As you see, she's not here. She has not, in fact, lived in this house since she was seventeen, and as I am only the housekeeper it is hardly my place to hand out information about the family's whereabouts to casual inquirers. Would you describe yourself as a casual inquirer, Mr Percival?'

Jonathan said: 'Perhaps it seems like that. It's just that I found the name in the telephone directory and thought it was worth a try. Of course she might not want to see me again.'

'I should imagine that is more than likely. And, of course, you have some identification, something to confirm that you are Mr Charles Percival of Nottingham.'

Jonathan said: 'Not really, I'm afraid. I didn't think…'

'Not even a credit card or a driving licence? You seem to have come singularly unprepared, Mr Percival.'

Something in the deep, arrogantly upper-class voice, the mixture of insolence and contempt, stung him into defiance. He said: 'I'm not from the gas board. I don't see why I need to identify myself. It was just a simple inquiry.

I was hoping to see her, or perhaps Mrs Amphlett. I'm sorry if I've offended you.'

'You haven't offended me. If I were easily offended I wouldn't work for Mrs Amphlett. But I'm afraid you can't see her. Mrs Amphlett goes to Italy in late September and then flies to Spain for the winter. I'm surprised Caroline didn't tell you. In her absence I look after the flat. Mrs Amphlett dislikes the melancholy of autumn and the cold of winter. A wealthy woman need suffer neither. I'm sure you are perfectly well aware of that, Mr Percival.'

And here, at last, was the opening he needed. He made himself look into those terrible bleeding eyes and said: 'I thought Caroline told me that her mother was poor, that she'd lost all her money investing in Peter Robarts's plastics company.'

The effect of his words was extraordinary. She flushed scarlet, the mottled stain travelling like a rash from her neck to her forehead. It seemed a long time before she could bring herself to speak, but when she did her voice was perfectly under control.

'Either you wilfully misunderstood, Mr Percival, or your memory is as unreliable for financial facts as it is for addresses. Caroline could have told you nothing of the sort. Her mother inherited a fortune from her grandfather when she was twenty-one and has never lost a penny of it. It was my small capital – ten thousand pounds, in case you are interested – which was unwisely invested in the schemes of that plausible rogue. But Caroline would hardly confide that small personal tragedy to a stranger.'

He could think of nothing to say, could find no credible explanation, no excuse. He had the proof he wanted; Caroline had lied. He should have been filled with triumph that his suspicions had been justified, his small enterprise crowned with success. Instead, he was swept with a momentary but overwhelming depression and a conviction which seemed to him as frightening as it was irrational, that the proof of Caroline's perfidy had been bought at a terrible price.

There was a silence in which she continued to regard him, but did not speak. Then she suddenly asked: 'What did you think of Caroline? Obviously she made an impression on you or you wouldn't be wishing to renew the acquaintance. And no doubt she has been in your mind during the last two years.'

'I think – I thought she was very lovely.'

'Yes, isn't she? I'm glad you feel that. I was her nurse, her nanny, if one must use that ridiculous expression. You could say that I brought her up. Does that surprise you? I'm hardly the popular idea of a nanny. Warm lap, aproned bosom, Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, prayers at bedtime, eat up your crusts or your hair won't curl. But I had my methods. Mrs Amphlett accompanied the Brigadier on his overseas postings and we stayed here together, just the two of us. Mrs Amphlett believed that a child should have stability provided she was not required to provide it. Of course, if Caroline had been a son it would have been different. The Amphletts have never valued daughters. Caroline did have a brother but he was killed in a friend's car when he was fifteen. Caroline was with them but survived almost without a scratch. I don't think her parents ever forgave her. They could never look at her without making it plain that the wrong child had been killed.'

Jonathan thought: I don't want to hear this, I don't want to listen. He said: 'She never told me that she had a brother. But she did mention you.'

'Did she indeed? She talked about me to you. Now you do surprise me, Mr Percival. Forgive me, but you are the last person I should have expected her to talk to about me.'

He thought: She knows; not the truth, but she knows that I'm not Charles Percival from Nottingham. And it seemed to him, meeting those extraordinary eyes in which the mixture of suspicion and contempt was unmistakable that she was allied to Caroline in a female conspiracy in which he had from the first been a hapless and despised victim. The knowledge fuelled his anger and gave him strength. But he said nothing.

After a moment, she went on: 'Mrs Amphlett kept me on after Caroline left home, even after the Brigadier passed on. But passed on is hardly an appropriate euphemism for a soldier. Perhaps I should say was called to higher service, recalled to the Colours, promoted to glory. Or is that the Salvation Army? I have a feeling that it's only the Salvation Army who get promoted to glory.'

He said: 'Caroline did tell me that her father was a professional soldier.'

'She has never been a very confiding girl but you seem to have gained her confidence, Mr Percival. So now I call myself a housekeeper rather than a nanny. My employer finds plenty to keep me occupied even when she isn't here. It would never do for Maxie and me to live here on board wages and enjoy ourselves in London, would it, Maxie? No indeed. A little skilled sewing. Private letters to be posted on. Bills to be paid. Her jewels to be taken to be cleaned. The flat to be redecorated. Mrs Amphlett particularly dislikes the smell of paint. And, of course, Maxie has to be exercised daily. He never thrives in kennels, do you, my treasure? I wonder what will happen to me when Maxie is promoted to glory?'

There was nothing he could say to that, nor, apparently, did she expect him to. After a moment's silence, during which she lifted the dog's paw and rubbed it gently against her face, she said: 'Caroline's old friends seem very anxious to get in touch with her all of a sudden. Someone telephoned to ask for her only on Tuesday. Or was it Wednesday? But perhaps that was you, Mr Percival?'

'No,' he said, and was amazed at the ease with which he could lie. 'No, I didn't telephone. I thought it better just to take my chance and call.'

'But you knew who to ask for. You knew my name. You gave it to Baggott.'

But she wasn't going to catch him like that. He said: 'I remembered it. As I said, Caroline did talk about you.'

'It might have been sensible to telephone first. I could have explained that she wasn't here, saved you time. How odd that it didn't occur to you. But that other friend didn't sound like you. Quite a different voice. Scottish, I think. If you will excuse my saying so, Mr Percival, your voice is without either character or distinction.'

Jonathan said: 'If you don't feel you can give me Caroline's address, perhaps I'd better go. I'm sorry if I came at an inconvenient time.'

'Why not write a letter to her, Mr Percival? I can let you have the writing paper. I don't think it would be right to give you her address but you can be confident that I will post on any communication that you care to trust to me.'

'She isn't in London, then?'

'No, she hasn't lived in London for over three years and she hasn't lived here since she was seventeen. But I do know where she is. We keep in touch. Your letter will be safe with me.'

He thought: This is an obvious trap. But she can't make me write. There must be nothing in my handwriting. Caroline would recognize it even if I tried to disguise it. He said: 'I think I'd rather write later when I've more time to think what to say. If I post it to this address then you can send it on.'

'I will do that with pleasure, Mr Percival. And now, I expect, you will want to be on your way. Your visit may have been less productive than you hoped, but I expect you have learned what you came to learn.'

But she didn't move and for a moment he felt himself trapped, immobilized as if the disagreeably soft and yielding cushions held him in a vice. He half expected her to leap up and bar his way to the door, to denounce him as an impostor, to keep him locked in the flat while she telephoned the police or the porter. What then would he do: attempt to seize the keys by force and make his escape, wait for the police and try to bluff his way to freedom? But the momentary panic subsided. She got to her feet and led the way to the door and, without speaking, held it open. She did not close it and he was aware that she was standing there, the dog shivering in her arms, both of them watching him leave. At the head of the stairs he turned to smile a final goodbye. What he then saw made him stand for a second immobile before he almost ran down the stairs and through the hall to the open door. He had never in all his life seen such concentrated hatred on a human face.

The whole enterprise had been more of a strain than Jonathan could have believed possible, and by the time he reached Liverpool Street he was very tired. The station was in the process of being rebuilt – improved, as the large displays designed to reassure and encourage proclaimed -and had become a clanging and confusing maze of temporary walkways and direction signs in which it was difficult actually to find the trains. Taking a false turn he found himself in a glossily floored piazza and felt momentarily as disorientated as if he were in a foreign capital. His arrival that morning had been less confusing, but now even the station reinforced his sense of having ventured both physically and emotionally on to alien ground.

Once the journey had started he leaned back, his eyes closed, and tried to make sense of the day and of his conflicting emotions. But instead, and almost immediately, he fell asleep and didn't stir into consciousness until the train was drawing into Norwich station. But the sleep had done him good. He strode towards the castle car park filled with renewed energy and optimism. He knew what he would do; drive at once to the bungalow, and confront Caroline with the evidence and ask her why she had lied. He couldn't go on seeing her and pretend not to know. They were lovers; they should be able to trust each other. If she was worried or frightened he was there to reassure and comfort her. He knew that she couldn't have murdered Hilary. The very thought was profanation. But she wouldn't have lied unless she was frightened. Something was dreadfully wrong. He would persuade her to go to the police, explain why she had lied and persuaded him to lie. They would go together, confess together. He didn't ask himself whether she would want to see him or even whether, late on a Saturday, she would be at home. All he knew was that the matter between them had to be settled now. There was a rightness and inevitability about his decision and he felt, too, a small surge of power. She had thought him a gullible and ineffectual fool. Well, he would show her that she was wrong. From now on there would be a subtle change in their relationship; she would have a more confident, less malleable lover.

Forty minutes later he was driving through the darkness across flat, undistinguished country towards the bungalow. Slowing down as it came into sight on his left, he was struck afresh by how remote and unattractive it was and wondered again why, with so many villages closer to Larksoken, with the attractions of Norwich and the coast, she should have rented this forbidding, almost sinister little box of crude red brick. And the very word bungalow seemed to him ridiculous, evoking a picture of suburban ribbon development, of cosy respectability, of old people who could no longer manage stairs. Caroline should live in a tower with a wide view of the sea.

And then he saw her. The silver Golf came out from the drive very fast and accelerated eastward. She was wearing what looked like a woollen cap pulled down over her yellow hair but he knew her immediately. He didn't know whether she had recognized him or the Fiesta, but instinctively he braked and let her get almost out of sight before he followed. And, waiting in the quietness of that flat landscape, he could hear Remus barking hysterically.

He was surprised how easy it was to keep her in sight. Sometimes another car passing him would obscure his view of the silver Golf and occasionally, when she slowed for traffic lights or because they had reached a village, he had quickly to reduce speed in case she realized that he was on her tail. They passed through Lydsett village and she took the right turn across the headland. By now he feared that she must have recognized him, must know that she was being followed, but she went on apparently uncaring. When she had negotiated the gate he waited until she was out of sight over the ridge before following, then stopped, put out the car lights and went a little way on foot. He saw that she was picking someone up; a slim girl with spiked yellow hair, orange at the tips, was briefly illuminated in the headlights. The car turned north along the coast road, inland at the power station, then north again. Forty minutes later their destination was known, the quay at Wells-next-the-Sea.

He parked the Fiesta beside the Golf and followed them, keeping Caroline's blue and white cap in sight. They walked quickly, apparently unspeaking and neither of them looked back. At the quay he momentarily lost them and then he saw that they were getting on a boat. And now was his chance; he had to speak to Caroline. He almost ran towards them. They were already on board. It was a small craft, no more than fifteen feet long with a low central cabin and an outboard motor. Both girls were standing in the cockpit. As he came up Caroline turned to him. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

'I want to talk to you. I've been following you since you left the bungalow.'

'I know that, you fool. You've been in my mirror practically the whole way. If I'd wanted to throw you off it wouldn't have been difficult. You should give up this cloak-and-dagger business. It doesn't suit you and you're no good at it.'

But there was no anger in her voice, only a kind of irritated weariness. He said: 'Caroline, I have to talk to you.'

'Then wait until tomorrow. Or stay where you are if you must. We'll be back in an hour.'

'But where are you going? What are you doing?'

'For Christ's sake, what do you think I'm doing? This is a boat, my boat. Out there is the sea. Amy and I are planning a short trip.'

Amy, he thought, Amy who? But Caroline didn't introduce her. He said weakly: 'But it's so late. It's dark and it's getting misty.'

'So it's dark and misty. This is October. Look, Jonathan, why don't you mind your own business and get off home to mother.'

She was busying herself in the cockpit. He leaned over and clutched the side of the boat, feeling the gentle rock of the tide. He said: 'Caroline, please talk to me! Don't go. I love you.'

'I doubt it.'

Both of them seemed to have forgotten Amy. He said desperately: 'I know that you lied about your mother being ruined by Hilary's father. That wasn't true, any of it. Look, if you're in trouble I want to help. We've got to talk. I can't go on like this.'

'I'm not in trouble, and if I were you'd be the last person I'd turn to. And take your hands off my boat.'

He said, as if it were the most important thing between them: 'Your boat? You never told me you had a boat.'

'There are a great many things that I didn't tell you.'

And then, suddenly, he knew. There was no longer room for doubt. 'So it wasn't real was it, any of it? You don't love me, you never did love me.'

'Love, love, love. Stop bleating the word, Jonathan. Look, go home. Stand in front of your glass and take a good long look at yourself. How could you ever have supposed that it was real? This is real, Amy and me. She is why I stay at Larksoken and I am why she stays. Now you know.'

'You used me.'

He knew that he sounded like a querulous child.

'Yes, I used you. We used each other. When we went to bed I was using you and you were using me. That's what sex is. And, if you want to know, it was bloody hard work and it made me sick.'

Even in the throes of his misery and humiliation he could sense an urgency in her that had nothing to do with him. The cruelty was deliberate but it had no passion in it. It would have been more bearable if it had. His presence was merely an irritating but minor intrusion into more important preoccupations. Now the end of the rope had whipped clear of the bollard. She had started the engine and the boat was edging away from the quay. And for the first time he really noticed the other girl. She hadn't spoken since he arrived. She stood silently beside Caroline in the cockpit, unsmiling, shivering slightly, and somehow vulnerable, and he thought he saw on her childish face a look of puzzled compassion before his tears began to sting and the boat and its occupants became an amorphous blur. He waited until they were almost out of sight moving on the dark water, and then he made another decision. He would find a pub, have a beer and some food and be there when they returned. They couldn't be away long or they would miss the tide. And he had to know the truth. He couldn't spend another night in this uncertainty. He stood on the quay staring out to sea as if the little boat with its two occupants was still in sight, then turned away and dragged his feet towards the nearest pub.

The throb of the engine, unnaturally loud, shook the quiet air. Amy half expected doors to open, people to come running down to the quay, to hear protesting voices calling after them. Caroline made a movement and the noise died in a gentle murmur. The boat gently moved away from the quay. Amy said angrily: 'Who is he? Who is that creep?'

'Just a man from Larksoken. His name's Jonathan Reeves. He's unimportant.'

'Why did you tell him lies? Why did you tell him lies about us? We're not lovers.'

'Because it was necessary. What does it matter anyway? It isn't important.'

'It's important to me. Look at me, Caroline. I'm talking to you.'

But still Caroline didn't meet her eyes. She said calmly: 'Wait until we get clear of the harbour. There's something I have to tell you, but I want to get into deep water and I need to concentrate. Get up to the prow and keep a lookout.'

Amy stood for a moment irresolute, and then she obeyed, working her way carefully along the narrow deck, clutching the rim of the low cabin roof. She wasn't sure she liked the hold that Caroline apparently had over her. It was nothing to do with the money, which was paid irregularly and anonymously into her post office account or left hidden in the abbey ruins. It wasn't even the excitement and the secret sense of power which she gained from being part of a conspiracy. Perhaps after that first meeting in the pub at Islington which had led to her recruitment to Operation Birdcall she had subconsciously made a decision to give her loyalty and obedience and, now that the test had come, she was unable to shake off that unspoken allegiance.

Looking back she could see that the lights in the harbour were growing fainter, the windows becoming little squares of light and then pinpricks. The engine stuttered into greater life and, standing on the prow, she could feel the great power of the North Sea beneath her, the hiss of the parting water, see the unbroken waves smooth and black as oil emerging out of the mist, could feel the boat lifting, shuddering, and then settling. After ten minutes of watching she left her post and made her way back to the cockpit. She said: 'Look, we're well away from land now. What's going on? Did you have to tell him that? I know I'm supposed to keep away from people at Larksoken, but I'll find him, and I'll tell him the truth.'

Caroline was still standing motionless at the tiller, looking straight ahead. In her left hand she held a compass. She said: 'We won't be going back. That's what I have to tell you.'

Before Amy could even open her mouth she said: 'Look, don't start getting hysterical and don't argue. You're entitled to an explanation and if you keep quiet you'll get it. I've no option now; you have to know the truth, or some of the truth.'

'What truth? What are you talking about? And why aren't we going back? You said we'd only be gone about an hour. You said we were going out to meet some comrades offshore and get some new instructions. I left a note for Neil saying I wouldn't be long. I've got to get back to Timmy.'

But still Caroline didn't look at her. She said: 'We're not going back because we can't. When I recruited you from that London squat I didn't tell you the truth. It wasn't in your interest and I didn't know how far I could trust you. And I didn't know the whole truth myself, only as much as I needed to know. That's the way the operation works. Operation Birdcall is nothing to do with taking over Larksoken in the cause of animal rights. It's nothing to do with animals. It's nothing to do with threatened whales and sick seals and tormented laboratory animals and abandoned dogs and all the other spurious miseries you agonize about. It's to do with something far more important. It's to do with human beings and their future. It's to do with the way we organize our world.'

She was speaking very low and with an extraordinary intensity. Amy said above the noise of the engine: 'I can't hear you! I can't hear you properly. Turn off that engine!'

'Not yet. We've still a long way to go. We're meeting them at a precise spot. We have to sail south-east then take a bearing on the power station offshore structures and the Happisburgh light: I hope this mist doesn't thicken.'

'Who? Who are we meeting?'

'I don't know their names and I don't know their place in the organization. As I said, we are all of us told only as much as we actually need to know. My instructions were that if Operation Birdcall was blown I was to ring a number and activate the emergency procedure for getting me out. That's why I bought this boat and made sure it was always ready. I was told precisely where they'll pick us up. Then they'll get us into Germany, provide false papers, a new identity, incorporate us into the organization, find us a job.'

'Not for me they bloody well won't!' Amy looked at Caroline with horror. 'They're terrorists, aren't they? And you're one too. You're a bloody terrorist!'

Caroline said calmly: 'And what else are the agents of capitalism? What are the armies, the police, the courts? What are the industrialists, the multinational corporations who hold down three-quarters of the world's population and keep them poor and hungry? Don't use words you don't understand.'

'I understand that word. And don't you patronize me. You crazy or something? What were you planning, for Christ's sakes, to sabotage the reactor, release all that radioactivity, worse than Chernobyl, kill everyone on the headland, Timmy and Neil, Smudge and Whisky?'

'We wouldn't need to sabotage the reactors or release any radioactivity. The threat would be sufficient once we'd taken over the power stations,'

'The stations? How many? Where?'

'One here, one in France, one in Germany. The action would be co-ordinated and it would be sufficient. It's not what we could do when we had taken them over, it's what people would think we could do. War is out of date and unnecessary. We don't need armies. All we need are a few trained, intelligent and dedicated comrades with the necessary skills. What you call terrorism can change the world, and it's more cost-effective in human life than the militaristic industry of death which my father made his career. They've only one thing in common. A soldier, in the end, has to be prepared to die for this cause. Well, so are we.'

Amy cried: 'It can't happen! Governments won't let it happen!'

'It is happening and they can't stop it. They aren't united enough and they haven't the will. This is just the beginning.'

Amy looked at her. She said: 'Stop this boat. I'm getting off.'

'And swim ashore? You'd either drown or freeze to death. And in this mist.'

Amy hadn't noticed the thickening mist. One moment it seemed to her that she could see the distant lights of the shore, like stars, almost she could see the blackness of the slopping waves, could peer ahead. But now, slowly and inexorably, there was a clammy wetness. She cried: 'Oh God, take me back. You've got to get me off. Get me off. I want Timmy. I want Neil.'

'I can't do that, Amy. Look, if you don't want to be part of all this just say so when the boat arrives. They'll put you ashore somewhere. It won't be on this coast necessarily, but somewhere. We don't want reluctant recruits. There would be enough trouble as it is fitting you up with a new identity. But if you didn't want to be part of it, didn't want to be committed, why did you kill Hilary Robarts? D'you think we wanted a murder investigation centred on Larksoken, police attention, Rickards actually on the site, every suspect's past scrutinized, nothing left private? And if Rickards had arrested you, how sure could I be that you wouldn't crack, tell him about Operation Birdcall, turn Queen's evidence?'

Amy cried: 'Are you crazy? I'm on this boat with a bloody crazy woman. I didn't kill her.'

'Then who did? Pascoe? That's almost as dangerous.'

'How could he? He was on his way back from Norwich. We lied to Rickards about the time but he was back at the caravan by 9.15 and we were there together all the evening with Timmy. And all that business about the Whistler cutting her forehead, the hair, we never knew any of that. I thought you killed her.'

'Why should I?'

'Because she discovered Operation Birdcall. Isn't that why you're running, because you've got no option?'

'You're right that I've got no option. But it's not because of Robarts. She didn't find out. How could she? But someone did. It isn't only the Hilary Robarts murder. They've started checking up on me, the security services. Somehow they've got a lead, probably from one of the German cells or from a mole in the IRA.'

'How do you know? You could be running away for nothing.'

'There are too many coincidences. That last postcard you hid in the abbey ruins. I told you it was put back the wrong way. Someone had read it.'

'Anyone could have found it. And the message wouldn't have meant anything. It never meant anything to me.'

'Found it in late September when the picnic season's well over? Found it and carefully put it back? And that wasn't all. They've checked on my mother's flat. She has a housekeeper who used to be my nanny. She rang to let me know earlier today. I didn't wait after that. I sent the signal to say I was getting out.'

On their starboard side the occasional lights of the shore were blurred by the mist but still visible. And the throb of the engine sounded less intrusive now, almost a gentle companionable hum. Or perhaps, thought Amy, she had got used to it. But it seemed extraordinary to be moving so quietly and steadily through the darkness, hearing Caroline's voice saying unbelievable things, talking about terrorism and flight and betrayal as calmly as if she were discussing the details of a picnic. And Amy needed to hear, needed to know. She found herself saying: 'Where did you meet them, these people you're working for?'

'In Germany when I was seventeen. My nanny was ill and I had to spend the summer holiday with my parents. My father was stationed there. He didn't take much notice of me, but someone else did.'

'But that was years ago.'

'They know how to wait and so do I.'

'And this nanny-housekeeper, is she a member of Birdcall too?'

'She knows nothing, absolutely nothing. She's the last person I'd choose. She's a silly old fool who's hardly worth her bed and board, but my mother finds a use for her, and so do I. She hates my mother, and I've told her that Mummy is checking on my life and to let me know at once if there are any telephone calls for me or any visitors. It helps make her life with Mummy tolerable. It makes her feel important, helps her to believe that I care about her, that I love her.'

'Do you? Do you love her?'

'I did once. A child has to love someone. I grew out of it and I grew out of her. Well, there was a call and there was a visitor. On Tuesday a Scot, or someone pretending to be a Scot rang. And today a visitor came.'

'What sort of visitor?'

'A young man who said he'd met me in France. It was a lie. He was an impostor. He was from MI5. Who else could have sent him?'

'But you can't be sure. Not sure enough to send that signal, leave everything, put yourself in their mercy.'

'I can. Look, who else could it have been? There were three separate incidents, the postcard, the telephone call, the visitor. What else should I wait for? The security services kicking down my door?'

'What was he like, this man?'

'Young. Nervous. Not very attractive. Not particularly convincing either. Even Nanny didn't believe him.'

'Funny kind of MI5 officer. Couldn't they do better than that?'

'He was supposed to be someone I'd met in France who fancied me and wanted to see me again and had steeled himself actually to call at the flat. Of course he appeared young and nervous. That's the kind of man they'd send. They'd hardly choose a seasoned forty-year-old veteran from Curzon Street. They know how to select the right man for the job. That's their business. He was the right man, all right. Perhaps he wasn't even meant to be convincing. Perhaps they were trying to scare me, get me to react, flush me out.'

'Well, you have reacted, haven't you? But if you're wrong, wrong about it all, what will they do, the people you work for? You've blown Operation Birdcall by running away.'

'This operation has been aborted but the future won't be jeopardized. My instructions were to telephone if there was firm evidence that we'd been discovered. And there was. And that's not all. My telephone is being bugged.'

'You can't possibly tell that.'

'I can't tell it for certain, but I know.'

Suddenly Amy cried: 'What did you do about Remus? Did you feed him, leave him water?'

'Of course not. This has to look like an accident. They've got to believe that we're lesbian lovers who went for an evening boat trip and were drowned. They've got to believe that we only intended to be away for a couple of hours. He gets fed at seven. They've got to find him hungry and thirsty.'

'But they might not start looking for you until Monday! He'll be frantic, barking and whining. There's no one close to hear. You bloody bitch!'

Suddenly she flew at Caroline, screaming obscenities, clawing at her face. But the girl was too strong for her. Hands gripped her wrists like steel bands and she found herself hurled back against the boards. Through the tears of rage and self-pity she whispered: 'But why? Why?'

'For a cause worth dying for. There aren't many of those.'

'Nothing's worth dying for, except maybe another person, someone you love. I'd die for Timmy.'

'That's not a cause, that's sentimentality.'

'And if I want to die for a cause I'll bloody well choose it myself. And it won't be for terrorism. It won't be for bastards who put bombs in pubs and blow up my friends and don't give a damn about ordinary people, because we're not important, are we?'

Caroline said: 'You must have suspected something. You're not educated but you're not stupid, either. I wouldn't have chosen you if I couldn't be sure of that. You never questioned me and you wouldn't have got an answer if you had, but you couldn't have thought that we were going to all that trouble for frightened kittens or butchered seal pups.'

Had she thought that? Amy wondered. Perhaps the truth was that she had believed in the intention but never that it would actually be carried out. She hadn't doubted their will, only their ability. And in the meantime it had been fun to be part of the conspiracy. She had enjoyed the excitement, the knowledge that she had a secret from Neil, the half-simulated frisson of fear as she left the caravan after dark to plant the postcards in the ruins of the abbey.

She had hidden behind a broken breakwater almost laughing aloud that night when she had nearly been caught by Mrs Dennison and Mr Dalgliesh. And the money had been useful, too; generous payment for so small a task. And there had been the dream, the picture of a flag whose design was as yet unknown, but which they would raise over the power station and which would command respect, obedience, instant response. They would be saying to the whole world, 'Stop it. Stop it now.' They would be speaking for the captive zoo animals, the threatened whales, the polluted, sick seals, the tormented laboratory animals, the terrified beasts driven into the abattoirs to the smell of blood and their own death, the hens crowded together, unable even to peck, for the whole of the abused and exploited animal world. But it had been only a dream. This was reality; the insubstantial boards under her feet, the dark suffocating mist, the oily waves slapping against their frail craft. The reality was death, there was no other. Everything in her life, from the moment she had met Caroline in that Islington pub and they had walked back to the squat together, had led to this moment of truth, this terror.

She moaned: 'I want Timmy. What about my baby? I want my baby.'

'You won't have to leave him, not permanently. They'll find a way of reuniting you.'

'Don't be daft. What sort of life would he have with a terrorist gang? They'll write him off like they write off everyone else.'

Caroline said: 'What about your parents? Won't they take him? Can't they look after him?'

'Are you crazy? I ran away from home because my stepfather knocked Ma about. When he started on me I walked out. Do you think I'd let him have Timmy, him or her?'

Her mother had seemed to like the violence, or at least had liked what came after it. Those two years before she ran away had taught Amy one lesson; have sex only with men who want you more than you want them.

Caroline asked: 'What about Pascoe? Are you sure he knows nothing?'

'Of course he doesn't. We weren't even lovers. He didn't want me and I didn't want him.'

But there was someone she had wanted, and she had a sudden vivid memory of lying with Alex in the dunes, the smell of sea and sand and sweat, his grave ironic face. Well, she wasn't going to tell Caroline about Alex. She had one secret of her own. She would keep it.

She thought of the curious paths by which she had come to this moment in time, to this place. Perhaps if she drowned her whole life would flash before her as it was said to do, everything experienced, understood, made sense of in that final annihilating moment. But now she saw the past as a series of coloured slides, clicking in quick succession, an image briefly received, an emotion barely experienced before it disappeared. Suddenly she was shivering violently. She said: 'I'm cold.'

'I said to come with warm clothes and nothing else. That jumper isn't enough.'

'These are the only warm clothes I've got.'

'On the headland? What do you wear in winter?'

'Sometimes Neil lends me his greatcoat. We share. Whichever one of us goes out gets the coat. We were thinking we might get one for me from the Old Rectory jumble.'

Caroline took off her jacket. She said: 'Here, put this round you.'

'No, that's yours. I don't want it.' 'Put it on.'

'I said I don't want it.'

But like a child she let Caroline push her arms into the sleeves, stood obediently while the jacket was fastened. Then she crouched down, almost wedging herself under the narrow seat which ran round the boat, shutting out the horror of those silently advancing waves. It seemed to Amy that she felt for the first time and with every nerve the inexorable power of the sea. She saw in imagination her pale and lifeless body plummeting through the miles of wet darkness to the sea bed, to the skeletons of long-drowned sailors where the uncaring creatures swam between the ribs of ancient ships. And the mist, less thick now but mysteriously more frightening, had become a living thing, gently swirling and soundlessly breathing, stealing her own breath so that she found herself panting, insinuating its damp horror into every pore. It seemed impossible to believe that somewhere there was land, lighted windows behind the drawn curtains, light spilling from the doors of pubs, laughing voices, people sitdng in warmth and safety. She saw the caravan as she had seen it so often, returning from Norwich after dark, a sturdy rectangle of wood which seemed rooted to the headland defying the gales and the sea, the warm glow from its windows, the twist of smoke rising from the stack. She thought of Timmy and Neil. How long would Neil wait until he called the police? He wasn't one to act in a hurry. After all, she wasn't a child, she had a right to leave. He might do nothing until morning, and perhaps even then he would wait. But it wouldn't matter. There was nothing the police could do. No one except that desolate figure on the quay knew where they were and if he raised the alarm it would be too late. It was useless to believe even in the reality of the terrorists. They were marooned here in black dampness. They would circle and circle until the fuel ran out and then drift out to sea until a coaster ran them down.

She no longer had any sense of passing time. The rhythmic throbbing of the engine had lulled her, not into peace but into a dulled acquiescence in which she was aware only of the wood hard against her back, of Caroline standing intent and motionless in the cockpit.

The engine died. For a few seconds the silence was absolute. Then, as the boat gently lurched, Amy heard the creak of wood, the slap of water. She breathed a suffocating wetness, felt its cold seeping through the jacket, into her bones. It seemed impossible that anyone could find them in this bleak expanse of water and emptiness and she had ceased to care whether they did.

Caroline said: 'This is the place. This is where they're going to meet us. We'll just have to circle here until they come.'

Amy heard the engine again, but this time it was an almost imperceptible throb. And suddenly she knew. There was no conscious process of reasoning, only a blinding and terrifying certainty which burst upon her with the clarity of a vision. There was a second in which her heart froze, leapt and its strong drumming powered her body into life. She almost sprang to her feet. 'They're not going to put me ashore, are they? They're going to kill me. You know it. You've known it all along. You've brought me here to be killed.'

Caroline's eyes were fixed on the two lights, the intermittent flash from the lighthouse, the glitter from the offshore structures. She said coldly: 'Don't be hysterical.'

'They can't risk letting me go. I know too much. And you said yourself that I wouldn't be much use to them. Look, you've got to help me. Tell them how useful I was, make believe I'm worth keeping. If I can only get ashore, somehow I'll make a break for it. But I have to have a chance. Caroline, you've got me into this. You must help me. I have to get ashore. Listen to me! Listen to me, Caroline! We've got to talk.'

'You are talking. And what you're saying is ludicrous.'

'Is it? Is it, Caroline?'

She knew now that she mustn't plead. She wanted to throw herself at Caroline's feet and scream: 'Look at me. I'm human. I'm a woman. I want to live. My child needs me. I'm not much of a mother but I'm the only one he has. Help me.' But she knew with an instinctive wisdom born of desperation that abject pleading, clutching hands, sobs, whining entreaties, would only repel. She was speaking for her life. She had to stay calm, to rely on reason. She had somehow to find the right words. She said: 'It isn't only me, it's you too. This could be a choice of life or death for both of us. They won't want you either. You were only useful to them while you worked at Larksoken, while you could pass on to them details of how the place was run, who was on duty and when. Now you're a liability, the same as me. There's no difference. What kind of work can you do for them that will make it worthwhile supporting you, setting you up with a new identity? They can't find you a job in another power station. And if MI5 are really on to you they'll still be looking. They might not believe so easily in the accident, not if our bodies aren't washed up. And our bodies won't be washed up, will they? Not unless they kill us and that's what they're planning to do. What are two more bodies to them? Why meet us here? Why so far? They could have picked us up much closer to land. They could have got us out by air if they'd really needed us. Caroline, go back. It isn't too late. You could tell the people you work for that it wasn't safe to come, the mist was too thick. They'll find another way to get you out if you want to go. I won't talk, I wouldn't dare. I promise you with my life. We can go back now and it will just have been two friends who took a boat trip and came back safely. It's my life, Caroline, and it could be yours. You gave me your jacket. I'm asking for my life.'

She didn't touch Caroline. She knew that the wrong gesture, perhaps any gesture, could be fatal. But she knew, too, that the silent figure staring rigidly ahead was at the moment of decision. And, gazing at that carved intent face, Amy realized for the first time in her life that she was utterly alone. Even her lovers, seen now as a passing procession of strained beseeching faces and grasping exploring hands, had been only casual strangers giving her the fleeting illusion that a life could be shared. And she had never known Caroline, could never know her, never begin to understand what in her past, perhaps in her childhood, had led to this dangerous conspiracy, this moment of decision. They were physically so close that each could hear, could almost smell, the other's breath. But each was alone, as much alone as if this wide sea held no other craft, no other living soul. They might be fated to die together, but each could suffer only her own death as each had lived only her own life. And there was nothing left to say. She had pleaded her cause and the words were all spent. Now she waited in the darkness and the silence to know whether she would live or die.

It seemed to her that even time had stopped. Caroline put out her hand and switched off the engine. In the eerie silence Amy could hear, like a low insistent pounding, the beating of her heart. And then Caroline spoke. Her voice was calm, reflective, as if Amy had posed her a difficult problem which needed thought to solve.

'We have to get away from the meeting place. We haven't enough power to outrun them if they find us and give chase. Our only hope is to put out all the lights, get away from this place and lie silent hoping they won't find us in the mist.'

'Can't we get back to the harbour?'

'There isn't time. It's over ten miles and they'll have a powerful engine. If they find us they'll be on to us in seconds. The mist is our only chance.'

And then they heard, blunted by the fog but clearly, the sound of an approaching boat. Instinctively they moved closer together in the cockpit and waited, not daring even to whisper. Each knew that their only chance now lay in silence, the mist, the hope that their small craft would be undetected. But the engine noise increased and became a regular, directionless, vibrating throb. And then, when they had thought that the boat would loom out of the darkness and be on them, the noise grew no louder and Amy guessed that they were being slowly circled. Then suddenly she screamed. The searchlight cut through the mist and shone full on their faces. The light dazzled so that she could see nothing but its own giant cone in which the particles of mist swam like motes of silver light. A rough, foreign voice called: 'Is that the Lark out of Wells harbour?'

There was a moment's silence and then Amy heard Caroline's voice. It was clear and loud but to Amy's ears it signalled a high note of fear. 'No. We're a party of four friends from Yarmouth, but we'll probably put in at Wells. We're all right. No help needed, thank you.'

But the searchlight didn't move. The boat was held as if suspended between sea and sky in a blaze of light. The seconds passed. Nothing more was said. Then the light was switched off and they heard again the sound of the retreating engines. For a minute, still waiting, still frightened to speak, they shared a common desperate hope that the ruse had worked. And then they knew. The light held them again. And now the engines were roaring and the boat came straight at them out of the mist with only time for Caroline to place an icy cheek against Amy's. She said: 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

And then the great hull towered above them. Amy heard the crack as the wood splintered and the boat leapt out of the water. She felt herself hurled through an eternity of wet darkness and then falling endlessly falling, spread-eagled in space and time. Then there was the smack of the sea and a coldness so icy that for a few seconds she felt nothing. She came back to consciousness as she surfaced, gasping and fighting for breath, no more aware of the cold, feeling only the agony of a metal band crushing her chest, terror, and the desperate fight to keep her head above water, to survive. Something hard scraped against her face, then floated free. She thrashed out with flailing arms and fastened on a plank of wood from the boat. It offered at least a chance. She rested her arms on it and felt the blessed release of strain. And now she was capable of

rational thought. The plank might support her until morning light and the fog lifted. But she would be dead of cold and exhaustion long before then. Somehow to swim ashore was her only hope, but which way lay the shore? If the mist lifted she would be able to see the lights, perhaps even the light of the caravan. Neil would be there waving to her. But that was silly. The caravan was miles away. Neil would be desperately worried by now. And she had never finished those envelopes. Timmy might be crying for her. She had to get back to Timmy.

But in the end the sea was merciful. The cold that numbed her arms so that she could no longer hold on to the plank numbed also her mind. She was slipping into unconsciousness when the searchlight again found her. She was beyond thought, beyond fear when the boat turned and came driving at full power into her body. And then there was silence and darkness and a single plank of wood gently bobbing where the sea was stained red.

It was after eight before Rickards got home on Saturday night but this was still earlier than usual and, for the first time in weeks, he was able to feel that an evening stretched ahead with its choices; a leisurely meal, television, radio, a gentle undemanding catching-up with household chores, telephoning Susie, an early bed. But he was restless. Faced with a few hours of leisure he was uncertain what to do with them. For a moment he wondered whether to go out for a solitary restaurant meal, but the effort of choosing, the expense, even the bother of booking seemed disproportionate to any possible pleasure. He showered and changed as if the steaming water were a ritual cleansing away of his job, of murder and failure, which might give the evening before him some meaning, some pleasure. Then he opened a tin of baked beans, grilled four sausages and a couple of tomatoes and carried his tray into the sitting room to eat while watching television.

At 9.20 he switched off the set and, for a few minutes, sat immobile with the tray still on his lap. He thought that he must look like one of those modern paintings, Man with a Tray, a stiff figure immobilized in an ordinary setting made unordinary, even sinister. As he sat, trying to summon the energy even to wash up, the familiar depression settled on him, the sense that he was a stranger in his own house. He had felt more at home in that fire-lit, stone-walled room at Larksoken Mill, drinking Dalgliesh's whisky, than he did here in his own sitting room in his familiar, tightly upholstered chair, eating his own food. And it wasn't only the absence of Susie, the heavily pregnant ghost in the opposite chair. He found himself comparing the two rooms, seeking a clue to his different responses to a deepening dejection of which the sitting room seemed partly a symbol, partly a cause. It wasn't only that the mill had a real wood fire, hissing and spitting real sparks and smelling of autumn, while his was synthetic, nor that Dalgliesh's furniture was old, polished by centuries of use, arranged purely for convenience not for show, not even that the paintings were real oils, genuine watercolours, or that the whole room had been put together with no apparent sense that anything in it was particularly highly regarded for its own sake. Above all, he decided, the difference surely lay in the books, the two walls covered with shelves holding books of every age and description, books for use, for pleasure in the reading and the handling. His own small collection, and Susie's, was in the bedroom. Susie had decreed that the books were too diverse, too tattered to be worthy of a place in what she called the lounge, and there weren't many of them. In recent years he had had so little time for reading; a collection of modern adventure novels in paperback, four volumes of a book club to which, for a couple of years, he had belonged, a few hardback travel books, police manuals, Susie's school prizes for neatness and needlework. But a child should be brought up with books. He had read somewhere that it was the best possible beginning to life, to be surrounded with books, to have parents who encouraged reading. Perhaps they could fit shelves each side of the fireplace and make a start. Dickens: he had enjoyed Dickens at school; Shakespeare, of course, and the major English poets. His daughter – neither he nor Susie doubted that the baby would be a girl – would learn to love poetry.

But all that would have to wait. He could at least make a start with the housework. The room's air of dull pretentiousness was partly due, he realized, to dirt. It looked like an uncleaned hotel room in which no one took pride because no guest was expected and those few who came wouldn't care. He realized now that he should have kept on Mrs Adcock who came in to clean for three hours every Wednesday. But she had only worked for them in the last two months of Susie's pregnancy. He had hardly met her and he disliked the thought of handing over house keys to a comparative stranger, more from his love of privacy than from any lack of trust. So, despite Susie's misgivings, he had paid Mrs Adcock a retainer and had said that he could cope. Now he added his supper things to a load of crockery in the dishwasher and took a duster from those neatly folded in the drawer. Dust lay heavy on every surface. In the sitting room he drew the duster along the window sill and saw with wonder the black line of grimed dirt.

He moved next to the hall. The cyclamen on the table beside the telephone had unaccountably wilted despite his hurried daily watering, perhaps because of it. He was standing, duster in hand, wondering whether to throw it out or whether rescue was possible, when his ears caught the crunch of wheels on the gravel. He opened the door, then flung it wide with such force that it swung back and the latch clicked. Then he was at the taxi door, gently receiving the swollen figure into his arms.

'My darling, oh my darling, why didn't you ring?'

She leaned against him. He saw with compassion the white transparent skin, the smudges under her eyes. He seemed to feel even beneath the thick tweed of her coat the stirring of his child.

'I didn't wait. Mummy had only gone up the road to see Mrs Blenkinsop. I just had time to ring for a taxi and leave her a note. I had to come. You're not cross?'

'Oh, my love, my darling. Are you all right?'

'Only tired.' She laughed. 'Darling, you've let the door close. You'll have to use my key.'

He took her handbag from her, rummaged for the key and her purse, paid the driver who had placed her one case by the door. His hands were shaking so that he could hardly fit the key in the lock. He half lifted her over the threshold and lowered her on to the hall chair.

'Sit there a moment, darling, while I see to the case.'

'Terry, the cyclamen is dead. You've overwatered it.'

'No, I haven't. It died missing you.'

She laughed. The sound was strong, a happy, contented peal. He wanted to lift her up into his arms and shout aloud. Suddenly serious, she said: 'Has Mummy phoned?'

'Not yet, but she will.'

And then, as if on cue, the telephone rang. He snatched it up. This time, awaiting the sound of his mother-in-law's voice he was totally without fear, without anxiety. By that one magnificent, affirming action Susie had placed them both forever beyond her mother's destructive reach. He felt that he had been lifted out of misery as if by a huge wave and set for ever with his feet firmly on a rock. There was a second in which he saw Susie's look of anxiety, so acute that it was a spasm of pain, and then she got clumsily to her feet and leaned against him, slipping her hand into his. But the caller wasn't Mrs Cartwright.

Oliphant said: 'Jonathan Reeves has rung headquarters, sir, and they've put him on to me. He says that Caroline Amphlett and Amy Camm have gone boating together. They've been gone three hours now and the mist is getting thicker.'

'Then why did he ring the police? He should have got on to the coast guard.'

'I've already done that, sir. That wasn't really why he phoned. He and Amphlett didn't spend last Sunday evening together. She was on the headland. He wanted to tell us that Amphlett lied. So did he.'

'I don't suppose they're the only ones. We'll pull them in first thing tomorrow morning and hear their explanations. I've no doubt she'll come up with one.'

Oliphant said stolidly: 'But why should she lie if she's got nothing to hide? And it isn't just the false alibi. Reeves says that their love affair was only pretence, that she only pretended to care for him to cover up her lesbian affair with Camm. I reckon the two women were in it together, sir. Amphlett must have known that Robarts swam at night. All the staff at Larksoken knew that. And she worked closely with Mair, none closer. She's his PA. He could have told her all the details of that dinner party, how the Whistler operated. There'd be no problem in getting hold of the Bumbles. Camm knew about the jumble box even if Amphlett didn't. Her kid had clothes from it.'

Rickards said: 'There'd be no trouble in getting hold of the shoes. There might be trouble in wearing them. Neither woman is tall.'

Oliphant dismissed what he probably felt was a puerile objection. He said: 'But they would have had no time to try them on. Better to grab a pair too large than too small, a soft shoe rather than unyielding leather. And Camm's got a motive, sir. A double motive. She threatened Robarts after her kid was pushed over. We've got Mrs Jago's evidence of their quarrel. And if Camm wanted to stay on in the caravan, close to her lover, it was important to put a stop to Robarts's libel action against Pascoe. And Camm almost certainly knew exactly where Robarts took her nightly swim. If Amphlett didn't tell her, Pascoe probably did. He admitted to us that he used to sneak out occasionally to spy on her. Dirty-minded little devil. And there's another thing. Camm has a dog lead, remember. So has Amphlett, come to that. Reeves said that she was exercising her dog on the headland Sunday night.'

'There were no paw marks at the scene, Sergeant. Don't let's get too excited. She might have been at the scene, but the dog wasn't.'

'Kept in the car, sir. Maybe she didn't have him with her but I reckon she used the lead. There's another thing. Those two wine-glasses in Thyme Cottage. I reckon Caroline Amphlett was with Robarts before she went for that last swim. She's Mair's PA. Robarts would have let her in without question. It all adds up, sir. It's a watertight case, sir.'

Rickards thought that it was as watertight as a sieve. But Oliphant was right. There was a case, even if there wasn't as yet a scintilla of proof. He mustn't let his feelings about the man cloud his judgement. And one fact was depressingly obvious. If he arrested another suspect this theory, for all the lack of firm evidence, would be a gift to any defence counsel.

He said: 'Ingenious, but it's totally circumstantial. Anyway, it can wait until tomorrow. There's nothing we can do tonight.'

'We ought to see Reeves, sir. He may change his story before morning.'

'You see him. And let me know when Camm and Amphlett get back. I'll see you at Hoveton at eight. We'll pull them in then. And I don't want them questioned, either of them, until I see them tomorrow. Is that understood?'

'Yes, sir. Goodnight, sir.'

When he had replaced the receiver, Susie said: 'If you think you ought to go, darling, don't worry about me. I'll be all right now I'm home.'

'It's not urgent. Oliphant can cope. He likes being in charge. Let's make him a happy Jumbo.'

'But I don't want to be a trouble to you, darling. Mummy thought that life would be better for you with me away.'

He turned and took her in his arms. He felt his own tears warm on her face. He said: 'Life is never better for me when you're away.'

The bodies were washed up two days later two miles south of Hunstanton, or enough of them to make identification certain. On the Monday morning a retired tax officer, exercising his Dalmatian dog on the beach, saw the animal sniffing round what looked like a white slab of lard entwined with seaweed, rolling and gliding at the edge of the tide. As he drew close the object was sucked back by the receding wave then taken up by the next surge and flung at his feet and he found himself gazing in incredulous horror at the torso of a woman neatly severed at the waist. For a second he stood petrified, staring down as the tide boiled in the empty sockets of the left eye and swayed the flattened breasts. Then he turned away and was violently sick before shambling like a drunkard up the shingle of the beach, dragging the dog by its collar.

The body of Caroline Amphlett, unmutilated, was washed up on the same tide together with planks from the boat and part of the roof of the cabin. They were found by Daft Billy, a harmless and amiable beachcomber, on one of his regular sorties. It was the wood which first caught his eye and he dragged the planks ashore with squeals of glee. Then, his prize secure, he turned his puzzled attention to the drowned girl. It was not the first body he had found in forty years of beachcombing and he knew what he must do, who he must tell. First he placed his hands under the arms and pulled the body out of the reach of the tide. Then, moaning softly, as if mourning his clumsiness, her lack of response, he knelt beside her and, pulling off his jacket, spread it over the torn rags of her shirt and slacks.

'Comfy?' he asked. 'Comfy?'

Then, putting out his hand he carefully moved the strands of hair out of her eyes and, rocking himself gently, began crooning to her as he might to a child.

Dalgliesh made three visits on foot to the caravan after lunch on Thursday but on no occasion was Neil Pascoe at home. He was unwilling to telephone to check whether the man had returned. He could think of no valid excuse for wanting to see him and it seemed best to make the visit part of a walk, as if the decision to call at the caravan were merely an impulse. In one sense he supposed it could be a visit of condolence but he had only known Amy Camm by sight and that excuse seemed to him dishonest as well as unconvincing. Shortly after five o'clock, when the light was beginning to fade, he tried again. This time the door of the caravan was wide open but there was no sign of Pascoe. While he stood hesitating a billow of smoke rose from above the edge of the cliff, followed by a brief flash of flame, and the air was suddenly filled with the acrid smell of bonfire.

From the edge of the cliff he looked down on an extraordinary scene. Pascoe had built a fireplace of large stones and chunks of concrete and had lit a fire of brushwood on to which he was emptying papers, box files, cartons, bottles and what looked like an assortment of clothes. The pile awaiting burning was caged down against the strengthening wind by the bars of Timmy's cot; that too, no doubt, destined for the flames. A soiled mattress lay curled to one side like a makeshift and ineffectual windbreak. Pascoe, wearing only a pair of grubby shorts, was working like a demented demon, his eyes white saucers in his blackened face, his arms and naked chest glistening with sweat. As Dalgliesh slithered down the sandy slope of the cliff and moved up to the fire he nodded a brief acknowledgement of his presence, then began dragging a small, scuffed suitcase from under the cot bars with desperate haste. Then he sprang up and balanced himself on the wide rim of the fireplace, his legs wide apart. In the ruddy glow of the flames his whole body gleamed, seeming for a moment transparent as if it were lit from within, and the great dollops of sweat ran from his shoulders like blood. With a shout he swung the case high over the fire and wrenched it open. The baby clothes fell in a brightly coloured shower and the flames leapt like living tongues to snatch at the woollen garments in mid-air, spinning them into briefly burning torches before they fell blackened into the heart of the fire. Pascoe stood for a moment breathing heavily, then sprang down with a cry half exultant, half despairing. Dalgliesh could understand and partly shared his exultation in this tumultuous juxtaposition of wind, fire and water. With each gust the tongues of flame roared and hissed so that he saw through a shimmering haze of heat the veins of the tumbling waves stained as if with blood. As Pascoe emptied into the fire yet another box file of papers the charred fragments rose and danced like frantic birds, blew gently against Dalgliesh's face and settled over the dry stones of the upper shingle like a black contagion. He could feel his eyes prickling with the smoke.

He called out: 'Aren't you polluting the beach?'

Pascoe turned to him and spoke for the first time, shouting above the roar of the fire. 'What does it matter? We're polluting the whole bloody planet.'

Dalgliesh shouted back: 'Shove some shingle on it and leave it until tomorrow. It's too windy for a bonfire this evening.'

He had expected Pascoe to ignore him, but to his surprise the words seemed to recall his companion to reality. The exultation and vigour seemed to drain out of him. He looked at the fire and said dully: ‘I suppose you're right.'

There was a spade and a rusty shovel down by the pile of rubbish. Together the two men scooped up a mixture of shingle and sand and flung it on to the flames. When the last red tongue had died with an angry hiss Pascoe turned and began scrunching his way up the beach towards the cliff. Dalgliesh followed. The question he had half feared -Are you here on purpose? Why do you want to see me? -was unspoken and apparently unthought.

In the caravan Pascoe kicked the door shut and slumped down at the table. He said: 'Want a beer? Or there's tea. I'm out of coffee.'

'Nothing, thanks.'

Dalgliesh sat and watched as Pascoe groped his way over to the refrigerator. Returning to the table, he wrenched open the seal, threw back his head and poured the beer down his throat in an almost continuous stream. Then he slumped forward silent, still clutching the tin. Neither spoke and it seemed to Dalgliesh that his companion hardly knew that he was still there. It was dark in the caravan and Pascoe's face across the two feet of wood was an indistinguishable oval in which the whites of the eyes gleamed unnaturally bright. Then he stumbled to his feet, murmuring something about matches, and a few seconds later there was a scrape and hiss and his hands stretched towards the oil lamp on the table. In its strengthening glow his face, beneath the dirt and smudges of smoke, looked drained and haggard, the eyes dulled with pain. The wind was shaking the caravan, not roughly but with a regular gentle sway as if it were being rocked by an unseen hand. The sliding door of the end compartment was open and Dalgliesh could see, on the narrow bed, a pile of female clothes topped with a jumble of tubes, jars and bottles. Apart from this, the caravan looked tidy but denuded, less a home than a temporary, ill-equipped refuge, but holding still the unmistakable milky and faecal smell of a child. The absence of Timmy and his dead mother filled the caravan as it did both their minds.

After minutes of silence Pascoe looked up at him: 'I was burning all my PANUP records out there with the rest of the rubbish. You probably guessed. It was never any use. I was only using PANUP to pander to my own need to feel important. You more or less said so that time I called at the mill.'

'Did I? I hadn't any right to. What will you do now?'

'Go to London and look for a job. The university won't extend my grant for a further year. I don't blame them. I'd prefer to go back to the north-east but I suppose London offers me more hope.'

'What sort of job?'

'Any job. I don't give a damn what I do as long as it makes money for me and is no possible use to anyone else.'

Dalgliesh asked: 'What happened to Timmy?'

'The local authority took him. They got a Place of Safety Order or something of the sort. A couple of social workers came for him yesterday. Decent enough women, but he didn't want to go with them. They had to tear him screaming from my arms. What sort of a society does that to its children?'

Dalgliesh said: 'I don't suppose they had any choice. They have to make long-term plans for his future. After all, he couldn't have stayed here indefinitely with you.'

'Why not? I cared for him for over a year. And at least I would have had something out of all this mess.'

Dalgliesh asked: 'Have they traced Amy's family?'

'They haven't had much time, have they? And when they do I don't expect they'll tell me. Timmy lived here for over a year but I'm of less account than the grandparents he never saw and who probably don't give a damn about him.'

He was still holding the empty beer can. Twisting it slowly in his hands he said: 'What really gets to me is the deception. I thought she cared. Oh, not about me, but about what I was trying to do. It was all pretence. She was using me, using this place to be near Caroline.'

Dalgliesh said: 'But they can't have seen very much of each other.'

'How do I know? When I wasn't here she probably sneaked out to meet her lover. Timmy must have spent hours alone. She didn't even care for him. The cats were more important than Timmy. Mrs Jago has taken them now. They'll be all right. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons she used to go out blatantly telling me that she was off to meet her lover in the sand dunes. I thought it was a joke, I needed to believe that. And all the time she and Caroline were out there together making love, laughing at me.'

Dalgliesh said: 'You've only got Reeves's evidence to suggest they were lovers. Caroline could have been lying to him.'

'No. No, she wasn't lying. I know that. They used us both, Reeves and me. Amy wasn't – well, she wasn't undersexed. We lived here together for over a year. On the second night she – well, she did offer to come to my bed. But it was just her way of paying for board and lodging. It wouldn't have been right then for either of us. But after a time I suppose I began to hope. I mean, living here together, I suppose I grew fond of her. But she never really wanted me to be near her. And when she came in from those Sunday walks I knew. I pretended to myself that I didn't but I knew. She looked exultant. She was shining with happiness.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Look, is it really so important to you, the affair with Caroline, even if it is true? What you had here together, the affection, friendship, comradeship, caring for Timmy, does all that go for nothing because she found her sexual life outside the walls of this caravan?'

Pascoe said bitterly: 'Forget and forgive? You make it. sound so easy.'

'I don't suppose you can forget, or perhaps even want to. But I can't see why you have to use the word forgive. She never promised more than she gave.'

'You despise me, don't you?'

Dalgliesh thought how unattractive it was, the self-absorption of the deeply unhappy. But there were questions he still had to ask. He said: 'And she left nothing, no papers, no records, no diary, nothing to say what she was doing on the headland?'

'Nothing. And I know what she was doing here, why she came. She came to be near Caroline.'

'Did she have any money? Even if you fed her she must have had something of her own.'

'She always had some cash but I don't know how she got it. She never said and I didn't like to ask. I know she didn't draw any welfare payments. She said she didn't want the DHSS snooping round here to check whether we were sleeping together. I didn't blame her. Nor did I.'

'And she got no post.'

'She got postcards from time to time. Pretty regularly really. So she must have had friends in London. I don't know what she did with them. Threw them away I suppose. There's nothing in the caravan but her clothes and make-up and I'm going to burn those next. After that there'll be nothing left to show that she was ever here.'

Dalgliesh asked: 'And the murder. Do you think that Caroline Amphlett killed Robarts?'

'Perhaps. I don't care. It doesn't matter any more. If she didn't, Rickards will make her a scapegoat, her and Amy together.'

'But you can't really believe that Amy connived at murder?'

Pascoe looked at Dalgliesh with the frustration and anger of an uncomprehending child. 'I don't know! Look, I really never knew her. That's what I'm telling you. I don't know! And now that Timmy's gone I don't really care. And I'm in such a muddle, anger at what she did to me, at what she was, and grief that she's dead. I didn't think you could be angry and grieving at the same time. I ought to be mourning her but all I can feel is this terrible anger.'

'Oh yes,' said Dalgliesh. 'You can feel anger and grief together. That's the commonest reaction to bereavement.' Suddenly Pascoe began crying. The empty beer can rattled against the table and he bent his head low over it, his shoulders shaking. Women, thought Dalgliesh, are better at coping with grief than we are. He had seen them so many times, the women police officers moving unconsciously to take the grieving mother, the lost child, in their arms. Some men were good at it too, of course. Rickards had been in the old days. He himself was good with the words, but then words were his trade. What he found difficult was what came so spontaneously to the truly generous at heart, the willingness to touch and be touched. He thought: I'm here on false pretences. If I were not, perhaps I, too, could feel adequate.

He said: 'I think the wind is less strong than it was. Why don't we finish the burning and clear up that mess on the beach?'

It was over an hour before Dalgliesh was ready to set off for the mill. As he said goodbye to Pascoe at the door of the caravan a blue Fiesta with a young man at its wheel came bumping over the grass.

Pascoe said: 'Jonathan Reeves. He was engaged to Caroline Amphlett, or thought he was. She fooled him like Amy fooled me. He's been round once or twice to chat. We thought we might walk to the Local Hero for a game of bar billiards.'

It was not, thought Dalgliesh, an agreeable picture, the two men, bound by a common grievance, consoling each other for the perfidy of their women with beer and bar billiards. But Pascoe seemed to want to introduce Reeves and he found himself grasping a surprisingly firm hand and making his formal condolences.

Jonathan Reeves said: 'I still can't believe it, but I suppose people always say that after a sudden death. And I can't help feeling that it was my fault. I should have stopped them.'

Dalgliesh said: 'They were adult women. Presumably they knew what they were doing. Short of physically dragging them off the boat, which would hardly have been practicable, I don't see how you could have stopped them.'

Reeves reiterated obstinately: 'I should have stopped them.' Then he added: 'I keep having this dream, well, nightmare really. She's standing at the side of my bed with the child in her arms and saying to me, "It's all your fault. All your fault.'"

Pascoe said: 'Caroline comes with Timmy?'

Reeves looked at him as if surprised that he could be so obtuse. He said: 'Not Caroline. It's Amy who comes. Amy, whom I never met, standing there with water streaming from her hair, holding the child in her arms and telling me that it's all my fault.'

Just over an hour later Dalgliesh had left the headland and was driving west along the A1151. After twenty minutes he turned south along a narrow country road. Darkness had fallen and the low scudding clouds, torn by wind, moved like a tattered blanket over the moon and the high stars. He drove fast and unhesitatingly, hardly aware of the tug and howl of the wind. He had taken this route only once before, early that same morning, but he had no need to consult the map; he knew where he was going. On either side of the low hedges stretched the black, unbroken fields. The lights of the car silvered an occasional distorted tree flailing in the wind, briefly illuminated as if with a searchlight the blank face of an isolated farm cottage, picked out the pin-bright eyes of a night animal before it scuttled to safety. The drive was not long, less than fifty minutes, but, staring straight ahead and shifting the gear lever as if he were an automaton, he felt for a moment disorientated as if he had driven through the bleak darkness of this flat, secretive landscape for interminable hours.

The brick-built, early-Victorian villa stood on the outskirts of a village. The gate to the gravel drive lay open and he drove slowly between the tossing laurels and the high, creaking boughs of the beech trees and manoeuvred the Jaguar between the three cars already discreetly parked at the side of the house. The two rows of windows in the front were dark and the single bulb which illuminated the fanlight seemed to Dalgliesh less a welcoming sign of occupation than a private signal, a sinister indication of secret life. He did not need to ring. Ears had been alert for the approaching car and the door was opened just as he reached it by the same stocky, cheerful-faced janitor who had greeted him on his first summons earlier that morning. Now, as then, he was wearing blue overalls so sprucely well cut that they looked like a uniform. Dalgliesh wondered what was his precise role; driver, guard, general factotum? Or had he, perhaps, a more specialized and sinister function?

He said: 'They're in the library, sir. I'll bring in the coffee. Will you be wanting sandwiches, sir? There's some beef left or I could put up a bit of cheese.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Just the coffee, thank you.'

They were waiting for him in the same small room at the back of the house. The walls were panelled in pale wood and there was only one window, a square bay heavily curtained with faded blue velvet. Despite its name the function of the room was unclear. Admittedly the wall opposite the window was lined with bookshelves, but they held only half a dozen leather-bound volumes and piles of old periodicals which looked as if they were Sunday colour supplements. The room had an oddly disturbing air of being both makeshift yet not devoid of comfort, a staging post in which the temporary occupants were attempting to make themselves at home. Ranged round the ornate marble fireplace were six assorted armchairs, most of them leather and each with a small wine table. The opposite end of the room was occupied by a modern dining table in plain wood with six chairs. This morning it had held the remains of breakfast and the air had been oppressively heavy with the smell of bacon and eggs. But the debris had been cleared and replaced by a tray of bottles and glasses. Looking at the variety provided, Dalgliesh thought that they had been doing themselves rather well. The loaded tray gave the place the air of a temporary hospitality room in which little else was hospitable. The air struck him as rather chill. In the grate an ornamental fan of paper rustled with each moan of the wind in the chimney and the two-bar electric fire which stood in the fender was barely adequate, even for so meanly proportioned and cluttered a room.

Three pairs of eyes turned on him as he entered. Clifford Sowerby was standing against the fireplace in exactly the same pose as when Dalgliesh had last seen him. He looked, in his formal suit and immaculate linen, as fresh as he had at nine o'clock that morning. Now, as then, he dominated the room. He was a solid-fleshed, conventionally handsome man with the assurance and controlled benevolence of a headmaster or a successful banker. No customer need fear to enter his office, provided his account was well in credit. Meeting him for only the second time Dalgliesh felt again an instinctive and seemingly irrational unease. The man was both ruthless and dangerous and yet, in their hours apart, he had been unable accurately to recall either his face or his voice.

The same could not be said for Bill Harding. He stood over six foot tall and, with his pale freckled face and thatch of red hair, had obviously decided that anonymity was impossible and that he might as well opt for eccentricity. He was wearing a checked suit in heavy tweed with a spotted tie. Raising himself with some difficulty out of the low chair he ambled over to the drinks and, when Dalgliesh said he'd wait for coffee, stood holding the whisky bottle as if unsure what to do with it. But there was one addition since the morning. Alex Mair, whisky glass in hand, stood against the bookcase as if interested in the assortment of leather-bound volumes and piled periodicals. He turned as Dalgliesh entered and gave him a long, considering look, then nodded briefly. He was easily the most personable and the most intelligent of the three waiting men but something, confidence or energy, seemed to have drained out of him and he had the diminished, precariously contained look of a man in physical pain.

Sowerby said, his heavily lidded eyes amused: 'You've singed your hair, Adam. You smell as if you've been raking a bonfire.'

'I have.'

Mair didn't move but Sowerby and Harding seated themselves each side of the fire. Dalgliesh took a chair between them. They waited until coffee had arrived and he had a cup in hand. Sowerby was leaning back in his chair and looking up at the ceiling and seemed to be prepared to wait all night.

It was Bill Harding who said: 'Well, Adam?'

Putting down his cup, Dalgliesh described what exactly had happened since his arrival at the caravan. He had total verbal recall. He had made no notes, nor was it necessary. At the end of his account he said: 'So you can relax. Pascoe believes what will, I imagine, become the official line, that the two girls were lovers, went for an unwise boat trip together and were accidentally run down in the fog. I don't think he'll make any trouble for you or for anyone else. His capacity for troublemaking seems to be over.'

Sowerby said: 'And Camm left nothing incriminating in the caravan?'

'I doubt very much whether there was anything to leave. Pascoe said that he read one or two of the postcards when they arrived but they were mostly the usual meaningless phrases, tourist's chat. Camm apparently destroyed them. And he, with my help, has destroyed the detritus of her life on the headland. I helped him carry the last of her clothes and make-up down to the fire. While he was busy burning it I had a chance to return and make a fairly thorough search. There was nothing there.'

Sowerby said formally: 'It was good of you to do this for us, Adam. Obviously as Rickards isn't in the picture as far as our interest is concerned we could hardly rely on him. And you, of course, had an advantage he lacked. Pascoe would see you more as a friend than a policeman. That's obvious from his previous visit to Larksoken Mill. For some reason he trusts you.'

Dalgliesh said: 'You explained all that this morning. The request you made then seemed to me to be reasonable in the circumstances. I'm neither naive nor ambivalent about terrorism. You asked me to do something and I've done it. I still think you should put Rickards in the picture, but that's your business. And you've got your answer. If Camm were involved with Amphlett she didn't confide in Pascoe and he has no suspicions of either woman. He believes that Camm only stayed with him to be near her lover. Pascoe, for all his liberal ideas, is as ready as the next man to believe that a woman who doesn't persist in wanting to go to bed with him must be either frigid or a lesbian.'

Sowerby permitted himself a wry smile. He said: 'While you were playing Ariel to his Prospero on the beach I suppose he didn't confess to killing Robarts. It's of small importance, but one has a natural curiosity.'

'My brief was to talk to him about Amy Camm, but he did mention the murder. I don't think he really believes that Amy helped to kill Robarts, but he doesn't really care whether the two girls did or did not. Are you satisfied yourselves that they did?'

Sowerby said: 'We don't have to be. It's Rickards who has to be satisfied and I imagine that he is. Incidentally, have you seen or spoken to him today?'

'He telephoned briefly about midday, principally, I think, to tell me that his wife has come home. For some reason he thought I'd be interested. As far as the murder is concerned, he seems to be coming round to the view that Camm and Amphlett were in it together.'

Harding said: 'And he's probably right.'

Dalgliesh asked: 'On what evidence? And since he's not allowed to know that one of them at least is a suspected terrorist, where's the motive?'

Harding said impatiently: 'Come off it, Adam, what real evidence does he expect to get? And since when was motive the first consideration? Anyway, they had a motive, at least Camm did. She hated Robarts. There's one witness at least to a physical fight between them on the Sunday afternoon of the murder. And Camm was fiercely protective of Pascoe and connected to that pressure group he started. That libel action would have ruined him and put PANUP out of business for ever. It's precarious enough as it is. Camm wanted Robarts dead and Amphlett killed her. That will be the general belief locally and Rickards will go along with it. To do him justice, he probably believes it.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Camm fiercely protective of Pascoe? Who says so? That's supposition not evidence.'

'But he's got some evidence, hasn't he? Circumstantial evidence, admittedly, but that's all he's likely to get now. Amphlett knew that Robarts went swimming at night; practically everyone at the power station knew that. She concocted a false alibi. Camm had access, like anyone else, to the jumble room at the Old Rectory. And Pascoe now admits that it could have been 9.15 when he got back from Norwich. All right, the timing is tight but it's not impossible if Robarts swam earlier than usual. It adds up to a reasonable case; Not one which would have justified arresting them if thqrwere still living, but enough to make it difficult to get a conviction against anyone else.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Would Amy Camm have left the child?'

'Why not? He was probably asleep, and if he wasn't and started yelling, who would hear? You're not suggesting, Adam, that she was a good mother, for God's sake? She left him at the end, didn't she? Permanently, as it happens, although that may not have been intentional. If you ask me, that kid had a pretty low priority with his mother.'

Dalgliesh said: 'So you're postulating a mother who is so outraged by a minor assault on her child that she avenges it with murder, and that same mother leaves him alone in a caravan while she goes sailing with her girlfriend. Wouldn't Rickards find that difficult to reconcile?'

Sowerby said, with a touch of impatience: 'God knows how Rickards reconciles anything. Luckily we're not required to ask him. Anyway, Adam, we know of a positive motive. Robarts could have suspected Amphlett. After all she was Acting Administrative Officer. She was intelligent, conscientious – over-conscientious, didn't you say, Mair?'

They all looked towards the silent figure standing against the bookcase. Mair turned to face them. He said quietly: 'Yes, she was conscientious. But I doubt whether she was conscientious enough to detect a conspiracy which had eluded me.' He turned back to his contemplation of the books.

There was a moment's embarrassed silence which was broken by Bill Harding. He said briskly, as if Mair hadn't spoken: 'So who was better placed to smell out a spot of treason? Rickards may have no firm evidence and an inadequate motive, but essentially he'll probably get it right.'

Dalgliesh got to his feet and walked over to the table. He said: 'It would suit you to get the case closed, I see that. But if I were the investigating officer the file would stay open.'

Sowerby said wryly: 'Obviously. Then let us be grateful that you aren't. But you'll keep your doubts to yourself, Adam? That doesn't need saying.'

'Then why say it?'

He placed his coffee cup back on the table. He was aware of Sowerby and Harding watching his every move as if he were a suspect who might suddenly make a break for it. Returning to his chair he said: 'And how will Rickards or anyone else explain the boat trip?'

It was still Harding who answered: 'He doesn't have to. They were lovers, for God's sake. They fancied a sea trip. It was Amphlett's boat after all. She left her car on the quay perfectly openly. She took nothing with her and neither did Amy. She left a note to Pascoe saying she'd be back in about an hour. In Rickards's eyes and everyone else's that adds up to an unfortunate accident. And who is to say that it wasn't? We were nowhere near close enough to have scared Amphlett into making a run for it; not yet.'

'And your people have found nothing at the house?'

Harding looked at Sowerby. It was a question they preferred not to answer and one which should not have been asked. After a pause, Sowerby answered: 'Clean. No radio, no documents, no evidence of trade craft. If Amphlett did intend to do a bunk, she cleaned up efficiently before she left.'

Bill Harding said: 'OK, if she did panic and was getting out, the only mystery is why so precipitous? If she killed Robarts and thought that the police were getting close, that might have tipped the balance. But they weren't getting close. It could, of course, have been a genuine boat trip, and a genuine accident. Or, their own side could have killed them both. Once the Larksoken plan was obsolete they were expendable. What were the comrades going to do with them, for God's sake? Fit them out with new personalities, new papers, infiltrate them into a power station in Germany? They were hardly worth the trouble, I should have thought.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Is there any evidence that it was an accident? Has any ship reported bow damage in the fog, a possible collision?'

Sowerby said: 'None so far. I doubt whether there will be. But if Amphlett really was part of the organization we suspect recruited her, they'd have no compunction in providing a couple of involuntary martyrs for the cause. What sort of people did she think she was dealing with? The fog would have helped them, but they could have run down the boat without the fog. Or, for that matter, taken them off and killed them elsewhere. But to fake an accident was the sensible course particularly given the bonus of the fog. I'd have done it that way myself.' And he would, thought Dalgliesh. He would have done it without compunction.

Harding turned to Mair. He said: 'You never had the least suspicion of her?'

'You asked me that before. None. I was surprised – a little irritated even – that she preferred not to stay as my PA when I got the new job, and even more surprised at the reason. Jonathan Reeves was hardly the man I thought she'd have chosen.'

Sowerby said: 'But it was clever. An ineffectual man, one she could dominate. Not too intelligent. Already in love with her. She could have chucked him whenever she chose and he wouldn't have the wit to know why. And why should you suspect? Sexual attraction is irrational anyway.'

There was a pause, then he added: 'Did you ever see her, the other girl, Amy? I'm told that she did visit the power station on one of those open days but I don't suppose you'd remember her.'

Mair's face was like a white mask. He said: 'I did see her once, I think. Blonde dyed hair, a chubby, rather pretty face. She was carrying the child. What will happen to him, incidentally? Or is it a she?'

Sowerby said: 'Taken into care, I suppose, unless they can trace the father or the grandparents. He'll probably end up fostered or adopted. I wonder what the hell his mother thought she was doing.'

Harding spoke with sudden vehemence: 'Do they think? Ever? No faith, no stability, no family affection, no loyalty. They're blown like paper with every wind. Then when they do find something to believe in, something to give them the illusion that they're important, what do they choose? Violence, anarchy, hatred, murder.'

Sowerby looked at him, surprised and a little amused. Then he said: 'Ideas some of them think worth dying for. In that, of course, lies the problem.'

'Only because they want to die. If you can't cope with living look for an excuse, a cause you can kid yourself is worth dying for and indulge your death wish. With luck you can take a dozen or so poor sods with you, people who can cope with living, who don't want to die. And there's always the ultimate self-deception, the final arrogance. Martyrdom. Lonely and inadequate fools all over the world will clench their fists and shout your name and carry placards with your picture and start looking round themselves for someone to bomb and shoot and maim. And that girl, Amphlett. She hadn't even the excuse of poverty. Dad a senior army officer, security, a good education, privilege, money. She'd had it all.'

It was Sowerby who replied. He said: 'We know what she had. What we can't know is what she didn't have.'

Harding ignored him. 'And what did they expect to do with Larksoken if they did take it over? They wouldn't have lasted for more than half an hour. They'd have needed experts, programmers.'

Mair said: 'I think you can take it they knew what and who they'd need and had planned how they could get them.'

'Into the country? How?' 'By boat, perhaps.'

Sowerby looked at him and then said a little impatiently: 'They didn't do it. They couldn't have done it. And it's our job to see that they never can do it.'

There was a moment's silence, then Mair said: 'I suppose Amphlett was the dominant partner. I wonder what arguments or what inducements she used. The girl -Amy – struck me as an instinctive creature, not likely to die for a political theory. But that is obviously a superficial judgement. I only saw her once.'

Sowerby said: 'Without knowing them we can't be sure who was the dominant partner. But I'd say it was almost certainly Amphlett. Nothing is known or suspected about Camm. She was probably recruited as a runner. Amphlett must have had a contact in the organization, must have met him occasionally if only to receive instructions. But they'd be careful never to get in touch directly. Camm probably received the coded messages setting out time and place for the next meeting and passed them on. As for her reasons, she found life unsatisfactory no doubt.'

Bill Harding lunged over to the table and poured himself a large whisky. His voice was thick as if he were drunk.

'Life has always been unsatisfactory for most people for most of the time. The world isn't designed for our satisfaction. That's no reason for trying to pull it down about our ears.'

Sowerby smiled his sly superior smile. He said easily: 'Perhaps they thought that's what we're doing.'

Fifteen minutes later, Dalgliesh left with Mair. As they stood unlocking their cars he looked back and saw that the janitor was still waiting at the open door.

Mair said: 'Making sure that we actually leave the premises. What extraordinary people they are! I wonder how they got on to Caroline. There seemed no point in asking as they made it obvious that they had no intention of saying.'

'No, they wouldn't say. Almost certainly they got a tip-off from the security services in Germany.'

'And this house. How on earth do they find these places? D'you suppose that they own it, borrow it, rent it or just break into it?'

Dalgliesh said: 'It probably belongs to one of their own officers, retired, I imagine. He, or she, lets them have a spare key for such an occasional use.'

'And now they'll be packing up, I suppose. Dusting down the furniture, checking for fingerprints, finishing up the food, turning off the power. And in an hour no one will know that they were ever there. The perfect temporary tenants. They've got one thing wrong, though. There wasn't a physical relationship between Amy and Caroline. That's nonsense.'

He spoke with such extraordinary strength and conviction, almost with outrage, that Dalgliesh wondered for a moment whether Caroline Amphlett had been more than his PA. Mair must surely have sensed what his companion was thinking but he neither explained nor denied. Dalgliesh said: 'I haven't congratulated you yet on your new job.'

Mair had slipped into his seat and turned on the engine.

But the car door was still open and the silent warder at the door still waited patiently.

He said: 'Thank you. These tragedies at Larksoken have taken away some of the immediate satisfaction, but it's still the most important job I'm ever likely to hold.' Then, as Dalgliesh turned away, he said: 'So you think we still have a killer alive on the headland.'

'Don't you?'

But Mair didn't reply. Instead he asked: 'If you were Rickards, what would you do now?'

'I'd concentrate on trying to find out whether Blaney or Theresa left Scudder's Cottage that Sunday night. If either of them did, then I think my case would be complete. It isn't one that I'd be able to prove, but it would stand up in logic and I think that it would be the truth.'

Dalgliesh drove first out of the drive but Mair, accelerating sharply, overtook him on the first stretch of straight road and remained ahead. The thought of following the Jaguar all the way back to Larksoken was, for some reason, intolerable. But there was no danger of it; Dalgliesh even drove like a policeman, inside, if only just inside, the speed limit. And by the time they reached the main road Mair could no longer see the lights of the Jaguar in his mirror. He drove almost automatically, eyes fixed ahead, hardly aware of the black shapes of the tossing trees as they rushed past like an accelerated film, of the cat's-eyes unfolding in an unbroken stream of light. He was expecting a clear road on the headland and, cresting a low ridge, saw almost too late the lights of an ambulance. Violently twisting the wheel, he bumped off the road and braked on the grass verge, then sat there listening to the silence. It seemed to him that emotions which for the last three hours he had rigorously suppressed were buffeting him as the wind buffeted the car. He had to discipline his thoughts, to arrange and make sense of these astonishing feelings which horrified him by their violence and irrationality. Was it possible that he could feel relief at her death, at a danger averted, a possible embarrassment prevented, and yet, at the same time, be torn as if his sinews were being wrenched apart by a pain and regret so overwhelming that it could only be grief? He had to control himself from beating his head against the wheel of the car. She had been so uninhibited, so gallant, so entertaining. And she had kept faith with him. He hadn't been in touch with her since their last meeting on the Sunday afternoon of the murder and she had made no attempt to contact him by letter or telephone. They had agreed that the affair must end and that each would keep silent. She had kept her part of the bargain, as he had known she would. And now she was dead. He spoke her name aloud, 'Amy, Amy, Amy.' Suddenly he gave a gasp which tore at the muscles of his chest as if he were in the first throes of a heart attack and felt the blessed releasing tears flow down his face. He hadn't cried since he was a boy and even now, as the tears ran like rain and he tasted their surprising saltiness on his lips, he told himself that these minutes of emotion were good and therapeutic. He owed them to her and, once over, the tribute of grief paid, he would be able to put her out of his mind as he had planned to put her out of his heart. It was only thirty minutes later, when switching on the engine, that he gave thought to the ambulance and wondered which of the few inhabitants of the headland was being rushed to hospital.

As the two ambulance men wheeled the stretcher down the garden path the wind tore at the corner of the red blanket and billowed it into an arc. The straps held it down but Blaney almost flung himself across Theresa's body as if desperately shielding her from something more threatening than the wind. He shuffled crab-like down the path beside her, half bent, his hand holding hers under the blanket. It felt hot and moist and very small and it seemed to him that he was aware of every delicate bone. He wanted to whisper reassurance but terror had dried his throat and when he tried to speak his jaw jabbered as if palsied. And he had no comfort to give. There was a too-recent memory of another ambulance, another stretcher, another journey. He hardly dared look at Theresa in case he saw on her face what he had seen on her mother's; that look of pale, remote acceptance which meant that she was already moving away from him, from all the mundane affairs of life, even from his love, into a shadow land where he could neither follow nor was welcome. He tried to find reassurance in the memory of Dr Entwhistle's robust voice.

'She'll be all right. It's appendicitis. We'll get her to hospital straight away. They'll operate tonight and with luck she'll be back with you in a few days. Not to do the housework mind; we'll discuss all that later. Now, let's get to the telephone. And stop panicking, man. People don't die of appendicitis.'

But they did die. They died under the anaesthetic, they died because peritonitis intervened, they died because the surgeon made a mistake. He had read of these cases. He was without hope.

As the stretcher was gently lifted and slid with easy expertise into the ambulance he turned and looked back at Scudder's Cottage. He hated it now, hated what it had done to him, what it had made him do. Like him, it was accursed. Mrs Jago was standing at the door holding Anthony in her unpractised arms with a twin standing silently on each side. He had telephoned the Local Hero for help and George Jago had driven her over immediately to stay with the children until he returned. There had been no one else to ask. He had telephoned Alice Mair at Martyr's Cottage but all he had got was the answerphone. Mrs Jago lifted Anthony's hand and waved it in a gesture of goodbye, then bent to speak to the twins. Obediently they too waved. He climbed into the ambulance and the doors were firmly shut.

The ambulance bumped and gently swayed up the lane, then accelerated as it reached the narrow headland road to Lydsett. Suddenly it swerved and he was almost thrown from his seat. The paramedic sitting opposite him cursed.

'Some bloody fool going too fast.'

But he didn't reply. He sat very close to Theresa, his hand still in hers, and found himself praying as if he could batten on the ears of the God he hadn't believed in since he was seventeen. 'Don't let her die. Don't punish her because of me. I'll believe. I'll do anything. I can change, be different. Punish me but not her. Oh God, let her live.'

And suddenly he was standing again in that dreadful little churchyard, hearing the drone of Father McKee's voice, with Theresa at his side, her hand still cold in his. The earth was covered with synthetic grass but there was one mound left bare and he saw again the newly sliced gold of the soil. He hadn't known that Norfolk earth could be so rich a colour. A white flower had fallen from one of the wreaths, a small, tortured, unrecognized bud with a pin through the wrapped stalk and he was seized with an almost uncontrollable compulsion to pick it up before it was shovelled with the earth into the grave, to take it home, put it in water and let it die in peace. He had to hold himself tautly upright to prevent himself bending to retrieve it. But he hadn't dared, and it had been left there to be smothered and obliterated under the first clods.

He heard Theresa whisper and bent so low to listen that he could smell her breath. 'Daddy, am I going to die?'

'No. No.'

He almost shouted the word, a howled defiance of death, and was aware of the paramedic half rising to his feet. He said quietly: 'You heard what Dr Entwhistle said. It's just appendicitis.'

'I want to see Father McKee.'

'Tomorrow. After the operation. I'll tell him. He'll visit you. I won't forget. I promise. Now lie still.'

'Daddy, I want him now, before the operation. There's something I have to tell him.'

'Tell him tomorrow.'

'Can I tell you? I have to tell someone now.'

He said almost fiercely: 'Tomorrow, Theresa. Leave it till tomorrow.' And then, appalled by his selfishness, he whispered: 'Tell me, darling, if you must,' and closed his eyes so that she should not see the horror, the hopelessness.

She whispered: 'That night Miss Robarts died. I crept out to the abbey ruins. I saw her running into the sea. Daddy, I was there.'

He said hoarsely: 'It doesn't matter. You don't have to tell me any more.'

'But I want to tell. I ought to have told you before. Please, Daddy.'

He put his other hand over hers. He said: 'Tell me.'

'There was someone else there, too. I saw her walking over the headland towards the sea. It was Mrs Dennison.'

Relief flowed through him, wave after wave, like a warm cleansing summer sea. After a moment's silence he heard her voice again: 'Daddy, are you going to tell anyone, the police?'

'No,' he said. 'I'm glad you've told me but it isn't important. It doesn't mean anything. She was just taking a walk in the moonlight. I'm not going to tell.'

'Not even about me being on the headland that night?'

'No,' he said firmly, 'not even that. Not yet, anyway. But we'll talk about it, what we ought to do, after the operation.'

And for the first time he could believe that there would be a time for them after the operation.

Mr Copley's study was at the back of the Old Rectory, looking out over the unkempt lawn and the three rows of wind-crippled bushes which the Copleys called the shrubbery. It was the only room in the rectory which Meg would not dream of entering without first knocking and it was accepted as his private place as if he were still in charge of a parish and needing a quiet sanctum to prepare his weekly sermon or counsel those parishioners who sought his advice. It was here that each day he read Morning Prayer and Evensong, his only congregation his wife and Meg, whose low feminine voices would make the responses and read alternate verses of the psalms. On her first day with them he had said gently but without embarrassment: 'I say the two main offices every day in my study, but please don't feel that you need to attend unless you wish to.'

She had chosen to attend, at first from politeness but later because this daily ritual, the beautiful, half-forgotten cadences, seducing her into belief, gave a welcome shape to the day. And the study itself, of all the rooms in the solidly ugly but comfortable house, seemed to represent an inviolable security, a great rock in a weary land against which all the rancorous, intrusive memories of school, the petty irritations of daily living, even the horror of the Whistler and the menace of the power station beat in vain. She doubted whether it had greatly changed since the first Victorian rector had taken possession. One wall was lined with books, a theological library which she thought Mr Copley now rarely consulted. The old mahogany desk was usually bare and Meg suspected that he spent most of his time in the easy chair which looked out over the garden. Three walls were covered with pictures; the rowing eight of his university days with ridiculously small caps above the grave moustached young faces; the ordinands of his theological college; insipid watercolours in golden mounts, the record by some Victorian ancestor of his grand tour; etchings of Norwich Cathedral, the nave at Winchester, the great octagon of Ely. To one side of the ornate Victorian fireplace was a single crucifix. It seemed to Meg to be very old and probably valuable but she had never liked to ask. The body of Christ was a young man's body, stretched taut in its last agony, the open mouth seeming to shout in triumph or defiance at the God who had deserted him. Nothing else in the study was powerful or disturbing; furniture, objects, pictures all spoke of order, of certainty, of hope. Now, as she knocked and listened for Mr Copley's gentle 'Come in', it occurred to her that she was seeking comfort as much from the room itself as from its occupant.

He was sitting in the armchair, a book in his lap, and made to get up with awkward stiffness as she entered. She said: 'Please don't get up. I wonder if I could talk to you privately for a few minutes.'

She saw at once the flare of anxiety in the faded blue eyes and thought, He's afraid I'm going to give notice. She added quickly but with gentle firmness: 'As a priest. I wish to consult you as a priest.'

He laid down his book. She saw that it was one he and his wife had chosen the previous Friday from the travelling library, the newest H. R. F. Keating. Both he and Dorothy Copley enjoyed detective stories and she was always slightly irritated that husband and wife took it for granted that he should always have first read. This inopportune reminder of his mild domestic selfishness assumed for a moment a disproportionate importance and she wondered why she had ever thought he could be of help. Yet was it right to criticize him for the marital priorities which Dorothy Copley had herself laid down and gently enforced over fifty-three years? She told herself, I am consulting the priest not the man. I wouldn't ask a plumber how he treated his wife and children before letting him loose on the leaking tank.

He gestured towards a second easy chair and she drew it up opposite him. He marked his page with his leather bookmark with careful deliberation and laid down the novel as reverently as if it were a book of devotions, folding both hands over it. It seemed to her that he had drawn himself together and was leaning slightly forward, head to one side, as if he were in the confessional. She had nothing to confess to him, only a question which in its stark simplicity seemed to her to go to the very heart of her orthodox, self-affirming but not unquestioning Christian faith. She said: 'If we are faced with a decision, a dilemma, how do we know what is right?'

She thought she detected in his gentle face an easing of tension as if grateful that the question was less onerous than he had feared. But he took his time before he replied.

'Our conscience will tell us if we will listen.'

'The still, small voice, like the voice of God?'

'Not like, Meg. Conscience is the voice of God, of the indwelling Holy Spirit. In the collect for Whit Sunday we do indeed pray that we may have a right judgement in all things.'

She said with gentle persistence: 'But how can we be sure that what we're hearing isn't our own voice, our own subconscious desires? The message we listen for so carefully must be mediated through our own experience, our personality, our heredity, our inner needs. Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?'

'I haven't found it so. Conscience has usually directed me against my own desires.'

'Or what at the time you thought were your own desires.'

But this was pressing him too hard. He sat quietly, blinking rapidly as if seeking inspiration in old sermons, old homilies, familiar texts. There was a moment's pause and then he said: 'I have found it helpful to think of conscience as an instrument, a stringed instrument perhaps. The message is in the music, but if we don't keep it in repair and use it constantly in regular and disciplined practice we get only an imperfect response.'

She remembered that he had been an amateur violinist. His hands were too rheumatic now to hold the instrument, but it still lay in its case on top of the bureau in the corner. The metaphor might mean something to him but for her it was meaningless.

She said: 'But even if my conscience tells me what is right, I mean right according to the moral law or even the law of the country, that doesn't necessarily mean the end of responsibility. Suppose if I obey it, do what conscience tells me, I cause harm, even danger to someone else.'

'We must do what we know is right and leave the.consequences to God.'

'But any human decision has to take account of the probable consequences; that is surely what decision means. How can we separate cause from effect?'

He said: 'Would it be helpful if you told me what is troubling you, that is if you feel you can?'

'It isn't my secret to tell, but I can give an example. Suppose I know that someone is regularly stealing, from his employer. If I expose him he'll be sacked, his marriage will be at risk, his wife and children injured. I might feel that the shop or firm could afford to lose a few pounds each week rather than cause all that hurt to innocent people.'

He was silent for a moment, then said: 'Conscience might tell you to speak to the thief rather than to his employer. Explain that you know, persuade him to stop. Of course the money would have to be returned. I can see that that might present a practical difficulty.'

She watched as he wrestled with the difficulty for a moment, brow creased, conjuring up the mythical thieving husband and father, clothing the moral problem in living flesh. She said: 'But what if he won't or can't stop his stealing?'

'Can't? If stealing is an irresistible compulsion then, of course, he needs medical help. Yes, certainly, that would have to be tried, although I'm never very sanguine about the success of psychotherapy.'

'Won't, then, or promises to stop and then goes on stealing.'

'You must still do what your conscience tells you is right. We cannot always judge the consequences. In the case you have postulated, to let the stealing go on unchecked is to connive at dishonesty. Once you have discovered what is happening you can't pretend not to know, you can't abdicate responsibility. Knowledge always brings responsibility; that is as true for Alex Mair at Larksoken Power Station as it is in this study. You said that the children would be injured if you told; they are being injured already by their father's dishonesty and so is the wife who benefits from it. Then there are the other staff to consider: perhaps they might be wrongly suspected. The dishonesty, if undetected, could well get worse so that at the end the wife and children would be in deeper trouble than if it were stopped now. That is why it is safer if we concentrate on doing what is right and leave the consequences to God.'

She wanted to say, 'Even if we're not sure any longer if He exists? Even if that seems only another way of evading the personal responsibility which you have just told me we can't and shouldn't evade?' But she saw with compunction that he was suddenly looking tired and she didn't miss the quick glance down at his book.

He wanted to get back to Inspector Ghote, Keating's gentle Indian detective who, despite his uncertainties, would get there in the end because this was fiction; problems could be solved, evil overcome, justice vindicated, and death itself only a mystery which would be solved in the final chapter. He was a very old man. It was unfair to bother him. She wanted to put her hand on his sleeve and tell him that it was all right, he mustn't worry. Instead she got up and, using for the first time the name that came naturally to her, spoke the comforting lie.

'Thank you, Father, you have been very helpful. It's plainer to me now. I shall know what to do.'

Every turn and hazard of the overgrown garden path leading to the gate which gave access to the headland was so familiar to Meg that she hardly needed to follow the jerking moon of her torch's beam and the wind, always capricious at Larksoken, seemed to have abated the worst of its fury. But when she reached a slight ridge and the light at the door of Martyr's Cottage came in sight, it renewed its strength and came swooping down on her as if it would pluck her from the earth and send her whirling back to the shelter and peace of the rectory. She didn't give battle but leaned against it, her head bent, her shoulder bag bumping at her side, clutching her scarf to her head with both hands until the fury passed and she could again stand upright. The sky, too, was turbulent, the stars bright but very high, the moon reeling frantically between the shredded clouds like a blown lantern of frail paper. Fighting her way towards Martyr's Cottage, Meg felt as if the whole headland was whirling in chaos about her so that she could no longer tell whether the roaring in her ears was the wind, her blood or the crashing sea. When at last, breathless, she reached the oak door she thought for the first time about Alex Mair and wondered what she would do if he were at home. It struck her as strange that the possibility hadn't previously occurred to her. And she knew that she couldn't face him, not now, not yet. But it was Alice who answered her ring. Meg asked: 'Are you alone?'

'Yes, I'm alone. Alex is at Larksoken. Come in, Meg.'

Meg took off and hung up her coat and headscarf in the hall and followed Alice to the kitchen. She had obviously been occupied in correcting her proofs. Now she reseated herself at her desk, swivelled round and looked gravely at Meg as she took her usual fireside chair. For a few moments neither spoke. Alice was wearing a long brown skirt of fine wool with a blouse high-buttoned to the chin and over it a sleeveless, pleated shift in narrow stripes of brown and fawn which reached almost to the floor. It gave her a hieratic dignity, an almost sacerdotal look of composed authority which was yet one of total comfort and ease. A small fire of logs was burning in the hearth, filling the room with a pungent autumnal smell, and the wind, muted by thick sixteenth-century walls, sighed and moaned companionably in the chimney. From time to time it gushed down and the logs flared into hissing life. The clothes, the firelight, the smell of burning wood overlaying the subtler smell of herbs and warm bread were familiar to Meg from their many quiet evenings together and they were dear to her. But tonight was dreadfully different. After tonight the kitchen might never be home to her again.

She asked: 'Am I interrupting?'

'Obviously, but that doesn't mean that I don't welcome interruption.'

Meg bent to extract a large brown envelope from her shoulder bag.

'I've brought back the first fifty pages of proofs. I've done what you asked, read the text and checked for printing errors only.'

Alice took the envelope and, without glancing at it, placed it on the desk. She said: 'That's what I wanted. I'm so obsessed with the accuracy of the recipes that errors in the text sometimes slip through. I hope it wasn't too much of a chore.'

'No, I enjoyed it, Alice. It reminded me of Elizabeth David.'

'Not too much, I hope. She's so marvellous that I'm always afraid of being over-influenced by her.'

There was a silence. Meg thought: We're talking as if the dialogue has been scripted for us, not as strangers exactly, but as people who are careful of their words because the space between them is loaded with dangerous thoughts. How well do I really know her? What has she ever told me about herself? Just a few details of her life with her father, snatches of information, a few phrases dropped into our conversations like a falling match, briefly illuminating the contours of a vast unexplored terrain. I've confided almost everything about myself, my childhood, the racial trouble at the school, Martin's death. But has it ever been an equal friendship? She knows more about me than any other living creature. All I really know about Alice is that she's a good cook.

She was aware of her friend's steady, almost quizzical look. Alice said: 'But you didn't fight your way in this wind just to bring back fifty pages of proofs.'

'I have to talk to you.'

'You are talking to me.'

Meg held Alice's own unflinching gaze. She said: 'Those two girls, Caroline and Amy, people are saying that they killed Hilary Robarts. Is that what you believe?'

'No. Why do you ask?'

'Nor do I believe it. Do you suppose the police will try to pin it on them?'

Alice's voice was cool. 'I shouldn't think so. Isn't that rather a dramatic idea? And why should they? Chief Inspector Rickards strikes me as an honest and conscientious officer, if not particularly intelligent.'

'Well, it's convenient for them, isn't it? Two suspects dead. The case closed. No more deaths.'

'Were they suspects? You seem to be more in Rickards's confidence than I am.'

'They didn't have alibis. The man at Larksoken Caroline was supposed to be engaged to – Jonathan Reeves, isn't it? – apparently he's confessed that they weren't together that night. Caroline forced him to lie. Most of the staff at Larksoken know that now. And it's all over the village, of course. George Jago rang to tell me.'

'So they didn't have alibis. Nor did other people – you, for example. Not having an alibi isn't proof of guilt. Nor did I, incidentally. I was at home all that evening but I doubt whether I could prove it.'

And this at last was the moment which had filled Meg's thoughts since the murder, the moment of truth which she had dreaded. She said through dry unyielding lips: 'But you weren't at home, were you? You told Chief Inspector Rickards that you were when I was here sitting in this kitchen on the Monday morning, but it wasn't true.'

There was a moment's silence. Then Alice said calmly: 'Is that what you've come to say?'

'I know that it can be explained. It's ridiculous even to ask. It's just that I've had it on my mind for so long. And you are my friend. A friend should be able to ask. There should be honesty, confidence, trust.'

'Ask what? Do you have to talk like a marriage guidance counsellor?'

'Ask why you told the police you were here at nine. You weren't. I was. After the Copleys left I had a sudden need to see you. I tried the telephone but got only the answer-phone. I didn't leave a message; there was no point. I walked down. The cottage was empty. The light was on in the sitting room and the kitchen and the door was locked. I called out for you. The record player was on, very loud. The cottage was filled with triumphant music. But there was no one here.'

Alice sat in silence for a moment. Then she said calmly: 'I went for a walk to enjoy the moonlight. I didn't expect a casual caller. There are never casual callers except you, and I thought that you were in Norwich. But I took the obvious precaution against an intruder, I locked the door. How did you get in?'

'With your key. You can't have forgotten, Alice. You gave me a key a year ago. I've had it ever since.'

Alice looked at her and Meg saw in her face the dawning of memory, chagrin, even, before she turned briefly away, the beginning of a rueful smile. She said: 'But I had forgotten; completely. How extraordinary! It might not have worried me, even if I had remembered. After all, I thought you were in Norwich. But I didn't remember. We've got so many keys to the cottage, some here, some in London. But you never reminded me that you had one.'

'I did once, early on, and you told me to keep it. Like a fool I thought that the key meant something: trust, friendship, a sign that Martyr's Cottage was always open to me. You told me that I might one day need to use it.'

And now Alice did laugh aloud. She said: 'And you did need to use it. How ironic. But it isn't like you to come in uninvited, not while I wasn't here. You never have before.'

'But I didn't know you weren't here. The lights were on and I rang and I could hear the music. When I rang the third time and you still didn't come I was afraid that you might be ill, unable to summon help. So I unlocked the door. I walked into a surge of wonderful sound. I recognized it, Mozart's Symphony in G minor. It was Martin's favourite. What an extraordinary tape to choose.'

'I didn't choose it. I just turned on the player. What do you think I should have chosen? A requiem mass to mark the passing of a soul I don't believe in?'

Meg went on as if she hadn't heard: 'I walked through to the kitchen. The light was on here too. It was the first time I'd been in this room on my own. And suddenly I felt like a stranger. I felt that nothing in it had anything to do with me. I felt that I had no right here. That's why I went away without leaving you any message.'

Alice said sadly: 'You were quite right. You had no right here. And you needed to see me so badly that you walked alone over the headland before you knew that the Whistler was dead?'

'I didn't walk in fear. The headland is so deserted. There's nowhere anyone can lurk, and I knew when I reached Martyr's Cottage I'd be with you.'

'No, you're not easily frightened are you? Are you frightened now?'

'Not of you but of myself. I'm frightened of what I'm thinking.'

'So the cottage was empty. What else is there? Obviously there is something else.'

Meg said: 'That message on your answerphone; if you'd really received it at ten past eight you would have telephoned Norwich station and left a message for me to ring back. You knew how much the Copleys disliked the thought of going to their daughter. No one else on the headland knew that. The Copleys never spoke of it and nor did I, not to anyone except you. You would have rung, Alice. There could have been an announcement over the station loudspeaker and I could have driven them home. You would have thought of that.'

Alice said: 'One lie to Rickards which could have been a matter of convenience, a wish to avoid trouble, and one instance of insensitive neglect. Is that all?'

'The knife. The middle knife in your block. It wasn't here. It meant nothing at the time, of course, but the block looked odd. I was so used to seeing the five carefully graded knives, each in its sheath. It's back now. It was back when I called in on the Monday after the murder. But it wasn't here on the Sunday night.'

She wanted to cry out: 'You can't be going to use it! Alice, don't use it!' Instead she made herself go on, trying to keep her voice calm, trying not to plead for reassurance, understanding.

'And next morning, when you telephoned to say that Hilary was dead, I didn't say anything about my visit. I didn't know what to believe. It wasn't that I suspected you; that would have been impossible for me, it still is. But I needed time to think. It was late morning before I could bring myself to come to you.'

'And then you found me here with Chief Inspector Rickards and heard me lying. And you saw that the knife was back in the block. But you didn't speak then and you haven't spoken since, not even, I presume, to Adam Dalgliesh.'

It was a shrewd thrust. Meg said: 'I've told no one, how could I? Not until we'd spoken. I knew that you must have had what seemed to you a good reason for lying.'

'And then, I suppose, slowly, perhaps unwillingly, you began to realize what that reason might be?'

'I didn't think you'd murdered Hilary. It sounds fantastic, ludicrous even to speak those words, to think of suspecting you. But the knife was missing and you weren't there. You did lie and I couldn't understand why. I still can't. I wonder who it is you're shielding. And sometimes – forgive me, Alice – sometimes I wonder whether you were there when he killed her, kept guard, stood there watching, might even have helped him by cutting off her hair.'

Alice sat so still that the long-fingered hands resting in her lap, the folds of her shift, might have been carved in stone. She said: 'I didn't help anyone – and no one helped me. There were only two people on that beach, Hilary Robarts and I. I planned it alone and I did it alone.'

For a moment they sat in silence. Meg felt a great coldness. She heard the words and she knew that they were true. Had she, perhaps, always known? She thought: I shall never be with her in this kitchen again, never again find the peace and security which I found in this room. And there fell into her mind an incongruous memory; herself sitting quietly in the same chair and watching while Alice made short pastry; sieving the flour on to a marble slab, adding the squares of soft butter, breaking in the egg, her long fingers delicately dabbling the mixture, drawing in the flour, lightly forming the glistening ball of dough. She said: 'They were your hands. Your hands tightening the belt round her throat, your hands cutting off her hair, your hands slicing that L into her forehead. You planned it alone and you did it alone.'

Alice said: 'It took courage, but perhaps less than you would imagine. And she died very quickly, very easily. We shall be lucky to go with so little pain. She hadn't even time to feel terror. She had an easier death than most of us can look forward to. And as for what followed, that didn't matter. Not to her. Not even much to me. She was dead. It's what you do to the living that takes the strong emotions, courage, hatred and love.'

She was silent for a moment, then she said: 'In your eagerness to prove me a murderess, don't confuse suspicion with proof. You can't prove any of this. All right, you say the knife was missing, but that's only your word against mine. And if it was missing, I could say that I went for a short walk on the headland and the murderer saw his chance.'

'And put it back afterwards? He wouldn't even know that it was there.'

'Of course he would. Everyone knows that I'm a cook, and a cook has sharp knives. And why shouldn't he put it back?'

'But how would he get in? The door was locked.'

'There's only your word for that. I shall say that I left it open. People on the headland usually do.'

Meg wanted to cry out: 'Don't, Alice. Don't begin planning more lies. Let there at least be truth between us.' She said: 'And the portrait, the smashed window, was that you too?'

'Of course.'

'But why? Why all that complication?'

'Because it was necessary. While I was waiting for Hilary to come out of the sea I glimpsed Theresa Blaney. She suddenly appeared on the very edge of the cliff by the abbey ruins. She was only there for a moment and then she disappeared. But I saw her. She was unmistakable in the moonlight.'

'But if she didn't see you, if she wasn't there when you… when Hilary died…'

'Don't you see? It meant that her father wouldn't have an alibi. She has always struck me as a truthful child and she has had a strict religious upbringing. Once she told the police that she was out on the headland that night Ryan would be in terrible danger. And even if she had sense enough to lie, for how long could she keep it up? The police would be gentle questioning her. Rickards isn't a brute. But a truthful child would find it difficult to lie convincingly. When I got back here after the murder I played back the messages on the answerphone. It occurred to me that Alex might change his plans and telephone. And it was then, too late, that I got George Jago's message. I knew that the murder could no longer be pinned on the Whistler. I had to give Ryan Blaney an alibi. So I tried to ring him to say that I'd collect the picture. When I couldn't get through I knew I had to call at Scudder's Cottage and as quickly as possible.'

'You could just have collected the portrait, knocked at the door to say what you'd done, seen him then. That would be proof enough that he was at home.'

'But it would have looked too deliberate, too contrived. Ryan had made it plain that he didn't want to be disturbed, that I was merely to collect the portrait. He made that very clear. And Adam Dalgliesh was with me when he said it. Not any casual caller, but Scotland Yard's most intelligent detective. No, I had to have a valid excuse to knock and speak to Ryan.'

'So you put the portrait in the boot of your car and told him that it wasn't in the shed?' It seemed to Meg extraordinary that horror could briefly be subsumed by curiosity, by the need to know. They might have been discussing complicated arrangements for a picnic.

Alice said: 'Exactly. He was hardly likely to think that it was I who had taken it only a minute earlier. It was convenient, of course, that he was half drunk. Not as drunk as I described to Rickards, but obviously incapable of killing Robarts and getting back to Scudder's Cottage by a quarter to ten.'

'Not even in the van or on his bicycle?'

'The van was out of commission and he couldn't have stayed on the bicycle. Besides, I would have passed him cycling home. My evidence meant that Ryan would be safe even if Theresa confessed that she'd left the cottage. After I left him I drove back over a deserted headland. I stopped briefly below the pillbox and threw the shoes inside. I had no way of burning them except on an open fire where I had burned the paper and string from the wrapped portrait, but I had an idea that burning rubber could leave some trace and a persistent smell. I didn't expect the police to search for them because I didn't believe they would find a print. But even if they did there would be nothing to link those particular shoes with the murder. I washed them thoroughly under the outside tap before I disposed of them. Ideally I could have returned them to the jumble box but I daren't wait and that night I knew that, with you gone to Norwich, the back door would be locked.'

'And then you threw the picture through Hilary's window?'

'I had to get rid of it somehow. That way it looked like a deliberate act of vandalism and hatred and there were plenty of possible suspects for that, not all of them on the headland. It complicated matters even further and it was one more piece of evidence to help Ryan. No one would believe that he would deliberately destroy his own work. But it had a double purpose: I wanted to get into Thyme Cottage. I smashed enough of the window to get through.'

'But that was terribly dangerous. You might have cut yourself, got a sliver of glass on your shoes. And they were your own shoes then; you had disposed of the Bumbles.'

'I examined the soles very thoroughly. And I was particularly careful where I trod. She had left the downstairs lights on so I didn't have to use my torch.'

'But why? What were you looking for? What did you hope to find?'

'Nothing. I wanted to get rid of the belt. I curled it very carefully and put it in the drawer in her bedroom among her other belts, stockings, handkerchiefs, socks.'

'But if the police examined it, it wouldn't have her prints on it.'

'Nor would it have mine. I was still wearing my gloves. Anyway why should they examine it? One would assume that the murderer had used his own belt and had taken it away again. The least likely hiding place for the killer to choose would be the victim's own cottage. That's why I chose it. And even if they did decide to examine every belt and dog lead on the headland I doubt whether they'd get any useful prints from half an inch of leather which dozens of hands must have touched.'

Meg said bitterly: 'You took a lot of trouble to give Ryan an alibi. What about the other innocent suspects? They were all at risk, they still are. Didn't you think of them?'

'I only cared about one other, Alex, and he had the best alibi of all. He would go through security to get into the station and again when he left.'

Meg said: 'I was thinking of Neil Pascoe, Amy, Miles Lessingham, even myself.'

'None of you is a parent responsible for four motherless children. I thought it very unlikely that Lessingham wouldn't be able to provide an alibi and if he couldn't there was no real evidence against him. How could there be? He didn't do it. But I have a feeling that he guesses who did. Lessingham isn't a fool. But even if he knows, he'll never tell. Neil Pascoe and Amy could give each other an alibi and you, my dear Meg, do you really see yourself as a serious suspect?'

'I felt like one. When Rickards was questioning me it was like being back in that staffroom at school, facing those cold accusing faces, knowing I'd already been judged and found guilty, wondering if perhaps I wasn't guilty.'

'The possible distress of innocent suspects, even you, was very low on my list of priorities.'

'And now you'll let them blame the murder on Caroline and Amy, both dead and both innocent?'

'Innocent? Of that, of course. Perhaps you're right and the police will find it convenient to assume they did it, one of them or together in collusion. From Rickards's point of view it's better to have two dead suspects than no arrest. And it can't hurt them now. The dead are beyond harm, the harm they do and the harm that is done to them.'

'But it's wrong and it's unjust.'

'Meg, they are dead. Dead. It can't matter. Injustice is a word and they have passed beyond the power of words. They don't exist. And life is unjust. If you feel called upon to do something about injustice concentrate on injustice to the living. Alex had a right to that job.'

'And Hilary Robarts, hadn't she a right to life? I know that she wasn't likeable, nor even very happy. There's no immediate family to mourn, apparently. She doesn't leave young children. But you've taken from her what no one can ever give back. She didn't deserve to die. Perhaps none of us do, not like that. We don't even hang the Whistler now. We've learned something since Tyburn, since Agnes Poley's burning. Nothing Hilary Robarts did deserved death.'

'I'm not arguing that she deserved to die. It doesn't matter whether she was happy, or childless, or even much use to anyone but herself. What I'm saying is that I wanted her dead.'

'That seems to me so evil that it's beyond my understanding. Alice, what you did was a dreadful sin.'

Alice laughed. The sound was so full-throated, almost happy, as if the amusement were genuine. 'Meg, you continue to astonish me. You use words which are no longer in the general vocabulary, not even in the Church's, so I'm told. The implications of that simple little word are outside my comprehension. But if you want to see this in theological terms, then think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote: "We have at times to be willing to be guilty." Well, I'm willing to be guilty.'

'To be guilty, yes. But not to feel guilt. That must make it easier.'

'Oh, but I do feel it. I've been made to feel guilty from childhood. And if at the heart of your being you feel that you've no right even to exist, then one more cause of guilt hardly matters.'

Meg thought, I shall never be able to unlearn, never forget what's happening here this evening. But I have to know the whole of it. Even the most painful knowledge is better than half-knowledge. She said: 'That night I came here to tell you the Copleys were going to their daughter…'

Alice said: 'On the Friday after the dinner party. Thirteen days ago.'

'Is that all? It seems in a different dimension of time. You asked me to come and have supper with you when I got back from Norwich. Was that planned as part of your alibi? Did you use even me?'

Alice looked at her. She said: 'Yes. I'm sorry. You would have been here about half-past nine, just time for me to get back and be ready with a hot meal in the oven.'

'Which you would have cooked earlier in the evening. Safe enough with Alex at the power station, out of the way.'

'That's what I planned. When you declined I didn't press it. That would have looked suspicious later, too like trying to establish an alibi. Besides, you wouldn't have been persuaded to change your mind, would you? You never do. But the very fact of the invitation would have helped. A woman wouldn't normally invite a friend to even an informal supper if she's simultaneously planning a murder.'

'And if I had accepted, if I had turned up here at half-past nine, that would have been awkward, wouldn't it, given your later change of plan? You wouldn't have been able to drive over to Scudder's Cottage to give Ryan Blaney his alibi. And you would have been left in possession of the shoes and the belt.'

'The shoes would have been the greatest problem. I didn't think they'd ever be connected with the crime but I needed to get rid of them before next morning. I couldn't possibly explain my possession of them. I would probably have washed them and hidden them away, hoping for a chance to get them back to the jumble box the next day. Though I would have to have found a way of giving Ryan his alibi. Probably I would have told you that I couldn't get through by telephone and that we ought to drive over at once to tell him that the Whistler was dead. But it's all academic. I didn't worry. You said you wouldn't come and I knew you wouldn't.'

'But I did. Not to supper. But I came.'

'Yes. Why did you, Meg?'

'A feeling of depression after a heavy day, hating seeing the Copleys go, the need to see you. I wasn't looking for a meal. I had an early supper and then walked over the headland.'

But there was something else she needed to ask. She said: 'You knew that Hilary swam after watching the beginning of the main news. I suppose most people knew that who knew that she liked swimming at night. And you were taking trouble to see that Ryan had his alibi for nine fifteen or shortly after. But suppose the body hadn't been discovered until the next day? Surely she wouldn't normally be missed until she didn't turn up at the power station on Monday morning, and then they would telephone to see if she were ill. It might even have been Monday evening before anybody made any inquiries. She could have swum in the morning and not at night.'

'The pathologist can usually estimate the time of death with reasonable accuracy. And I knew she'd be found that night. I knew that Alex had promised to visit her when he got back from the power station. He was on his way to the cottage when he met Adam Dalgliesh. And now, I think, you know it all, except for the Bumble trainers. I came through the back gardens at the Old Rectory late on Sunday afternoon. I knew that the back door would be open and it was the time when you would be having high tea. I had a bag with me with a few items of jumble in case I was seen. But I wasn't seen. I took soft shoes, easy to wear, a pair that looked roughly my size. And I took one of the belts.'

But there was one more question to ask, the most important of all. Meg said: 'But why? Alice, I have to know. Why?'

'That's a dangerous question, Meg. Are you sure you really want the answer?'

'I need the answer, need to try to understand.'

'Isn't it enough that she was determined to marry Alex and I was determined that she shouldn't?'

'That isn't why you killed her. It can't be. There was something more than that, there had to be.'

'Yes, there was. I suppose you have a right to know. She was blackmailing Alex. She could have stopped him getting that job, or, if he had got it, could have made it impossible for him to function successfully. She had the power to destroy his whole career. Toby Gledhill had told her that Alex had deliberately held up publishing the result of their research because it might have prejudiced the success of the inquiry into Larksoken's second reactor. They discovered that some of the assumptions made in generating the mathematical models were more critical than had been thought. People opposing the building of the new PWR at Larksoken could have exploited it to cause delay, whip up fresh hysteria.'

'You mean that he deliberately falsified the results?'

'That's something he's incapable of doing. All he did was to delay publishing the experiment. He'll publish it within the next month or two. But that's the kind of information which, once it got into the press, would have done irreparable harm. Toby was almost prepared to hand it over to Neil Pascoe but Hilary dissuaded him. It was far too valuable for that. She meant to use it to persuade Alex to marry her. She faced him with the knowledge when he walked home with her after the dinner party and late that night, he told me. I knew then what I had to do. The only way he might have been able to buy her off was by promoting her from Acting Administrator to Administrative Officer of Larksoken, and that was almost as impossible for him as deliberately falsifying a scientific result.'

'You mean he might actually have married her?'

'He might have been forced to. But how safe would he have been even then? She could have held that knowledge over his head until the end of his life. And what would that life have been, tied to a woman who had blackmailed him into marriage, a woman he didn't want, whom he could neither respect nor love?'

And then she said in a voice so low that Meg only just heard it, 'I owed Alex a death.'

Meg said: 'But how could you be sure, sure enough to kill her? Couldn't you have talked to her, persuaded her, reasoned with her?'

'I did talk to her. I went to see her on that Sunday afternoon. It was I who was with her when Mrs Jago arrived with the church magazine. You could say that I went to give her a chance of life. I couldn't murder her without making sure that it was necessary. That meant doing what I'd never done before, talking to her about Alex, trying to persuade her that the marriage wouldn't be in either of their interests, to let him go. I could have saved myself the humiliation. There was no argument, she was beyond that. She was no longer even rational. Part of the time she railed at me like a woman possessed.'

Meg said: 'And your brother, did he know about the visit?'

'He knows nothing. I didn't tell him at the time and I haven't told him since. But he told me what he planned; to promise her marriage and then, when the job was secure, to renege. It would have been disastrous. He never understood the woman he was dealing with, the passion, the desperation. She was a rich man's only child, alternately overindulged or neglected, trying all her life to compete with her father, taught that what you want is yours by right if you've only got the courage to fight for it and take it. And she had courage. She was obsessed by him, by her need for him, above all by her need for a child. She said that he owed her a child. Did he think she was like one of his reactors, tameable, that he could let down into that turbulence the equivalent of his rods of boron-steel and control the force which he'd let loose? When I left her that afternoon I knew I had no choice. Sunday was the deadline. He had arranged to call at Thyme Cottage on his way home from the power station. It was fortunate for him that I got to her first.

'Perhaps the worst part of all was waiting for him to come home that night. I daren't ring the power station. I couldn't be sure that he would be alone in his office or in the computer room, and I had never before telephoned him to ask when he would be home. I sat there and waited for nearly three hours. I expected that it would be Alex who would find the body. When he discovered that she wasn't in the cottage the natural move would be to check at the beach. He would find the body, telephone the police from the car and ring home to tell me. When he didn't I began to fantasize that she wasn't really dead, that somehow I'd bungled it. I pictured him desperately working on her, giving her the kiss of life, saw her eyes slowly open. I turned off the lights and moved to the sitting room to watch the road. But it wasn't an ambulance that arrived, it was the police cars, the paraphernalia of murder. And still Alex didn't come.'

Meg asked: 'And when he did?'

'We hardly spoke. I'd gone to bed; I knew I must do what I would normally have done, not waited up for him.

He came to my room to tell me that Hilary was dead and how she had died. I asked "The Whistler?" and he answered, "The police think not. The Whistler was dead before she was killed." Then he left me. I don't think either of us could have borne to be together, the air heavy with our unspoken thoughts. But I did what I had to do, and it was worth it. The job is his. And they won't take it away from him, not after it's been confirmed. They can't sack him because his sister is a murderess.'

'But if they found out why you did it?'

'They won't. Only two people know that and I wouldn't have told you if I couldn't trust you. On a less elevated level, I doubt if they'd believe you in the absence of confirmation from another witness; and Toby Gledhill and Hilary Robarts, the only two who could give it, are dead.' After a minute's silence, she said: 'You would have done the same for Martin.'

'Oh no, no.'

'Not as I did. I can't see you managing to use physical force. But when he drowned, if you could have stood on that river bank and had the power to choose which one should die and which live, would you have hesitated?'

'No, of course not. But that would have been different. I wouldn't have planned a drowning, wouldn't have wanted it.'

'Or if you were told that millions of people would live more safely if Alex got a job which he is uniquely capable of filling but at the cost of one woman's life, would you hesitate then? That was the choice which faced me. Don't evade it, Meg. I didn't.'

'But murder, how could it solve anything? It never has.'

Alice said with sudden passion: 'Oh, but it can, and it does. You read history, don't you? Surely you know that.'

Meg felt exhausted with weariness and pain. She wanted the talking to stop. But it couldn't. There was still too much to be said. She asked: 'What are you going to do?'

'That depends on you.'

But out of horror and disbelief Meg had found courage. And she had found more than courage: authority. She said: 'Oh no, it doesn't. This isn't a responsibility I asked for and I don't want it.'

'But you can't evade it. You know what you know. Call Chief Inspector Rickards now. You can use this telephone.' When Meg made no move to use it she said: 'Surely you aren't going to do an E. M. Forster on me. If I had a choice between betraying my country and my friend I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.'

Meg said: 'That is one of those clever remarks that, when you analyse them, either mean nothing or mean something rather silly.'

Alice said: 'Remember, whatever you choose to do, you can't bring her back. You've got a number of options, but that isn't one. It's very satisfying to the human ego to discover the truth; ask Adam Dalgliesh. It's even more satisfying to human vanity to imagine you can avenge the innocent, restore the past, vindicate the right. But you can't. The dead stay dead. All you can do is to hurt the living in the name of justice or retribution or revenge. If that gives you any pleasure, then do it, but don't imagine that there's virtue in it. Whatever you decide, I know that you won't go back on it. I can believe you and I can trust you.'

Looking at Alice's face Meg saw that the look bent on her was serious, ironic, challenging; but it was not pleading. Alice said: 'Do you want some time to consider?'

'No. There's no point in having time. I know now what I have to do. I have to tell. But I'd rather you did.'

'Then give me until tomorrow. Once I've spoken there'll be no more privacy. There are things I need to do here. The proofs, affairs to arrange. And I should like twelve hours of freedom. If you can give me that I'll be grateful. I haven't the right to ask for more, but I am asking for that.'

Meg said: 'But when you confess you'll have to give them a motive, a reason, something they can believe in.'

'Oh, they'll believe it all right. Jealousy, hatred, the resentment of an ageing virgin for a woman who looked as she did, lived as she did. I'll say that she wanted to marry him, take him from me after all I've done for him. They'll see me as a neurotic, menopausal woman gone temporarily off her head. Unnatural affection. Suppressed sexuality. That's how men talk about women like me. That's the kind of motive that makes sense to a man like Rickards. I'll give it to him.'

'Even if it means you end up in Broadmoor? Alice, could you bear it?'

'Well, that's a possibility, isn't it? It's either that or prison. This was a carefully planned murder. Even the cleverest counsel won't be able to make it look like a sudden, unpremeditated act. And I doubt whether there's much to choose between Broadmoor and prison when it comes to the food.'

It seemed to Meg that nothing ever again would be certain. Not only had her inner world been shattered but the familiar objects of the external world no longer had reality. Alice's roll-top desk, the kitchen table, the high-backed cane chairs, the rows of gleaming pans, the stoves all seemed insubstantial, as if they would disappear at her touch. She was aware that the kitchen round which her eyes ranged was now empty. Alice had left. She leaned back, faint, and closed her eyes and then, opening them, she was aware of Alice's face bending low over hers, immense, almost moon-like. She was handing Meg a tumbler. She said: 'It's whisky. Drink this, you need it.'

'No, Alice, I can't. I can't really. You know I hate whisky, it makes me sick.'

'This won't make you sick. There are times when whisky is the only possible remedy. This is one of them. Drink it, Meg.'

She felt her knees tremble, and simultaneously the tears started like burning spurts of pain and began flowing unchecked, a salt stream over her cheeks, her mouth. She thought, This can't be happening. This can't be true. But that was how she had felt when Miss Mortimer, calling her from her class, had gently seated her in the chair opposite to her in the Head's private sitting room and had broken the news of Martin's death. The unthinkable had to be thought, the unbelievable believed. Words still meant what they had always meant; murder, death, grief, pain. She could see Miss Mortimer's mouth moving, the odd, disconnected phrases floating out, like balloons in a cartoon, noticing again how she must have wiped off her lipstick before the interview. Perhaps she had thought that only naked lips could give such appalling news. She saw again those restless blobs of flesh, noticed again that the top button on Miss Mortimer's cardigan was hanging loose on a single thread and heard herself say, actually say, 'Miss Mortimer, you're going to lose a button.'

She clasped her fingers round the glass. It seemed to her to have grown immensely large and heavy as a rock and the smell of the whisky almost turned her stomach. But she had no power to resist. She lifted it slowly to her mouth. She was aware of Alice's face still very close, of Alice's eyes watching her. She took the first small sip, and was about to throw back her head and gulp it down, when, firmly but gently, the glass was taken out of her hands, and she heard Alice's voice: 'You're quite right, Meg, it was never your drink. I'll make coffee for both of us then walk with you back to the Old Rectory.'

Fifteen minutes later Meg helped wash up the coffee cups as if this was the end of an ordinary evening. Then they set out together to walk over the headland. The wind was at their back and it seemed to Meg that they almost flew through the air, their feet hardly touching the turf, as if they were witches. At the door of the rectory Alice asked: 'What will you do tonight, Meg. Pray for me?'

'I shall pray for both of us.'

'As long as you don't expect me to repent. I'm not religious, as you know, and I don't understand that word unless, as I suppose, it means regret that something we've done has turned out less well for us than we hoped. On that definition I have little to repent of except ill luck that you, my dear Meg, are an incompetent car mechanic'

And then, as if on impulse, she grasped Meg's arms. The grip was so fierce that it hurt. Meg thought for a moment that Alice was going to kiss her but her hold loosened and her hands fell. She said a curt goodbye and turned away.

Putting her key in the lock and pushing the door open, Meg looked back, but Alice had disappeared into the darkness and the wild sobbing, which for an incredible moment she thought was a woman weeping, was only the wind.

Dalgliesh had just finished sorting the last of his aunt's papers when the telephone rang. It was Rickards. His voice, strong, high with euphoria, came over the line as clearly as if his presence filled the room. His wife had given birth to a daughter an hour earlier. He was ringing from the hospital. His wife was fine. The baby was wonderful. He only had a few minutes. They were carrying out some nursing procedure or other and then he'd be able to get back to Susie.

'She's got home just in time, Mr Dalgliesh. Lucky, wasn't it? And the midwife says she's hardly known such a quick labour for a first pregnancy. Only six hours. Seven and a half pounds, just a nice weight. And we wanted a girl. We're calling her Stella Louise. Louise is after Susie's mother. We may as well make the old trout happy.'

Replacing the receiver after warm congratulations which he suspected Rickards felt were hardly adequate, Dalgliesh wondered why he had been honoured with such early news and concluded that Rickards, possessed by joy, was ringing everyone who might have an interest, filling in the minutes before he was allowed back to his wife's bedside. His last words were: 'I can't tell you what it feels like, Mr Dalgliesh.'

But Dalgliesh could remember what it had felt like. He paused for a moment, the receiver still warm under his hand, and faced reactions which seemed to him overcomplicated for such ordinary and expected news, recognizing with distaste that part of what he was feeling was envy. Was it, he wondered, his coming to the headland, the sense there of man's transitory but continuing life, the everlasting cycle of birth and death, or was it the death of Jane Dalgliesh, his last living relative, that made him for a moment wish so keenly that he too had a living child?

Neither he nor Rickards had spoken about the murder. Rickards would no doubt have felt it an almost indecent intrusion into his private, almost sacrosanct, rapture. And there was, after all, little more to be said. Rickards had made it plain that he considered the case closed. Amy Camm and her lover were both dead and it was unlikely now that their guilt would ever be proved. And the case against them was admittedly imperfect. Rickards still had no evidence that either woman had known details of the Whistler killings. But that, apparently, now assumed less importance in the police mind. Someone could have talked. Scraps of information picked up by Camm in the Local Hero could have been pieced together. Robarts herself could have told Amphlett and what they hadn't learned they could have guessed. The case might officially be classified as unsolved but Rickards had now persuaded himself that Amphlett, helped by her lover Camm, had killed Hilary Robarts. Dalgliesh, when they had briefly met on the previous evening, had felt it right to put another view and had argued it calmly and logically, and Rickards had turned his own arguments against him.

'She's her own woman. You said so yourself. She's got her own life, a profession. Why the hell should she care who he marries? She didn't try to stop him when he married before. And it's not as if he needs protection. Can you imagine Alex Mair doing anything he doesn't want to do? He's the sort of man who'll die at his own convenience, not God's.'

Dalgliesh had said: 'The absence of motive is the weakest part of the case. And I admit there isn't a single piece of forensic or other physical evidence. But Alice Mair fulfils all the criteria. She knew how the Whistler killed; she knew where Robarts would be shortly after nine o'clock; she has no alibi; she knew where she could find those trainers and she is tall enough to wear them; she had an opportunity of throwing them into the bunker on her way back from Scudder's Cottage. But there's something else, isn't there? I think this crime was committed by someone who didn't know that the Whistler was dead when she did the murder and did know shortly afterwards.' 'It's ingenious, Mr Dalgliesh.'

Dalgliesh was tempted to say that it wasn't ingenious, merely logical. Rickards would feel obliged to question Alice Mair again, but he would get nowhere. And it wasn't his case. Within two days he would be back in London. Any more dirty work which MI5 wanted done they would have to do themselves. He had already interfered more than was strictly justified and certainly more than he had found agreeable. He told himself that it would be dishonest to blame either Rickards or the murderer for the fact that most of the decisions he had come to the headland to make were still undecided.

That unexpected spurt of envy had induced a mild self-disgust which wasn't helped by the discovery that he had left the book he was currently reading, A. N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy, in the room at the top of the tower. It was providing satisfaction and consolation of which at the present he felt particularly in need. Shutting the front door of the mill firmly against the wind, he fought his way round the curve of the tower, switched on the lights and climbed up to the top storey. Outside, the wind whooped and screamed like a pack of demented demons but here, in this small domed cell it was extraordinarily quiet. The tower had stood for over 150 years. It had resisted far worse gales. On an impulse he opened the eastward window and let the wind rush in like a wild cleansing force. It was then that he saw, over the flint wall which bounded the patio at Martyr's Cottage, a light in the kitchen window. It was no ordinary light. As he watched, it flickered, then died, flickered again, and then strengthened into a ruddy glow. He had seen that kind of light before and knew what it meant. Martyr's Cottage was on fire.

He almost slid down the two ladders linking the mill floors and, dashing into the sitting room, paused only to telephone for the fire brigade and ambulance, grateful that he hadn't yet garaged the car. Seconds later he was hurtling at top speed across the rough grass of the headland. The Jaguar rocked to a stop and he rushed to the front door. It was locked. For a second he considered battering it open with the Jaguar. But the frame was solid sixteenth-century oak and valuable seconds could be lost in futile manoeuvring and accelerating. Racing to the side he sprang at the wall, grasped the top, swung his body over and dropped on to the rear patio. It took only a second to check that the back door, too, was bolted top and bottom. He had no doubt who was inside; he would have to get her out through the window. He tore off his jacket and wrapped it round his right arm while, at the same time, turning on full the outside tap and drenching his head and upper body. The icy water dripped from him as he flexed his elbow and crashed it against the glass. But the pane was thick, designed to keep out the winter gales. He had to stand on the sill, supporting himself by the window frame, and kick violently and repeatedly before the glass crashed inwards and the flames leapt at him.

Inside the window was a double sink. He rolled over it and, gasping in the smoke, dropped to his knees and began to crawl towards her. She was lying between the stove and the table, the long body rigid as an effigy. Her hair and clothes were alight and she lay there staring upwards, bathed in tongues of fire. But her face was as yet untouched and the open eyes seemed to gaze at him with such an intensity of half-crazed endurance that there flashed into his mind unbidden the image of Agnes Poley so that the blazing tables and chairs were the crackling faggots of her agonizing martyrdom, and he smelled above the acrid smoke the dreadful stink of burning flesh.

He tugged at Alice Mair's body but it was awkwardly wedged and the edge of the burning table had fallen across her legs. Somehow he had to buy a few seconds of time.

He staggered coughing through the smoke to the sink, turned both taps full on and, seizing a pan, he filled it and threw water over the flames again and again. A small area of fire hissed and began to die. Kicking away the burning debris, he managed to lift her over his shoulder then stumbled to the door. But the bolts, almost too hot to touch, were jammed fast. He would have to get her out through the broken window. Gasping with the effort, he pushed the dead weight forward over the sink. But the rigid body caught on the taps and it took an eternity of agonizing time before he was able to free her, shove her forward to the window and at last see her tip forward out of sight. He gasped in the fresh air and, grasping the edge of the sink, tried to raise himself. But suddenly his legs had no strength. He felt them buckle and had to rest his arms on the sink edge to prevent himself from falling back into the strengthening fire. Until this minute he had been unaware of pain, but now it clawed and bit at his legs and back as if he were being savaged by a pack of dogs. He couldn't stretch his head to reach the running taps but he cupped his hands and threw the water against his face as if this cool benison could assuage the agony in his legs. And suddenly he was visited with an almost overwhelming temptation to let go, to fall back into the fire rather than make the impossible effort to escape. It was only a second's folly but it spurred him to a last desperate attempt. He seized the taps, one with each hand, and slowly and painfully lifted himself across the sink. And now his knees had a purchase on the hard edge and he could thrust himself forward to the windows. Smoke billowed around him and the great tongues of flame roared at his back. His ears hurt with the roaring. It filled the headland and he no longer knew whether he was hearing fire, wind or the sea. Then he made the last effort and felt himself falling on to the softness of her body. He rolled away from her. She was no longer burning. Her clothes had been burnt away and now clung like blackened rags to what was left of the flesh.

He managed to get to his feet and half crawled, half stumbled towards the outside tap. He reached it just before he lost consciousness and the last thing he heard was the hiss as the stream of water quenched his burning clothes.

A minute later he opened his eyes. The stones were hard against his burnt back and when he tried to move the spasm of agony made him cry aloud. He had never known such pain. But a face, pale as the moon, was bending over him and he recognized Meg Dennison. He thought of that blackened thing by the window and managed to say: 'Don't look. Don't look.'

But she answered gently: 'She's dead. And it's all right, I had to look.'

And then he ceased to know her. His mind, disorientated, was in another place, another time. And suddenly, among the crowd of gaping spectators, the soldiers with their pikes guarding the scaffold, there was Rickards saying: 'But she isn't a thing, Mr Dalgliesh. She's a woman.' He closed his eyes. Meg's arms enclosed him. He turned his face and pressed it into her jacket, biting the wool so that he would not disgrace himself by groaning aloud. And then he felt her cool hands on his face.

She said: 'The ambulance is coming. I can hear it. Lie still, my dear. It's going to be all right.'

The last sound he heard was the clanging of the fire engine's bell as he let himself slide again into unconsciousness.