Friday 16 September to Tuesday 20 September
Once free of the knotted tentacles of the eastern suburbs, Dalgliesh made good time and by three he was driving through Lydsett village.
Here a right turn took him off the coastal road on to what was little more than a smoothly macadamed track bordered by water-filled ditches and fringed by a golden haze of reeds, their lumbered heads straining in the wind.
And now, for the first time, he thought that he could smell the North Sea, that potent but half-illusory tang evoking nostalgic memories of childhood holidays, of solitary adolescent walks as he struggled with his first poems, of his aunt's tall figure at his side, binoculars round her neck, striding towards the haunts of her beloved birds.
And here, barring the road, was the familiar old farm gate still in place.
Its continued presence always surprised him since it served no purpose that he could see except symbolically to cut off the headland and to give travellers pause to consider whether they really wanted to continue.
It swung open at his touch but closing it, as always, was more difficult and he lugged and half lifted it into place and slipped the circle of wire over the gatepost with a familiar sensation of having turned his back on the workaday world and entered country which, no matter how frequent his visits, would always be alien territory.
He was driving now across the open headland towards the fringe of pine trees which bordered the North Sea.
The only house to his left was the old Victorian rectory, a square, red-brick building, incongruous behind its struggling hedge of rhododendron and laurel.
To his right the ground rose gently towards the southern cliffs and he could see the dark mouth of a concrete pillbox, undemolished since the war, and as seemingly indestructible as the great hulks of wave-battered concrete, remnants of the old fortifications which lay half-submerged in the sand along part of the beach.
To the north the broken arches and stumps of the ruined Benedictine abbey gleamed golden in the afternoon sun against the crinkled blue of the sea and, breasting a small ridge, he glimpsed for the first time the topsail of Larksoken Mill and beyond it, against the skyline, the great grey bulk of Larksoken Nuclear power Station.
The road he was on, veering left, would lead eventually to the station but was, he knew, seldom used since normal traffic and all heavy vehicles used the new access road to the north.
The headland was empty and almost bare, the few straggling trees, distorted by the wind, struggled to keep their precarious hold in the uncompromising soil.
And now he was passing a second and more dilapidated pillbox and it struck him that the whole headland had the desolate look of an old battlefield, the corpses long since carted away but the air vibrating still with the gunfire of long-lost battles, while the power station loomed over it like a grandiose modern monument to the unknown dead.
On his previous visits to Larksoken he had seen Martyr's Cottage spread out beneath him when he and his aunt had stood surveying the headland from the small top room under the cone of the mill.
But he had never been closer to it than the road and now, driving up to it, it struck him again that the description ' cottage ' was hardly appropriate.
It was a substantial, two-storey, L-shaped house standing to the east of the track with walls partly flint and partly rendered, enclosing at the rear a courtyard of York stone which gave an uninterrupted view over fifty yards of scrub to the grassy dunes and the sea.
No one appeared as he drew up and, before lifting his hand to the bell, he paused to read the words of a stone plaque embedded in the flints to the right of the door.
In a cottage on this site lived Agnes Poley, Protestant martyr, burned at Ipswich, 15th August 1557, aged 32 years.
Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 15.
The plaque was unadorned, the letters deeply carved in an elegant script reminiscent of Eric Gill, and Dalgliesh remembered his aunt telling him that it had been placed there by previous owners in the late twenties, when the cottage was originally extended.
One of the advantages of a religious education is the ability to identify at least the better-known texts of scripture and this was one which it needed no effort of memory to recall.
As a delinquent nine-year-old at his prep school, he had once been required by the headmaster to write out in his best handwriting the whole of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, old Gumboil, economical in this as in all matters, believing that writing lines should combine punishment with literary and religious education.
The words, in that round childish script, had remained with him.
It was, he thought, an interesting choice of text.
That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.
He rang and there was only a short delay before Alice Mair opened the door.
He saw a tall, handsome woman dressed with careful and expensive informality in a black cashmere sweater with a silk scarf at the throat and fawn trousers.
He would have recognized her from her strong resemblance to her brother, although she looked the elder by some years.
She took it for granted that each knew who the other was, and standing aside to motion him in she said: ' It's good of you to be so accommodating, Mr Dalgliesh.
I 'm afraid Nora Gurney is implacable.
Once she knew you were on your way to Norfolk you were a predestined victim.
Perhaps you would bring the proofs through to the kitchen. '
It was a distinguished face with the deep-set, widely spaced eyes beneath straight brows, a well-shaped, rather secretive mouth and strong greying hair swept upwards and curled into a chignon.
In her publicity photographs she could, he recalled, look beautiful in a somewhat intimidating, intellectual and very English mould.
But seen face to face, even in the informality of her own house, the absence of a spark of sexuality and, he sensed, a deep-seated reserve, made her seem less feminine and more formidable than he had expected, and she held herself stiffly as if repelling invaders of her personal space.
The handshake with which she had greeted him had been cool and firm and her brief smile was surprisingly attractive.
He knew that he was oversensitive to the timbre of the human voice and hers, although not jarring or unpleasant, sounded a little forced as if she were deliberately speaking at an unnatural pitch.
He followed her down the hall to the kitchen at the back of the house.
It was, he judged, almost twenty feet long and obviously served the triple purpose of sitting room, working place and office.
The right-hand half of the room was a well-equipped kitchen with a large gas stove and an Aga, a butcher's chopping block, a dresser to the right of the door holding an assortment of gleaming pots, and a long working surface with a wooden triangle sheathing her assortment of knives.
In the centre of the room was a large wooden table holding a stoneware jar of dried flowers.
On the left-hand wall was a working fireplace, the two recesses fitted with wall-to-ceiling bookshelves.
To each side of the hearth was a high-backed wicker armchair in an intricate closely woven design fitted with patchwork cushions.
There was an open roll-top desk facing one of the wide windows and, to its right, a stable door, the top half open, gave a view of the paved courtyard.
Dalgliesh could glimpse what was obviously her herb garden planted in elegant terracotta pots carefully disposed to catch the sun.
The room, which contained nothing superfluous, nothing pretentious, was both pleasing and extraordinarily comforting and, for a moment, he wondered why.
Was it the faint smell of herbs and newly baked dough, the soft ticking of the wall-mounted clock which seemed both to mark the passing seconds and yet to hold time in thrall, the rhythmic moaning of the sea through the half-open door, the sense of well-fed ease conveyed by the two cushioned armchairs, the open hearth?
Or was it that the kitchen reminded Dalgliesh of that rectory kitchen where the lonely only child had found warmth and undemanding, uncensorious companionship, been given hot dripping toast and small forbidden treats?
He placed the proofs on the desk, refused Alice Mair's offer of coffee and followed her back to the front door.
She walked out with him to the car and said: ' I was sorry about your aunt  sorry for you, I mean.
I expect that for an ornithologist death ceases to be terrible once sight and hearing begin to go.
And to die in one's sleep without distress to oneself or inconvenience to others is an enviable end.
But you had known her for so long that she must have seemed immortal. '
Formal condolences, he thought, were never easy to speak or accept and usually sounded either banal or insincere.
Hers had been perceptive.
Jane Dalgliesh had indeed seemed to him immortal.
The very old, he thought, make our past.
Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.
He said: ' I don't think death was ever terrible to her.
I 'm not sure that I really knew her and I 'm left wishing I'd tried harder.
But I shall miss her. '
Alice Mair said: ' I didn't know her either.
Perhaps I should have tried harder too.
She was a very private woman, I suspect one of those fortunate people who find no other company more agreeable than their own.
It always seems presumptuous to encroach on that self-sufficiency.
Perhaps you share it.
But if you can tolerate company, I 'm having a few people, mostly colleagues of Alex from the power station, to dinner on Thursday night.
Would you care to join us?
Seven thirty for eight. '
It sounded, he thought, more like a challenge than an invitation.
Somewhat to his surprise, Dalgliesh found himself accepting.
But then the whole encounter had been a little surprising.
She stood regarding him with a serious intensity as he let in the clutch and turned the car and he had the impression that she was watching critically to see how he handled it.
But at least, he thought as he gave a final wave, she hadn't asked him whether he had come to Norfolk to help catch the Whistler.
Three minutes later he raised his foot from the accelerator.
Ahead of him, trudging along on the left of the path, was a little group of children, the eldest girl wheeling a pushchair with two smaller children, one each side of her, clutching the bars.
Hearing the noise of the car she turned and he saw a peaked, delicate face framed with red-gold hair.
He recognized the Blaney children, met once before with their mother walking along the beach.
Obviously the eldest girl had been shopping: the folding pushchair had a shelf under the seat lumped high with plastic bags.
Instinctively he slowed down.
They were unlikely to be in real danger, the Whistler stalked at night, not in broad daylight, and no vehicle had passed him since he left the coastal road.
But the child looked grossly overburdened and ought not to be so far from home.
Though he had never seen their cottage he seemed to remember that his aunt had told him that it lay about two miles to the south.
He recalled what he knew about them, that their father earned a precarious living as a painter whose innocuous, prettified watercolours were sold in cafs and tourist shops along the coast and that their mother had been desperately ill with cancer.
He wondered whether Mrs Blaney was still alive.
His instinct was to pile the children into the car and drive them home but that, he knew, was hardly sensible.
Almost certainly the eldest child  Theresa, wasn't it?  had been taught not to accept lifts from strangers, particularly men, and he was virtually a stranger.
On an impulse he reversed the Jaguar and drove quickly back to Martyr's Cottage.
This time the front door was open and a swathe of sunlight lay across the red-tiled floor.
Alice Mair had heard the car and came out to him from the kitchen, wiping her hands.
He said: ' The Blaney children are walking home.
Theresa is wheeling a pushchair and trying to cope with the twins.
I thought I could offer a lift if I had a woman with me, someone they know. '
She said briefly: ' They know me. '
Without another word she went back into the kitchen then came out to him, closed the front door after her without locking it and got into the car.
Putting it into gear, his arm brushed her knee.
He was aware of an almost imperceptible withdrawing, more emotional than physical, a small delicate gesture of self-containment.
Dalgliesh doubted whether that half-imagined recoil had anything to do with him personally, nor did he find her silence disconcerting.
Their conversation, when they did speak, was brief.
He asked: ' Is Mrs Blaney still alive? '
' No.
She died six weeks ago. '
' How are they managing? '
' Not particularly well, I imagine.
But Ryan Blaney doesn't welcome interference.
I sympathize.
Once he lets down his defences half the social workers in Norfolk, amateur and professional, will move in on him. '
When they drew up beside the little band it was Alice Mair who opened the car door and spoke.
' Theresa, here is Mr Dalgliesh to give you all a lift.
He's Miss Dalgliesh's nephew from Larksoken Mill.
One of the twins had better sit on my lap.
The rest of you and the pushchair can fit into the back. '
Theresa looked at Dalgliesh without smiling and said a grave thank you.
She reminded him of pictures of the young Elizabeth Tudor, the same red-gold hair framing a curiously adult face both secretive and self-composed, the same sharp nose and wary eyes.
The faces of the twins, softer editions of her own, turned towards her questioningly then broke into shy smiles.
They looked as if they had been dressed in a hurry and not very suitably for a long walk on the headland, even in a warm autumn.
One wore a tattered summer dress in pink spotted cotton with double flounces, the other a pinafore over a checked blouse.
Their pathetically thin legs were unprotected.
Theresa was wearing jeans and a grubby sweat shirt with a map of London's Underground across the front.
Dalgliesh found himself wondering if it had been brought back from a school trip to the capital.
It was too large for her and the wide sleeves of limp cotton hung from her freckled arms like rags thrown over a stick.
In contrast to his sisters, Anthony was over-clad, a bundle of leggings, jumper and a padded jacket topped with a woollen helmet with a bobble pulled well down over his forehead, beneath which he surveyed their busyness, unsmiling, like a stout imperious Caesar.
Dalgliesh got out of the Jaguar and tried to extricate him from the pushchair, but the anatomy of the chair momentarily defeated him.
There was a bar beneath which the child's rigid legs were obstinately stuck.
The solid uncooperative bundle was surprisingly heavy; it was like trying to manoeuvre a firm and rather smelly poultice.
Theresa gave him a brief, pitying smile, dragged the plastic bags from beneath the seat then expertly freed her brother and settled him on her left hip while, with the other hand, she collapsed the pushchair, with a single vigorous shake.
Dalgliesh took the baby from her while Theresa helped the children into the Jaguar and commanded with sudden fierceness, ' Sit still. '
Anthony, recognizing incompetence, grasped Dalgliesh's hair firmly with a sticky hand and he felt the momentary touch of a cheek, so soft that it was like the fall of a petal.
Throughout these manoeuvrings Alice Mair sat quietly watching from the car but made no move to help.
It was impossible to know what she was thinking.
But once the Jaguar had moved away she turned to Theresa and said in a voice of surprising gentleness: ' Does your father know that you're out alone? '
' Daddy has taken the van to Mr Sparks.
It's due for its MOT test.
Mr Sparks doesn't think it's going to pass.
And I found we'd run out of milk for Anthony.
We have to have milk.
And we wanted some more disposable nappies. '
Alice Mair said: ' I 'm giving a dinner party on Thursday evening.
If your father agrees, would you like to come and help with the table like you did last month? '
' What are you going to cook, Miss Mair? '
' Put your head close so that I can whisper.
Mr Dalgliesh is going to be one of the guests.
I want it to be a surprise. '
The pale golden head leaned forward towards the grey and Miss Mair whispered.
Theresa smiled and then nodded with serious satisfaction in a moment of grave feminine conspiracy.
It was Alice Mair who directed him to the cottage.
After about a mile they turned seaward and the Jaguar lurched and bounced down a narrow track between high, untended hedges of bramble and elderberry.
The track led only to Scudder's Cottage, the name crudely painted on a board nailed to the gate.
Beyond the cottage it widened to provide a rough, gravelled turning, backed by a forty-foot bank of shingle behind which Dalgliesh could hear the crash and suck of the tide.
Scudder's Cottage, small-windowed, picturesque under its tiled, dipping roof, was fronted by a flowering wilderness which had once been a garden.
Theresa led the way, between grass almost knee-high bordered by a riot of unpruned roses, to the porch, then reached for a key hung high on a nail, less, Dalgliesh supposed, for security reasons than to ensure that it wasn't lost.
With Dalgliesh carrying Anthony they passed into the cottage.
It was much lighter than he had expected, largely because of a rear door, now open, which led to a glass extension giving a view of the headland.
He was aware of the room's clutter, the central wooden table still covered with the remains of their midday meal, an assortment of plates smeared with tomato sauce, a half-eaten sausage, a large bottle of orangeade uncapped; the children's clothes thrown over the back of a low nursing chair before the fireplace, of the smell of milk and bodies and wood smoke.
But what held his attention was a large oil painting propped on a chair and fronting the door.
It was a three-quarter portrait in oils of a woman, painted with remarkable power.
It dominated the room so that he and Alice Mair stood for a moment, silently regarding it.
The painter had avoided caricature, if only just, but the portrait was, he felt, intended less as a physical likeness than an allegory.
Behind the wide, full mouth, the arrogant stare of the eyes, the dark, crimped, Pre-Raphaelite hair streaming in the wind, was a careful delineation of the headland, its objects disposed and painted with the meticulous attention to detail of a sixteenth-century primitive; the Victorian rectory, the ruined abbey, the half-demolished pillbox, the crippled trees, the small white mill like a child's toy and, gaunt against a flaming evening sky, the stark outline of the power station.
But it was the woman, painted more freely, who dominated the landscape, arms stretched, the palms facing outwards in a parody of blessing.
Dalgliesh's private verdict was that it was technically brilliant, but overwrought and painted, he felt, in hatred.
Blaney's intention to produce a study of evil was as clear as if the portrait had been labelled.
It was so different from the artist's usual work that without the bold signature, the single surname, Dalgliesh might have wondered if it was, in fact, his work.
He recalled Blaney's pallid and innocuous watercolours of the better-known beauty spots of Norfolk: Blakeney, St Peter Mancroft and the cathedral at Norwich, which he produced for the local shops.
They could have been painted from picture postcards and probably were.
And he could recall seeing one or two small oils hung in local restaurants and pubs, slap-dash in technique and economical of paint, but so different from the prettified watercolours that it was hard to believe that they too were by the same hand.
But this portrait was different from either; the wonder was that the artist who could produce this disciplined splurge of colour, this technical artistry and imagination, had been content to churn out meretricious souvenirs for the tourist trade.
' You didn't know I could do it, did you? '
Absorbed in the painting, their ears hadn't caught his almost silent approach through the open door.
He moved round and joined them and stared intently at the portrait as if seeing it for the first time.
His daughters, as though obedient to some unspoken command, grouped themselves around him in what in older children could have been a conscious gesture of family solidarity.
Dalgliesh had last seen Blaney six months earlier splashing alone along the edge of the beach, painting gear slung over his shoulder, and was shocked by the change in the man.
He stood a gaunt six foot three in his torn jeans, the checked, woollen shirt open almost to the waist, his long grubby feet in the open sandals looking like dry, brown bones.
His face was a picture of red ferocity, the straggling red hair and beard, the bloodshot eyes, the gaunt-featured face burnt red by wind and sun, which yet showed on the cheekbones and under the eyes the bruising stain of tiredness.
Dalgliesh saw Theresa slip her hand into his while one of the twins moved closer to him and clasped both arms firmly round one of his legs.
Dalgliesh thought that however ferocious he might appear to the outside world his children had no fear of him.
Alice Mair said calmly: ' Good afternoon, Ryan, ' but did not appear to expect an answer.
She nodded towards the portrait and went on: ' It's remarkable, certainly.
What are you proposing to do with it?
I can hardly suppose that she sat for you or that it was commissioned. '
' She didn't need to sit.
I know that face.
I 'm showing it at the Norwich Contemporary Arts Exhibition on October the third if I can get it there.
The van is out of use. '
Alice Mair said: ' I 'll be driving to London within the next week.
I could collect it and deliver it if you let me have the address. '
He said: ' If you like. '
The response was ungracious but Dalgliesh thought he detected relief.
Then he added: ' I 'll leave it packed and labelled to the left of the door in the painting shed.
The light is just above it.
You can collect it whenever it suits you.
No need to knock. '
The last words had the force of a command, almost of a warning.
Miss Mair said: ' I 'll telephone you when I know when I 'm going.
By the way, I don't think you've met Mr Dalgliesh.
He saw the children on the road and thought of giving them a lift. '
Blaney didn't say thank you, but after a moment's hesitation held out his hand which Dalgliesh grasped.
Then he said gruffly, ' I liked your aunt.
She telephoned offering to help when my wife was ill and when I said there was nothing she or anyone could do, she didn't keep fussing.
Some people can't keep away from a deathbed.
Like the Whistler, they get their kicks from watching people die. '
' No, ' said Dalgliesh, ' she never fussed.
I shall miss her.
I 'm sorry about your wife. '
Blaney didn't reply, but stared hard at Dalgliesh as if assessing the sincerity of that simple statement, and then said curtly, ' Thank you for helping the children, ' and lifted his son from Dalgliesh's shoulder.
It was a clear gesture of dismissal.
Neither of them spoke as Dalgliesh negotiated the track and finally turned on to the higher road.
It was as if the cottage had exerted some spell which it was important to throw off before they talked.
Then he asked: ' Who is that woman in the portrait? '
' I hadn't realized that you didn't know.
Hilary Robarts.
She's Acting Administrative Officer at the power station.
Actually you 'll meet her at dinner on Thursday night.
She bought Scudder's Cottage when she first arrived here three years ago.
She's been trying to get the Blaneys out for some time.
There's been a certain amount of feeling about it locally. '
Dalgliesh asked: ' Why does she want to gain possession?
Does she propose to live there? '
' I don't imagine so.
I think she bought it as an investment and wants to sell.
Even a remote cottage  particularly a remote cottage  has value on this coast.
And she has some justice on her side.
Blaney did say that his tenancy would be short-term.
I think she feels a certain resentment that he used his wife's illness, her death, and now uses the children as an excuse for reneging on his undertaking to leave when she wanted the cottage back. '
Dalgliesh was interested that Alice Mair apparently knew so much about local affairs.
He had thought of her as essentially a private woman who would be very little concerned with her neighbours or their problems.
And what about himself?
In his deliberations whether to sell or keep on the mill as a holiday home he had seen it as a refuge from London, eccentric and remote, providing a temporary escape from the demands of his job and the pressures of success.
But how far, even as an occasional visitor, could he isolate himself from the community, from their private tragedies no less than their dinner parties?
It would be simple enough to avoid their hospitality given sufficient ruthlessness and he had never lacked that when it came to safeguarding his privacy.
But the less tangible demands of neighbourliness might be less easily shrugged away.
It was in London that you could live anonymously, could create your own ambience, could deliberately fabricate the persona which you chose to present to the world.
In the country you lived as a social being and at the valuation of others.
So he had lived in childhood and adolescence in the same country rectory, taking part each Sunday in a familiar liturgy which reflected, interpreted, and sanctified the changing seasons of the farming year.
It was a world he had relinquished with small regret and he had not expected to find it again on Larksoken headland.
But some of its obligations were here, deep-rooted even in this arid and unfertile earth.
His aunt had lived as privately as any woman he knew, but even she had visited and tried to help the Blaneys.
He thought of the man, bereft and incarcerated in that cluttered cottage behind the great dyke of shingle, listening night after night to the never-ceasing moaning of the tide, and brooding on the wrongs, real or imaginary, which could inspire that hate-filled portrait.
It could hardly be healthy for him or for his children.
Come to that, he thought grimly, it could hardly be healthy for Hilary Robarts.
He asked: ' Does he get much official help with the children?
It can't be easy. '
As much as he's prepared to tolerate.
The local authority has arranged for the twins to attend some kind of daycare centre.
They get collected most days.
And Theresa, of course, is at school.
She catches the bus at the end of the lane.
She and Ryan between them cope with the baby.
Meg Dennison  she housekeeps for the Reverend and Mrs Copley at the Old Rectory  thinks we ought to do more for them but it's difficult to see precisely what.
As an ex-schoolmistress I should have thought she'd had her fill of children and I make no pretence at understanding them. '
Dalgliesh remembered her whispered confidence to Theresa in the car, the child's intent face and brief transforming smile, and thought that she understood one child at least far better than she would probably claim.
But his thoughts returned to the portrait.
He said: ' It must be uncomfortable, particularly in a small community, to be the object of so much malevolence. '
She understood at once what he meant.
' Hatred rather than malevolence, wouldn't you say?
Uncomfortable and rather frightening.
Not that Hilary Robarts is easily frightened.
But she's becoming something of an obsession with Ryan, particularly since his wife's death.
He chooses to believe that Hilary practically badgered her into her grave.
It's understandable, I suppose.
Human beings need to find someone to blame both for their misery and for their guilt.
Hilary Robarts makes a convenient scapegoat. '
It was a disagreeable story and coming as it did after the impact of the portrait it provoked in Dalgliesh a mixture of depression and foreboding which he tried to shake off as irrational.
He was glad to let the subject drop and they drove in silence until he left her at the gate of Martyr's Cottage.
To his surprise she held out her hand and gave him, once again, that extraordinary, attractive smile.
' I 'm glad you stopped for the children.
I 'll see you, then, on Thursday night.
You will be able to make your own assessment of Hilary Robarts and compare the portrait with the woman. '
As the Jaguar crested the headland Neil Pascoe was dumping rubbish into one of the two dustbins outside the caravan, two plastic bags of empty tins of soup and baby food, soiled disposable napkins, vegetable peelings and squashed cartons, already malodorous despite his careful sealing of the bags.
Firmly replacing the lid he marvelled, as he always did, at the difference one girl and an eighteen-month-old baby could make to the volume of household waste.
Climbing back into the caravan, he said: ' A Jag has just passed.
It looks as if Miss Dalgliesh's nephew is back. '
Amy, fitting a recalcitrant new ribbon to the ancient typewriter, didn't bother to look up.
' The detective.
Perhaps he's come to help catch the Whistler. '
' That isn't his job.
The Whistler is nothing to do with the Met Police.
It's probably just a holiday.
Or perhaps he's here to decide what to do with the mill.
He can hardly live here and work in London. '
' So why don't you ask him if we can have it?
Rent-free, of course.
We could caretake, see that no one squats.
You're always saying it's antisocial for people to have second homes or leave property empty.
Go on, have a word with him.
I dare you.
Or I will if you're too scared. '
It was, he knew, less a suggestion than a half-serious threat.
But for a moment, gladdened by her easy assumption that they were a couple, that she wasn't thinking of leaving him, he actually entertained the idea as a feasible solution to all their problems.
Well, almost all.
But a glance round the caravan restored him to reality.
It was becoming difficult to remember how it had looked fifteen months ago, before Amy and Timmy had entered his life; the homemade shelves of orange boxes ranged against the wall which had held his books, the two mugs, two plates and one soup bowl, which had been adequate for his needs, neatly stacked in the cupboard, the excessive cleanliness of the small kitchen and lavatory, his bed smooth under the coverlet of knitted woollen squares, the single hanging cupboard which had been sufficient for his meagre wardrobe, his other possessions boxed and tidily stowed in the chest under the seat.
It wasn't that Amy was dirty; she was continually washing herself, her hair, her few clothes.
He Spent hours carrying water from the tap outside Cliff Cottage to which they had access.
He was continually having to fetch new Calor-gas cylinders from the general store in Lydsett village and steam from the almost constantly boiling kettle made the caravan a damp mist.
But she was chronically untidy; her clothes lying where she had dropped them, shoes kicked under the table, knickers and bras stuffed beneath cushions and Timmy's toys littering the floor and table top.
The make-up, which seemed to be her sole extravagance, cluttered the single shelf in the cramped shower and he would find half-empty, opened jars and bottles in the food cupboard.
He smiled as he pictured Commander Adam Dalgliesh, that no doubt fastidious widower, making his way through the accumulated mess to discuss their suitability as caretakers at Larksoken Mill.
And then there were the animals.
She was incurably sentimental about wildlife and they were seldom without some maimed, deserted or starving creatures.
Seagulls, their wings covered with oil, were cleansed, caged and then let free.
There had been a stray mongrel whom they had named Herbert, with a large uncoordinated body and look of lugubrious disapproval who had attached himself to them for a few weeks and whose voracious appetite for dog-meat and biscuits had had a ruinous effect on the housekeeping.
Happily Herbert had eventually trotted off and to Amy's distress had been seen no more, although his lead still hung on the caravan door, a limp reminder of her bereavement.
And now there were the two black and white kittens found abandoned on the grass verge of the coast road as they came back in the van from Ipswich.
Amy had screamed for him to stop and, scooping up the kittens, had thrown back her head and howled obscenities at the cruelty of human beings.
They slept on Amy's bed, drank indiscriminately from any saucer of milk or tea put down for them, were remarkably docile under Timmy's boisterous caresses and, happily, seemed content with the cheapest kind of tinned cat food.
But he was glad to have them because they too seemed to offer some assurance that Amy would stay.
He had found her  and he used the word much as he might of finding a particularly beautiful sea-washed stone  one late June afternoon the previous year.
She had been sitting on the shingle staring out to sea, her arms clasped round her knees, Timmy lying asleep on the small rug beside her.
He was wearing a blue fleecy sleeping suit embroidered with ducks from which his round face seemed to have spilled over, still and pink as a porcelain, Painted doll, the delicate lashes brush-tipped on the plump cheeks.
And she, too, had something of the precision and contrived charm of a doll with an almost round head poised ' on a long delicate neck, a snub nose with a splatter of freckles, a small mouth with a full upper lip beautifully curved and a bristle of cropped hair, originally fair but with bright orange tips which caught the sun and trembled in the breeze so that the whole head seemed for a moment to have a vivid life separated from the rest of her body and, the image changing, he had seen her as a bright exotic flower.
He could remember every detail of that first meeting.
She had been wearing blue faded jeans, and a white sweat shirt flattened against the pointed nipples and the upturned breasts; the cotton seeming too thin a protection against the freshening onshore breeze.
As he approached tentatively, wanting to seem friendly but not to alarm her, she had turned on him a long and curious glance from remarkable, slanted, violet-blue eyes.
Standing over her, he had said: ' My name's Neil Pascoe.
I live in that caravan on the edge of the cliff.
I 'm just going to make some tea.
I wondered if you ' d like a mug. '
' I don't mind, if you're making it. '
She had turned away at once and gazed again out to sea.
Five minutes later he had slithered down the sandy cliffs, a mug of tea slopping in each hand.
He heard himself say: ' May I sit down? '
' Please yourself.
The beach is free. '
So he had lowered himself to sit beside her and together they had stared wordlessly towards the horizon.
Looking back on it he was amazed both at his boldness and at the seeming inevitability and naturalness of that first encounter.
It was several minutes before he had found the courage to ask her how she had got to the beach.
She had shrugged.
' By bus to the village and then I walked. '
' It was a long way carrying the baby. '
' I 'm used to walking a long way carrying the baby. '
And then, under his hesitant questioning, the story had come out, told by her without self-pity, almost, it had seemed, without particular interest, as if the events had happened to someone else.
It was not, he supposed, an unusual tale.
She was living in one of the small private hotels in Cromer on Social Security.
She had been in a squat in London but had thought it would be pleasant to have some sea air for the baby for the summer.
Only it wasn't working out.
The woman at the hotel didn't really want kids and with summer holidays approaching could get a better rate for her rooms.
She didn't think she could be turned out, but she wasn't going to stay, not with that bitch.
He asked: ' Couldn't the baby's father help? '
' He hasn't got a father.
He did have a father  I mean, he isn't Jesus Christ.
But he hasn't got one now. '
' Do you mean that he's dead or that he's gone away? '
' Could be either, couldn't it?
Look, if I knew who he was I might know where he was, OK? '
Then there had been another science during which she took periodical gulps of her tea and the sleeping baby stirred and gave small pig-like grunts.
After a few minutes he had spoken again.
' Look, if you can't find anywhere else in Cromer you can share the caravan for a time. '
He had added hastily: ' I mean, there is a second bedroom.
It's very small, only just room for the bunk, but it would do for a time.
I know it's isolated here but it's close to the beach which would be nice for the baby. '
She had turned on him again that remarkable glance in which for the first time he had detected to his discomfiture a brief flash of intelligence and of calculation.
' All right, ' she said.
' If I can't find anywhere else I 'll come back
And he had lain awake late that night half hoping, half dreading that she would return.
And she had returned the following afternoon, carrying Timmy on her hip and the rest of her possessions in a backpack.
She had taken over the caravan and his life.
He didn't know whether what he felt for her was love, affection or pity, or a mixture of all three.
He only knew that in his anxious and over-concerned life his second greatest fear was that she might leave.
He had lived in the caravan now for just over two years, supported by a research grant from his northern university to study the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the rural industries of East Anglia.
His dissertation was nearly finished but for the last six months he had almost stopped work on it and had devoted himself entirely to his passion, a crusade against nuclear power.
From the caravan on the very edge of the sea he could see Larksoken Power Station stark against the skyline, as uncompromising as his own will to oppose it, a symbol and a threat.
It was from the caravan that he ran People Against Nuclear Power, with its acronym PANUP, the small organization of which he was both founder and president.
The caravan had been a stroke of luck.
The owner of Cliff Cottage was a Canadian who, returning to his roots and seduced by nostalgia, had bought it on impulse as a possible holiday home.
About fifty years earlier there had been a murder at Cliff Cottage.
It had been a fairly commonplace murder, a henpecked husband at the end of his tether who had taken a hatchet to his virago of a wife.
But if it had been neither particularly interesting nor mysterious, it had certainly been bloody.
After the cottage had been bought the Canadian's wife had heard graphic accounts of spilt brains and blood-spattered walls and had declared that she had no intention of living there in summer or at any other time.
Its very isolation, once attractive, now appeared both sinister and repellent.
And to compound the problem, the local planning authority had shown themselves unsympathetic to the owner's over-ambitious plans for rebuilding.
Disillusioned with the cottage and its problems, he had boarded up the windows and returned to Toronto, meaning eventually to come back and make a final decision about his ill-advised purchase.
The previous owner had parked a large, old-fashioned caravan at the back and the Canadian had made no difficulty about letting this to Neil for two pounds a week, seeing it as a useful way of having someone to keep an eye on the property.
And it was the caravan, at once his home and his office, from which Neil conducted his campaign.
He tried not to think about the time, six months ahead, when his grant would finish and he would need to find work.
He knew that he had somehow to stay here on the headland, to keep always in view that monstrous building which dominated his imagination as it did his view.
But now, to the uncertainty about his future funding, was added a new and more terrifying threat.
About five months earlier he had attended an open day at the power station during which the Acting Administrative Officer, Hilary Robarts, had given a short preliminary talk.
He had challenged almost everything she had said and what was meant as an informative introduction to a public relations exercise had developed into something close to a public brawl.
In the next issue of his news-sheet he had reported on the incident in terms which he now realized had been unwise.
She had sued him for libel.
The action was due to be heard in four weeks, time and he knew that, successful or not, he was faced with ruin.
Unless she died in the next few weeks  and why should she die?  it could be the end of his life on the headland, the end of his organization, the end of all he had planned and hoped to do.
Amy was typing envelopes, sending out the final copies of the newsletter.
A pile was already to hand and he began folding the pamphlets and inserting them into the envelopes.
The job wasn't easy.
He had tried to economize with the size and quality and the envelopes were in danger of splitting.
He now had a mailing list of 250, only a small minority of whom were active supporters of PANUP.
Most never paid any dues towards the organization and the majority of the pamphlets went unsolicited to public authorities, local firms and industry in the vicinity of Larksoken and Sizewell.
He wondered how many of the 250 were read and thought, with a sudden spasm of anxiety and depression, of the total cost of even this small enterprise.
And this month's newsletter wasn't his best.
Rereading one before he put it in the envelope, it seemed to him to be ill-organized, to have no coherent theme.
The principal aim now was to refute the growing argument that nuclear power could avoid the damage to the environment through the greenhouse effect, but the mixture of suggestions ranging from solar power to replacing light bulbs with those which consumed seventy-five per cent less energy seemed na?ve and hardly convincing.
His article argued that nuclear-generated electricity couldn't realistically replace oil and fossil fuels unless all nations built sixteen new reactors a week in the five years from 1995, a programme impossible to achieve and one which, if practicable, would add intolerably to the nuclear threat.
But the statistics, like all his figures, were culled from a variety of sources and lacked authority.
Nothing he produced seemed to him genuinely his own work.
And the rest of the newsletter was a jumble of the usual scare stories, most of which he had used before; allegations of safety breaches which had been covered up, doubts about the safety of the ageing Magnox stations, the unsolved problem of storing and transporting nuclear waste.
And this issue he had been hard put to it to find a couple of intelligent letters for the correspondence page; sometimes it seemed that every crackbrain in north-east Norfolk read the PANUP newsletter but that no one else did.
Amy was picking at the letters of the typewriter which had a persistent tendency to stick.
She said: ' Neil, this is a bloody awful machine.
It would be quicker to write the addresses by hand. '
' It's better since you cleaned it and the new ribbon looks fine. '
' It's still diabolical.
Why don't you buy a new one?
It would save time in the end. '
' I can't afford it. '
' You can't afford a new typewriter and you think you're going to save the world. '
' You don't need possessions to save the world, Amy.
Jesus Christ had nothing; no home, no money, no property. '
' I thought you said when I came here that you weren't religious. '
It always surprised him that, apparently taking no account of him, she could yet recall comments he had made months earlier.
He said: ' I don't believe Christ was God.
I don't believe there is a God.
But I believe in what He taught. '
' If He wasn't a God, I don't see that it matters much what He taught.
Anyway, all I can remember is something about turning the other cheek which I don't believe in.
I mean, that's daft.
If someone slaps your left cheek then you slap his right, only harder.
Anyway, I do know they hung Him up on the cross so it didn't do Him a lot of good.
That's what turning the other cheek does for you. '
He said: ' I've got a Bible here somewhere.
You could read about Him if you wanted to.
Make a start with St Mark's Gospel. '
' No thanks.
I had enough of that in the home. '
' What home? '
' Just a home, before the baby was born. '
' How long were you there? '
' Two weeks.
Two weeks too bloody many.
Then I ran away and found a squat. '
' Where was that, the squat? '
' Islington, Camden, King's Cross, Stoke Newington.
Does it matter?
I 'm here now, OK? '
' It's OK by me, Amy. '
Lost in his thoughts, he hardly realized that he had given up folding the pamphlets.
Amy said: 'Look, if you're not going to help with these envelopes you might as well go and put a new washer on that tap.
It's been dripping for weeks and Timmy's always falling about in the mud. '
' All right, ' he said, ' I 'll do it now. '
He took down his tool kit from the high cupboard where it was kept well out of Timmy's reach.
He was glad to be out of the caravan.
It had become increasingly claustrophobic in the last few weeks.
Outside he bent to talk to Timmy, caged in his playpen.
He and Amy had collected large stones from the beach, looking for those with holes in them  and he had strung them on to strong cord and tied them along one side of the playpen.
Timmy would spend hours happily banging them together or against the bars or, as now, slobbering against one of the stones in an attempt to get it into his mouth.
Sometimes he would communicate with individual flints, a continuous admonitory prattle broken by sudden triumphant squeals.
Kneeling down Neil clutched the bars, rubbed his nose against Timmy ' s, and was rewarded by his huge, heart-tugging smile.
He looked very like his mother with the same round head on a delicate neck, the same beautifully shaped mouth.
Only his eyes, widely spaced, were differently shaped, large blue spheres with, above them, straight bushy eyebrows which reminded Neil of pale and delicate caterpillars.
The tenderness he felt for the child was equal to, if different from, the tenderness he felt for his mother.
He could not now imagine life on the headland without either of them.
But the tap defeated him.
Despite his tuggings with the wrench he couldn't get the screw to shift.
Even this minor domestic task was apparently beyond his powers.
He could hear Amy's derisive voice.
' You want to change the world and you can't change a washer. '
After a couple of minutes he gave up the attempt, left the tool box by the cottage wall and walked to the edge of the cliff then slithered down to the beach.
Crunching over the ridges of stones, he went down to the edge of the sea and almost violently wrenched off his shoes.
It was thus, when the weight of anxiety about his failed ambitions, his uncertain future, became too heavy that he would find his peace, standing motionless to watch the veined curve of the poised wave, the tumult of crashing foam breaking over his feet, the wide intersecting arches washing over the smooth sand as the wave retreated to leave its tenuous lip of foam.
But today even this wonder, continually repeated, failed to comfort his spirit.
He gazed out to the horizon with unseeing eyes and thought about his present life, the hopelessness of the future, about Amy, about his family.
Thrusting his hands in his pocket, he felt the crumpled envelope of his mother's last letter.
He knew that his parents were disappointed in him, although they never said so openly since oblique hints were just as effective: ' Mrs Reilly keeps on asking me, what is Neil doing?
I don't like to say that you're living in a caravan with no proper job. '
She certainly didn't like to say that he was living there with a girl.
He had written to tell them about Amy since his parents constantly threatened to visit and ' unlikely as this was actually to happen, the prospect had added an intolerable anxiety to his already anxiety-ridden life.
' I 'm giving a temporary home to an unmarried mother in return for typing help.
Don't worry, I shan't suddenly present you with a bastard grandchild. '
After the letter had been posted.
he had felt ashamed.
The cheap attempt at humour had been too like a treacherous repudiation of Timmy whom he loved.
And his mother hadn't found it either funny or reassuring.
His letter had produced an almost incoherent farrago of warnings, pained reproaches and veiled references to the possible reaction of Mrs Reilly if she ever got to know.
Only his two brothers surreptitiously welcomed his way of life.
They hadn't made university and the difference between their comfortable life style  houses on an executive estate, en suite bathrooms, artificial coal fires in what they called the lounge, working wives, a new car every two years and timeshares in Majorca  provided both with agreeable hours of self-satisfied comparisons which he knew would always end with the same conclusion, that he ought to pull himself together, that it wasn't right, not after all the sacrifices Mum and Dad had made to send him to college, and a fine waste of money that had proved.
He had told Amy none of this but would have happily confided had she shown the least interest.
But she asked no questions about his past life and told him nothing about hers.
Her voice, her body, her smell were as familiar to him as his own, but essentially he knew no more about her now than when she had arrived.
She refused to collect any welfare benefits, saying that she wasn't going to have DHSS snoopers visiting the caravan to see if she and Neil were sleeping together.
He sympathized.
He didn't want them either, but he felt that for Timmy's sake she should take what was on offer.
He had given her no money but he did feed both of them, and this was difficult enough on his grant.
No one visited her and no one telephoned.
Occasionally she would receive a postcard, coloured views usually of London with nondescript, meaningless messages, but as far as he knew she never replied.
They had so little in common.
She helped spasmodically with PANUP but he was never sure how far she was actually committed.
And he knew that she found his pacifism stupid.
He could recall a conversation only this morning.
' Look, if I live next door to an enemy and he has a knife, a gun and a machine gun and I've got the same, I 'm not going to chuck mine before he chucks his.
I 'll say, OK, let the knife go, then the gun maybe, then the machine gun.
Him and me at the same time.
Why should I throw mine away and leave him with his? '
' But one of you has to make a start, Amy.
There has to be a beginning of trust.
Whether it's people or nations, we have to find the faith to open our hearts and hands and say, ' Look, I've nothing.
I've only my humanity.
We inhabit the same planet.
The world is full of pain but we needn't add to it.
There has to be an end of fear.
'' '
She had said obstinately: ' I don't see why he should chuck his weapons once he knows I've got nothing. '
' Why should he keep them?
He's got nothing to fear from you any more. '
' He'd keep them because he liked the feeling of having them and because he might like to use them some day.
He'd like the power and he'd like knowing he had me where he wanted me.
Honestly, Neil, you're so na?ve sometimes.
That's how people are. '
' But we can't argue like that any more, Amy.
We aren't talking about knives and guns and machine guns.
We're talking about weapons neither of us could use without destroying ourselves and probably our whole planet.
But it's good of you to help with PANUP when you don't sympathize. '
She had said: ' PANUP's different.
And I sympathize all right.
I just think that you're wasting your time writing letters, making speeches, sending out all those pamphlets.
It won't do any good.
You've got to fight people their way. '
' But it's done good already.
All over the world ordinary people are marching, demonstrating, making their voices heard, letting the people in power know that what they want is a peaceful world for themselves and their children.
Ordinary people like you. '
And then she had almost shouted at him: ' I 'm not ordinary!
Don't you call me ordinary!
If there are ordinary people, I 'm not one of them. '
' I 'm sorry, Amy.
I didn't mean it like that. '
' Then don't say it. '
The only cause they had in common was a refusal to eat meat.
Soon after she arrived at the caravan he had said: ' I 'm vegetarian but I don't expect you to be, or Timmy. '
He had wondered as he spoke whether Timmy was old enough to eat meat.
He had added: ' You can buy a chop occasionally in Norwich if you feel like it. '
' What you have is all right by me.
Animals don't eat me, and I don't eat them. '
' And Timmy? '
' Timmy has what I give him.
He's not fussy. '
Nor was he.
Neil couldn't imagine a more accommodating child nor, for most of the time, a more contented one.
He had found the second-hand playpen advertised on a newsagent's board in Norwich and had brought it back on the top of the van.
In it Timmy would crawl for hours or pull himself up and stand precariously balancing, his napkin invariably falling about his knees.
When thwarted he would rage, shutting his eyes tight, opening his mouth and holding his breath before letting out a bellow of such terrifying power that Neil half expected the whole of Lydsett to come running to see which of them was tormenting the child.
Amy never smacked him but would jerk him on to her hip and dump him on her bed saying: ' Bloody awful noise. '
' Shouldn't you stay with him?
Holding his breath like that, he could kill himself. '
' You daft?
He won't kill himself.
They never do. '
And he knew now that he wanted her, wanted her when it was obvious that she didn't want him and would never again risk rejection.
On the second night at the caravan she had slid back the partition between his bed and hers and had walked quietly up to his bed and had stood gravely looking down at him.
She had been completely naked.
He had said: ' Look, Amy, you don't have to pay me.
' I never pay for anything, at least not like that.
But have it your own way. '
After a pause she had said: ' You gay or something? '
' No, it's just that I don't like casual affairs. '
' You mean you don't like them, or you don't think you ought to have them? '
' I suppose I mean that I don't think I ought to have them. '
' You religious, then? '
' No, I 'm not religious, not in the ordinary way.
It's just that I think sex is too important to be casual about.
You see, if we slept together and I  if I disappointed you  we might quarrel and then you'd walk out.
You'd feel that you had to.
You'd leave, you and Timmy. '
' So what, I walk out. '
' I wouldn't want you to do that, not because of anything I'd done. '
' Or hadn't done.
OK, I expect you're right. '
Another pause, and then she had added: ' You'd mind then, if I walked out? '
' Yes, ' he said, ' I'd mind. '
She had turned away.
' I always do walk out in the end.
No one has ever minded before. '
It was the only sexual advance she had ever made to him and he knew it would be the last.
Now they slept with Timmy's cot wedged between the partition and his bed.
Sometimes in the night, wakeful because the child had stirred, he would put out his hands and clasp the bars and long to shake this frail barrier that symbolized the unbridgeable gulf between them.
She lay there, sleek and curved as a fish or a gull, so close that he could hear the rise and fall of her breath faintly echoing the suspiration of the sea.
His body ached for her and he would press his face into the lumpy pillow groaning with the hopelessness of his need.
What could she possibly see in him to make her want him, except, as on that one night, out of gratitude, pity, curiosity or boredom?
He hated his body, the scrawny legs on which the kneecaps protruded like deformities, the small blinking eyes too closely set, the sparse beard which couldn't disguise the weakness of the mouth and chin.
Sometimes, too, he was tormented by jealousy.
Without proof, he had convinced himself that there was someone else.
She would say that she wanted to walk alone on the headland.
And he would watch her go with the certainty that she was meeting a lover.
And when she returned he would imagine that he could see the glow of the skin, the satisfied smile of remembered happiness, could almost smell that she had been making love.
He had already heard from the university that his research grant would not be extended.
The decision wasn't surprising; he had been warned to expect it.
He had been saving as much as possible from the grant in the hope of amassing a small sum which would tide him over until he could find a local job.
It hardly mattered what.
Anything that would pay enough to live and allow him to remain on the headland to carry on the campaign.
In theory he supposed he could organize PANUP from anywhere in the UK, but he knew that it was irrevocably bound to Larksoken headland, to the caravan, to that concrete mass five miles to the north which had power, apparently, to dominate his will as it did his imagination.
He had already put out feelers with local employers but they hadn't been too keen on employing a well-known agitator; even those who seemed sympathetic to the anti-nuclear cause didn't actually have work on offer.
Perhaps they feared that too many of his energies would be diverted to the campaign.
And his small capital was draining away with the extra expense of Amy, Timmy and even the cats.
And now there was the threat of this libel action, less of a threat than a certainty.
When, ten minutes later, he returned to the caravan Amy, too, had given up working.
She was lying on her bed, looking up at the ceiling, Smudge and Whisky curled on her stomach.
Looking down at her, he said abruptly: ' If the Robarts legal action goes ahead I 'll need money.
We're not going to be able to go on as we are.
We've got to make plans. '
She sat up smartly and stared at him.
The kittens, affronted, squealed their protest and fled.
' You mean we might have to leave here? '
The ' we ' would normally have lifted his heart, now he hardly noticed it.
' It's possible. '
' But why?
I mean, you aren't going to find anything cheaper than the caravan.
Try getting a single room for two pounds a week.
We're bloody lucky to have this place. '
' But there's no work here, Amy.
If I have huge damages to pay, I 'll have to get a job.
That means London. '
' What sort of a job? '
' Any sort.
I've got my degree. '
' Well, I can't see the sense of leaving here, even if there isn't any work.
You can go to the DHSS.
Draw the dole. '
' That isn't going to pay damages. '
' Well, if you have to go, maybe I 'll stay on.
I can pay the rent here.
After all, what's the difference to the owner?
He 'll get his two quid whoever pays it. '
' You couldn't live here alone. '
' Why not?
I've lived in worse places. '
' On what?
What would you do for money? '
' Well, with you gone I could go to the DHSS, couldn't I?
They could send their snoopers round and it wouldn't matter.
They wouldn't be able to say I was having sex with you then, not if you weren't here.
Anyway, I've got a bit in my post office account. '
The casual cruelty of the suggestion struck at his heart.
He heard with heavy disgust the note of self-pity which he was unable to suppress.
He said: ' Is that what you really want, Amy, for me not to be here? '
' Don't be daft, I was only teasing.
Honestly Neil, you should see yourself.
Talk about misery.
Anyway, it might not happen  the libel action, I mean. '
' It's bound to happen unless she withdraws it.
They've set a date for the hearing. '
' She might withdraw it, or else she might die.
She might drown on one of those night swims she takes after the headlines on the nine o'clock news, regular as clockwork, right up to December. '
' Who told you that?
How do you know that she swims at night? '
' You did. '
' I can't remember telling you. '
' Then someone else did, one of the regulars in the Local Hero, maybe.
I mean, it's no secret, is it? '
He said: ' She won't drown.
She's a strong swimmer.
She wouldn't take foolish risks.
And I can't wish her dead.
You can't preach love and practise hatred. '
' I can  wish her dead, I mean.
Maybe the Whistler will get her.
Or you might win the action and then she 'll have to pay you.
That'd be a laugh. '
' That's not very likely.
I consulted a lawyer at the Citizens Advice Bureau when I was in Norwich last Friday.
I could see he thought it was serious, that she did have a case.
He said I ought to get myself a lawyer. '
' Well, get one. '
' How?
Lawyers cost money. '
' Get legal aid.
Put a note in the newsletter asking for contributions. '
' I can't do that.
It's difficult enough keeping the newsletter going, what with the cost of paper and postage. '
Amy said, suddenly serious: ' I 'll think of something.
There's still four weeks to go.
Anything can happen in four weeks.
Stop worrying.
It's going to be all right.
Look, Neil, I promise you that libel action will never come to court. '
And illogically, he was, for the moment, reassured and comforted.
It was six o'clock and at Larksoken Power Station, the weekly interdepartmental meeting was drawing to a close.
It had lasted thirty minutes longer than usual; Dr Alex Mair took the view, which he could normally enforce by brisk chairmanship, that little original thought was contributed to a discussion after three hours of talking.
But it had been a heavy agenda: the revised safety plan still in draft; the rationalization of the internal structure from the present seven departments to three under engineering, production and resources; the report of the district survey laboratory on their monitoring of the environment; the preliminary agenda for the local liaison committee.
This annual jamboree was an unwieldy but useful public relations exercise which needed careful preparation, including as it did representatives from the interested government departments, local authorities, police, fire and water authorities, the National Farmers Union and the Country Landowners' Association.
Mair sometimes grudged the work and time it involved but he knew its importance.
The weekly meeting was held in his office at the conference table set in front of the south window.
Darkness was falling and the huge pane of glass was a black rectangle in which he could see their faces reflected, like the gaunt, disembodied heads of night travellers in a lighted railway carriage.
He suspected that some of his departmental heads, particularly BH Morgan, the Works Office Engineer, and Stephen Mansell, the Maintenance Superintendent, would have preferred a more relaxed setting in his private sitting room next door, the low, comfortable chairs, a few hours of chat with no set agenda, perhaps a drink together afterwards in a local pub.
Well, that was one management style, but it wasn't his.
Now he closed the stiff cover of his folder in which his PA had meticulously tagged all the papers and cross-references, and said dismissively: ' Any other business. '
But he was not allowed to get away so easily.
On his right, as usual, sat Miles Lessingham, the Operations Superintendent, whose reflection, staring back into the room, looked like a hydrocephalic death's head.
Glancing from the image to the face, Mair could see little difference.
The stark overhead lights threw deep shadows under the deep-set eyes and the sweat glistened on the wide, rather knobbly forehead with its swathe of fair undisciplined hair.
Now he stretched back in his chair and said: ' This proposed job  rumoured job, I should say  I suppose we're entitled to ask whether it has been formally offered to you yet?
Or aren't we? '
Mair said calmly: The answer is that it hasn't; the publicity was premature.
The press got hold of it somehow, as they usually do, but there's nothing official yet.
One unfortunate result of our present habit of leaking any information of interest is that the people most concerned become the last to know.
If and when it is official you seven will be the first to be told. '
Lessingham said: ' It will have serious implications here, Alex, if you do go.
The contract already signed for the new PWR reactor, the internal reorganization which is bound to create disruption, electricity privatization.
It's a bad time for a change at the top. '
Maid said: ' Is there ever a good time?
But until it happens, if it does happen, there's little point in discussing it. '
John Standing, the station chemist, said: ' But the internal reorganization will go ahead presumably? '
' I hope so, considering the time and energy we've spent planning it.
I should be surprised if a change at the top alters a necessary reorganization which is already under way. '
Lessingham asked: ' Who will they appoint, a director or a station manager? '
The question was less innocent than it sounded.
' I imagine a station manager. '
' You mean that the research will go? '
Mair said: ' When I go, now or later, the research will go.
You've always known that.
I brought it with me and I wouldn't have taken the job if I couldn't have continued it here.
I asked for certain research facilities and I got them.
But research at Larksoken has always been somewhat of an anomaly.
We've done good work, are still doing good work, but logically it should be done elsewhere, at Harwell or Winfrith.
Is there any other business? '
But Lessingham was not to be discouraged.
He said: ' Who will you be responsible to?
The Secretary of State for Energy directly or the AEA? '
Mair knew the answer but had no intention of giving it.
He said quietly: ' That is still under discussion. '
' Along, no doubt, with such minor matters as pay, rations, scope of your responsibilities and what you are going to be called.
Controller of Nuclear Power has a certain cachet.
I like it.
But what precisely will you control? '
There was a silence.
Mair said: ' If the answer to that question were known, no doubt the appointment would have been made by now.
I don't want to stifle discussion, but hadn't we better confine it to matters within the competence of this committee?
Right, is there any other business? ' and this time there was no reply.
Hilary Robarts, the Acting Administrative Officer, had already closed her file.
She hadn't taken part in the questioning but the others, Mair knew, would assume that that was because he had already told her the answers.
Even before they had left, his PA, Caroline Amphlett, had come in to take away the tea cups and clear the table.
Lessingham made it a habit to leave his agenda behind, a small personal protest against the amount of paper which the formal weekly meeting generated.
Dr Martin Goss, head of the medical physics department, had, as always, doodled obsessively.
His jotting pad was covered with hot-air balloons, intricately patterned and decorated; part of his mind had obviously been with his private passion.
Caroline Amphlett moved, as always, with a quiet, efficient grace.
Neither spoke.
She had worked for Mair as his PA for the last three years and he knew her now no better than on that morning when she had sat in this same office being interviewed for the job.
She was a tall, blonde girl, smooth-skinned with wide-spaced, rather small eyes of an extraordinary deep blue, who would have been thought beautiful if she had shown more animation.
Mair suspected that she used her confidential job as his PA to preserve a deliberately intimidating reserve.
She was the most efficient secretary he had ever had and it irked him that she had made it clear that, if and when he moved, she would wish to stay at Larksoken.
She had told him that her reasons were personal.
That, of course, meant Jonathan Reeves, a junior engineer in the workshop.
He had been as surprised and chagrined at her choice as he had at the prospect of taking up a new job with an unknown PA, but there had been an additional and more disturbing reaction.
Hers was not a type of female beauty which attracted him and he had always assumed that she was physically cold.
It was disconcerting to think that an acned nonenity had discovered and perhaps explored depths which he, in their daily intimacy, hadn't even suspected.
He had sometimes wondered, although with little real curiosity, whether she might not be less compliant, more complicated than he had supposed, had occasionally had a disconcerting sense that the fa?ade she presented to the power station of dedicated, humourless efficiency had been carefully constructed to conceal a less accommodating, more complex personality.
But if the real Caroline was accessible to Jonathan Reeves, if she really liked and wanted that unprepossessing wimp, then she hardly merited the tribute even of his curiosity.
He gave his departmental heads time to get back to their offices before he rang for Hilary Robarts and asked her to come back.
It would have been more usual to have asked her with careful casualness to wait behind after the meeting but what he had to say was private and he had been trying for some weeks now to cut down the number of times when they were known to be alone together.
He wasn't looking forward to the interview.
She would see what he had to say as personal criticism and that was something which in his experience few women could take.
He thought: She was my mistress once.
I was in love with her, as much in love as I thought I was capable of being.
And if it wasn't love, whatever that word means, at least I wanted her.
Will that make what I have to say easier or more difficult?
He told himself that all men were cowards when it came to a showdown with a woman.
That first post-natal subservience, bred of physical dependence, was too ingrained ever to be totally eradicated.
He wasn't more cowardly than the rest of his sex.
What was it he had overheard that woman in the Lydsett stores saying?
' George would do anything to avoid a scene. '
Of course he would, poor sod.
Women with their womb-smelling warmth, their talcum powder and milky breasts had seen to that in the first four weeks of life.
He stood up when she came in and waited until she had taken the chair on the other side of the desk.
Then he opened the right-hand drawer and took out a duplicated news-sheet which he slid across the desk towards her.
' Have you seen this?
It's Neil Pascoe's latest news-sheet from PANUP. '
She said: ' People Against Nuclear Power.
That means Pascoe and a few dozen other ill-informed hysterics.
Of course I've seen it, I 'm on his mailing list.
He takes good care that I see it. '
She gave it a brief glance, then pushed it back across the desk.
He took it up and read: ' Many readers will probably have learned by now that I am being sued by Miss Hilary Robarts, the Acting Administrative Officer at Larksoken Power Station, for alleged libel arising from what I wrote in the May issue of the news-sheet.
I shall, of course, strenuously defend the action and, as I have no money to pay for a lawyer, will present my own defence.
This is just the latest example of the threat to free information and even free speech presented by the nuclear energy lobby.
Apparently now even the mildest criticism is to be followed by the threat of legal action.
But there is a positive side.
This action by Hilary Robarts shows that we, the ordinary people of this county, are making our impact.
Would they bother with our small news-sheet if they weren't running scared?
And the libel action, if it comes to trial, will give us valuable national publicity if properly handled.
We are stronger than we know.
Meanwhile I give below the dates of the next open days at Larksoken so that as many of us as possible can attend and strenuously put our case against nuclear power during the question time which normally precedes the actual tour of the station. '
She said: ' I told you, I've seen it.
I don't know why you wasted your time reading it out.
He seems determined to aggravate his offence.
If he had any sense he'd get himself a good lawyer and keep his mouth shut. '
' He can't afford a lawyer.
And he won't be able to pay damages. '
He paused, and then said quietly: ' In the interests of the station I think you should drop it. '
' Is that an order? '
' I've no power to compel you and you know that.
I 'm asking you.
You 'll get nothing out of him, the man's practically penniless, and he isn't worth the trouble. '
' He is to me.
What he describes as mild criticism was a serious libel and it was widely disseminated.
There's no defence.
Remember the actual words?
' A woman whose response to Chernobyl is that only thirty-one people were killed, who can dismiss as unimportant one of the world's greatest nuclear disasters which put thousands in hospital, exposed a hundred thousand or more to dangerous radioactivity, devastated vast areas of land, and may result in deaths from cancer amounting to fifty thousand over the next fifty years, is totally unsuitable to be trusted to work in an atomic power station.
While she remains there, in any capacity, we must have the gravest doubts whether safety will ever be taken seriously at Larksoken. ' '
That's a clear allegation of professional incompetence.
If he's allowed to get away with that, we 'll never get rid of him. '
' I wasn't aware that we were in the business of getting rid of inconvenient critics.
What method had you in mind? '
He paused, detecting in his voice the first trace of that reedy mixture of sarcasm and pomposity which he knew occasionally affected him and to which he was morbidly sensitive.
He went on: ' He's a free citizen living where he chooses.
He's entitled to his views.
Hilary, he's not a worthy opponent.
Bring him to court and he 'll attract publicity for his cause and do your own no good at all.
We're trying to win over the locals, not antagonize them.
Let it go before someone starts a fund to pay for his defence.
One martyr on Larksoken headland is enough. '
While he was speaking she got up and began pacing to and fro across the wide office.
Then she paused and turned to him.
' This is what it's all about, isn't it?
The reputation of the station, your reputation.
What about my reputation?
If I drop the action now it will be a clear admission that he was right, that I 'm not fit to work here. '
' What he wrote hasn't hurt your reputation with anyone who matters.
And suing him isn't going to help it.
It's unwise to let policy be influenced, let alone jeopardized, by outraged personal pride.
The reasonable course is quietly to drop the action.
What do feelings matter? '
He found that he couldn't remain seated while she was striding to and fro across the office.
He got to his feet and walked over to the window hearing the angry voice but no longer having to face her, watching the reflection of her pacing figure, the swirling hair.
He said again: ' What do feelings matter?
It's the work that is important. '
' They matter to me.
And that's something you've never understood, have you?
Life is about feeling.
Loving is about feeling.
It was the same with the abortion.
You forced me to have it.
Did you ever ask yourself what I felt then, what I needed? '
Oh God, he thought, not this, not again, not now.
He said, still with his back to her: ' It's ridiculous to say that I forced you.
How could I?
And I thought you felt as I did, that it was impossible for you to have a child. '
' Oh no, it wasn't.
If you're so bloody keen on accuracy, let's be accurate about this.
It would have been inconvenient, embarrassing, awkward, expensive.
But it wasn't impossible.
It still isn't impossible.
And, for God's sake, turn around.
Look at me.
I 'm talking to you.
What I 'm saying is important. '
He turned and walked back to the desk.
He said calmly: ' All right, my phrasing was inaccurate.
Have a child by all means if that's what you want.
I 'll be happy for you as long as you don't expect me to father it.
But what we're talking about now is Neil Pascoe and PANUP.
We've gone to a lot of trouble here to promote good relations with the local community and I 'm not going to have all that good work vitiated by a totally unnecessary legal action, particularly not now when work will soon begin on the new reactor. '
Then try to prevent it.
And since we're talking about public relations, I 'm surprised you haven't mentioned Ryan Blaney and Scudder's Cottage.
My cottage, in case you've forgotten.
What am I expected to do about that?
Hand over my property to him and his kids rent-free in the interests of good public relations? '
' That's a different matter.
It's not my concern as Director.
But if you want my opinion, I think you're ill-advised to try and force him out simply because you've got a legal case.
He's paying the rent regularly, isn't he?
And it isn't as if you want the cottage. '
' I do want the cottage.
It's mine.
I bought it and now I want to sell it. '
She slumped back into the chair and he, too, sat.
He made himself stare into the eyes in which, to his discomfort, he saw more pain than anger.
He said: ' Presumably he knows that and he 'll get out when he can, but it won't be easy.
He's recently widowed and he's got four children.
There's a certain amount of local feeling about it, I understand. '
' I've no doubt there is, particularly in the Local Hero where Ryan Blaney spends most of his time and money.
I 'm not prepared to wait.
If we're moving to London in the next three months there's not much time to get the question of the cottage settled.
I don't want to leave that kind of unfinished business.
I want to get it on the market as soon as possible. '
He knew that this was the moment when he should have said firmly: ' I may be moving to London, but not with you. '
But he found it impossible.
He told himself that it was late, the end of a busy day, the worst possible time for rational argument.
She was already overwrought.
One thing at a time.
He had tackled her about Pascoe and, although she had reacted much as he'd expected, perhaps she would think it over and do what he advised.
And she was right about Ryan Blaney; it was none of his business.
The interview had left him with two clear intentions more firmly fixed than ever in his mind.
She wasn't coming to London with him and nor would he recommend her as Administrative Officer at Larksoken.
For all her efficiency, her intelligence, her appropriate education, she wasn't the right person for the job.
For a moment it crossed his mind that here was his bargaining card.
' I 'm not offering you marriage but I am offering you the most senior job you could possibly aspire to. '
But he knew there was no real temptation.
He wouldn't leave the administration of Larksoken in her hands.
Sooner or later she was going to have to realize that there would be no marriage and no promotion.
But now was the wrong moment and he found himself wondering wryly when the right moment might be.
Instead he said: ' Look, we're here to run a power station efficiently and safely.
We're doing a necessary and important job.
Of course we're committed to it, we wouldn't be here otherwise.
But we're scientists and technicians, not evangelists.
We're not running a religious campaign. '
' They are, the other side.
He is.
You see him as an insignificant twit.
He isn't.
He's dishonest and he's dangerous.
Look how he scrubs around in the records to turn up individual cases of leukaemia which he thinks he can ascribe to nuclear energy.
And now he's got the latest Comare report to fuel his spurious concern.
And what about last month's newsletter, that emotive nonsense about the midnight trains of death trundling silently through the northern suburbs of London?
Anyone would think they were carrying open trucks of radioactive waste.
Doesn't he care that nuclear energy has so far saved the world from burning five hundred million tons of coal?
Hasn't he heard about the greenhouse effect?
I mean, is the fool totally ignorant?
Hasn't he any conception of the devastation caused to this planet by burning fossil fuels?
Has no one told him about acid rain or the carcinogens in coal waste?
And when it comes to danger, what about the fifty-seven miners buried alive in the Borken disaster only this year?
Don't their lives matter?
Think of the outcry if that had been a nuclear accident. '
He said: ' He's only one voice and a pathetically uneducated and ignorant one. '
' But he's having his effect and you know it.
We've got to match passion with passion. '
His mind fastened on the word.
We're not, he thought, talking about nuclear energy, we're talking about Passion.
Would we be having this conversation if we were still lovers?
She's demanding from me a commitment to something more personal than atomic Power.
Turning to face her, he was visited suddenly, not by desire, but by a memory, inconveniently intense, of the desire he had once felt for her.
And with memory came a sudden vivid picture of them together in her cottage, the heavy breasts bent over him, her hair falling across his face, her lips, her hands, her thighs.
He said roughly: ' If you want a religion, if you need a religion, then find one.
There are plenty to choose from.
All right the abbey is in ruins and I doubt whether that impotent old priest up at the Old Rectory has much on offer.
But find something or someone; give up fish on Friday, don't eat meat, count beads, put ashes on your head, meditate four times a day, bow down towards your own personal Mecca.
But don't, for God's sake, assuming He exists, ever make science into a religion. '
The telephone on his desk rang.
Caroline Amphlett had left and it was switched through to an outside line.
As he lifted the receiver he saw that Hilary was standing at the door.
She gave him a last long look and went out, shutting it with unnecessary firmness behind her.
The caller was his sister.
She said: ' I hoped I'd catch you.
I forgot to remind you to call at Bollard's farm for the ducks for Thursday.
He 'll have them ready.
We 'll be six, incidentally.
I've invited Adam Dalgliesh.
He's back on the headland. '
He was able to answer her as calmly as she had spoken.
' Congratulations.
He and his aunt have contrived with some skill to avoid their neighbours' cutlets for the last five years.
How did you manage it? '
' By the expedient of asking.
I imagine he may be thinking of keeping on the mill as a holiday home and feels it's time to acknowledge that he does have neighbours.
Or he may be planning to sell, in which case he can risk a dinner party without being trapped into intimacy.
But why not give him credit for a simple human weakness; the attraction of eating a good dinner which he hasn't had to cook? '
And it would balance her table, thought Mair, although that was hardly likely to have been a consideration.
She despised the Noah's Ark convention which decreed that a superfluous man, however unattractive or stupid, was acceptable; a superfluous woman, however witty and well-informed, a social embarrassment.
He said: ' Am I expected to talk about his poetry? '
' I imagine he's come to Larksoken to get away from people who want to talk about his poetry.
But it wouldn't hurt you to take a look at it.
I've got the most recent volume.
And it is poetry, not prose rearranged on the page. '
' With modern verse, can one tell the difference? '
' Oh yes, ' she said.
' If it can be read as prose, then it is prose.
It's an infallible test. '
' But not one, I imagine, that the English faculties would support.
I 'll be leaving in ten minutes.
I won't forget the ducks. '
He smiled as he replaced the receiver.
His sister invariably had the power to restore him to good humour.
Before leaving he stood for a moment at the door and let his eyes range round the room as if he were seeing it for the first time.
He was ambitious for the new job, had cleverly planned and schemed to get it.
And now, when it was almost his, he realized how much he would miss Larksoken, its remoteness, its bleak uncompromising strength.
Nothing had been done to prettify the site as at Sizewell, on the Suffolk coast, or to produce the pleasantly laid-out grounds of smooth lawn, flowering trees and shrubs which so agreeably impressed him on his periodic visits to Winfrith in Dorset.
A low, curving wall faced with flint had been built on the seaward boundary behind whose shelter every spring a bright ribbon of daffodils strained and tossed in the March winds.
Little else had been done to harmonize or soften the concrete's grey immensity.
But this was what he liked, the wide expanse of turbulent sea, browny-grey, white-laced under a limitless sky, windows which he could open so that, at a touch of his hand, the faint continuous boom like distant thunder would instantaneously pour into his office in a roar of crashing billows.
He liked best the stormy winter evenings when, working late, he could see the lights of shipping prinking the horizon as they made their way down the coast to the Yarmouth lanes, and see the flashing lightships and the beam from Happisburgh Lighthouse, which for generations had warned mariners of the treacherous offshore sands.
Even on the darkest night, by the light which the sea seemed mysteriously to absorb and reflect, he could make out the splendid fifteenth-century west tower of Happisburgh Church, that embattled symbol of man's precarious defences against this most dangerous of seas.
And it was a symbol of more than that.
The tower must have been the last sight of land for hundreds of drowning mariners in peace and war.
His mind, always tenacious of facts, could recall the details at will.
The crew of HMS Peggy, driven ashore on 19 December 1770, the 119 members of HMS Invincible wrecked on the sands on 13 March 1801 when on her way to join Nelson's fleet at Copenhagen, the crew of HMS Hunter, the revenue cutter, lost in 1804, many of their crews buried under the grassy mounds in Happisburgh Churchyard.
Built in an age of faith, the tower had stood as a symbol, too, of that final unquenchable hope that even the sea would yield up her dead and that their God was God of the waters as he was of the land.
But now mariners could see, dwarfing the tower, the huge rectangular bulk of Larksoken Power Station.
For those who sought symbols in inanimate objects its message was both simple and expedient, that man, by his own intelligence and his own efforts, could understand and master his world, could make his transitory life more agreeable, more comfortable, more free of pain.
For him this was challenging enough, and if he had needed a faith to live by it would have been starkly sufficient.
But sometimes, on the darkest nights, when the waves pounded the shingle like bursts of distant gunfire, both the science and the symbol would seem to him as transitory as those drowned lives and he would find himself wondering if this great hulk would one day yield to the sea, like the wave-smashed concrete from the last war defences, and like them become a broken symbol of man's long history on this desolate coast.
Or would it resist even time and the North Sea and still be standing when the final darkness fell over the planet?
In his more pessimistic moments some rogue part of his mind knew this darkness to be inevitable, although he did not expect it to come in his time, maybe not even in his son 's.
He would sometimes smile wryly, telling himself that he and Neil Pascoe, on different sides, would understand each other well.
The only difference was that one of them had hope.
Jane Dalgliesh had bought Larksoken Mill five years earlier when she had moved from her previous home on the Suffolk coast.
The mill, which was built in 1525, was a picturesque brick tower, four storeys high with an octagonal dome cap and skeleton fantail.
It had been converted some years before Miss Dalgliesh had bought it by the addition of a flint-faced, two-storey building with a large sitting room, smaller study and a kitchen on the ground floor and three bedrooms, two of them with their own bathrooms, on the floor above.
Dalgliesh had never asked her why she had moved to Norfolk but he guessed that the mill's main attraction had been its remoteness, its closeness to notable bird sanctuaries and the impressive view of headland, sky and sea from the top storey.
Perhaps she had intended to restore it to working order but with increasing age hadn't been able to summon the energy or enthusiasm to cope with the disturbance.
He had inherited it as an agreeable but mildly onerous responsibility, together with her considerable fortune.
The origin of that had only become plain after her death.
It had originally been left to her by a noted amateur ornithologist and eccentric with whom she had been friendly for many years.
Whether the relationship had gone beyond friendship Dalgliesh would now never know.
She had, apparently, spent little of the money on herself, had been a dependable benefactress of the few eccentric charities of which she approved, had remembered them in her will, but without egregious generosity, and had left the residue of her estate to him without explanation, admonition or peculiar protestations of affection, although he had no doubt that the words' my dearly beloved nephew ' meant exactly what they said.
He had liked her, respected her, had always been at ease in her company, but he had never thought that he really knew her, and now he never would.
He was a little surprised how much he minded.
The only change she had made to the property was to build a garage, and after he had unloaded and put away the Jaguar he decided to climb to the top chamber of the mill while it was still light.
The bottom room, with Its two huge grinding-wheels of burr-granite propped against the wall and its lingering smell of flour, still held an air of mystery, of time held in abeyance, of a place bereft of its purpose and meaning, so that he never entered it without a slight sense of desolation.
There were only ladders between the floors and, as he grasped the rungs, he saw again his aunt's long trousered legs ahead of him disappearing into the chamber above.
She had used only the top room of the mill which she had furnished simply with a small writing table and chair facing the North Sea, a telephone and her binoculars.
Entering it he could imagine her sitting there in the summer days and evenings, working on the papers which she occasionally contributed to ornithological journals and looking up from time to time to gaze out over the headland to the sea and the far horizon, could see again that carved, weather-browned Aztec face with its hooded eyes under the grey-black hair, drawn back into a bun, could hear again a voice which, for him, had been one of the most beautiful female voices he had ever heard.
Now it was late afternoon and the headland lay enriched by the mellow afternoon light, the sea a wide expanse of wrinkled blue with a painter's stroke of purple laid on the horizon.
The colours and shapes were intensified by the sun's last strong rays so that the ruins of the abbey looked unreal, a golden fantasy against the blue of the sea, and the dry grass gleamed as richly as a lush water meadow.
There was a window at each of the compass points, and, binoculars in hand, he made his slow perambulation.
To the west his eyes could travel along the narrow road between the reed beds and the dykes to the flint-walled and Dutch-gabled cottages and the pantiled roofs of Lydsett village and the round tower of St Andrew's Church.
To the north the view was dominated by the huge bulk of the power station, the low-roofed administration block with, behind it, the reactor building and the great steel, aluminium-clad building of the turbine house.
Four hundred metres out to sea were the rigs and platforms of the intake structures through which the cooling sea water passed to the pump house and the circulating water pumps.
He moved again to the eastern window and looked out over the cottages of the headland.
Far to the south he could just glimpse the roof of Scudder's Cottage.
Directly to his left the flint walls of Martyr's Cottage glistened like marbles in the afternoon sun and less than half a mile to the north, set back among the Californian pines which fringed that part of the coast, was the dull square cottage rented by Hilary Robarts, a neatly proportional suburban villa incongruously set down on this bleak headland and facing inland as if resolutely ignoring the sea.
Further inland, and only just visible from the southern window was the Old Rectory, set like a Victorian dolls' house in its large, overgrown garden which, at this distance, looked as neatly green and formal as a municipal park.
The telephone rang.
The strident peal was unwelcome.
It was to get away from such intrusions that he had come to Larksoken.
But the call was not unexpected.
It was Terry Rickards saying that he would like to drop in for a chat with Mr Dalgliesh if it wouldn't be too much bother and would nine be convenient?
Dalgliesh was unable to think of a single excuse why it shouldn't be.
Ten minutes later he left the tower, locking the door after him.
This precaution was a small act of piety.
His aunt had always kept the door locked, fearing that children might venture into the mill and hurt themselves by tumbling down the ladders.
Leaving the tower to its darkness and its solitude, he went into Mill Cottage to unpack and get his supper.
The huge sitting room with its York stone floor, rugs and open fireplace was a comfortable and nostalgic mixture of the old and the new.
Most of the furniture was familiar to him from boyhood visits to his grandparents, inherited by his aunt as the last of her generation.
Only the music centre and the television set were comparatively new.
Music had been important to her and the shelves held a catholic collection of records with which he could refresh or console himself during the two weeks' holiday.
And next door, the kitchen contained nothing superfluous but everything necessary to a woman who enjoyed food but preferred to cook it with a minimum of fuss.
He put a couple of lamb chops under the grill, made a green salad and prepared to enjoy a few hours of solitude before the intrusion of Rickards and his preoccupations.
It still surprised him a little that his aunt had finally bought a television set.
Had she been seduced into conformity by the excellence of the natural history programmes and then, like other late converts he had known, sat captive to virtually every offering as if making up for lost time?
That at least seemed unlikely.
He switched on to see if the set was still working.
A jerking pop star was wielding his guitar as the credits rolled, his parodic sexual gyrations so grotesque that it was difficult to see that even the besotted young could find them erotic.
Switching off, Dalgliesh looked up at the oil portrait of his maternal great-grandfather, the Victorian bishop, robed but unmitred, his arms in their billowing lawn sleeves confidently resting on the arms of the chair.
He had an impulse to say, ' This is the music of 1988; these are our heroes; that building on the headland is our architecture and I dare not stop my car to help children home because they've been taught with good reason that a strange man might abduct and rape them. '
He could have added, ' And out there somewhere is a mass murderer who enjoys strangling women and stuffing their mouths with their hair. '
But that aberration, at least, was independent of changing fashions and his great-grandfather would have had his scrupulous but uncompromising answer to it.
And with reason.
After all, hadn't he been consecrated bishop in 1880, the year of Jack the Ripper?
And probably he would have found the Whistler more understandable than the pop star whose gyrations would surely have convinced him that man was in the grip of his final, manic St Vitus's dance.
Rickards came promptly on time.
It was precisely nine when Dalgliesh heard his car and, opening the door on the darkness of the night, saw his tall figure striding towards him.
Dalgliesh hadn't seen him for more than ten years when he had been a newly appointed inspector in the Metropolitan CID and was surprised to see how little he had changed; time, marriage, removal from London, promotion, had left no apparent mark on him.
His rangy, graceless figure, over six feet high, still looked as incongruous in a formal suit as it always had.
The rugged, weatherbeaten face, with its look of dependable fortitude, would have looked more appropriate above a seaman's guernsey, preferably with RNLI woven across the chest.
In profile his face, with the long, slightly hooked nose and jutting eyebrows, was impressive.
In full face the nose was revealed as a little too wide and flattened at the base and the dark eyes, which when he was animated took on a fierce, almost manic gleam, in repose were pools of puzzled endurance.
Dalgliesh thought of him as a type of police officer less common than formerly but still not rare; the conscientious and incorruptible detective of limited imagination and somewhat greater intelligence who had never supposed that the evil of the world should be condoned because it was frequently inexplicable and its perpetrators unfortunate.
He gazed round the sitting room at the long wall of books, the crackling wood fire, the oil of the Victorian prelate above the mantelshelf as if deliberately impressing each item on his mind, then sank into his chair and stretched out his long legs with a small grunt of satisfaction.
Dalgliesh remembered that he had always drunk beer; now he accepted whisky but said he could do with coffee first.
One habit at least had changed.
He said: ' I 'm sorry that you won't be meeting Susie, my wife, while you're here, Mr Dalgliesh.
She's having our first baby in a couple of weeks and she's gone to stay with her mother in York.
Ma-in-law didn't like the idea of her being in Norfolk with the Whistler on the prowl, not with me working the hours I do. '
It was said with a kind of embarrassed formality as if he, not Dalgliesh, were the host and he was apologizing for the unexpected absence of the hostess.
He added: ' I suppose it's natural for an only daughter to want to be with her mother at a time like this, particularly with a first baby. '
Dalgliesh's wife hadn't wanted to be with her mother, she had wanted to be with him, had wanted it with such intensity that he had wondered afterwards whether she might have felt a premonition.
He could remember that, although he could no longer recall her face.
His memory of her, which for years, a traitor to grief and to their love, he had resolutely tried to suppress because the pain had seemed unbearable, had gradually been replaced by a boyish, romantic dream of gentleness and beauty now fixed for ever beyond the depredation of time.
His newborn son's face he could still recall vividly and sometimes did in his dreams, that white unsullied look of sweet knowledgeable contentment, as if, in a brief moment of life, he had seen and known all there was to know, seen it and rejected it.
He told himself that he was the last man who could reasonably be expected to advise or reassure on the problems of pregnancy and he sensed that Rickards's unhappiness at his wife's absence went deeper than missing her company.
He made the usual inquiries about her health and escaped into the kitchen to make the coffee.
Whatever mysterious spirit had unlocked the verse, it had freed him for other human satisfactions, for love; or was it the other way around?
Had love unlocked the verse?
It seemed even to have affected his job.
Grinding the coffee beans he pondered life's smaller ambiguities.
When the poetry hadn't come, the job too had seemed not only irksome but occasionally repellent.
Now he was happy enough to let Rickards impose on his solitude to use him as a sounding board.
This new benignity and tolerance a little disconcerted him.
Success in moderation was no doubt better for the character than failure but too much of it and he would lose his cutting edge.
And five minutes later, carrying in the two mugs and settling back in his chair, he could relish the contrast between Rickards's preoccupation with psychopathic violence and the peace of the mill.
The wood fire, now past its crackling stage, had settled into a comfortable glow and the wind, seldom absent from the headland, moved like a benign, gently hissing spirit through the still and soaring clappers of the mill.
He was glad that it wasn't his job to catch the Whistler.
Of all murders serial killings were the most frustrating, the most difficult and the chanciest to solve, the investigation carried on under the strain of vociferous public demand that the terrifying unknown devil be caught and exorcized for ever.
But this wasn't his case; he could discuss it with the detachment of a man who has a professional interest but no responsibility.
And he could understand what Rickards needed; not advice  he knew his job .
but someone he could trust, someone who understood the language, someone who would afterwards be gone, who wouldn't remain as a perpetual reminder of his uncertainties, a fellow professional to whom he could comfortably think aloud.
He had his team and he was too punctilious not to share his thinking with them.
But he was a man who needed to articulate his theories and here he could put them forward, embroider, reject, explore without the uncomfortable suspicion that his detective sergeant, deferentially listening, his face carefully expressionless, would be thinking, For God's sake, what's the old man dreaming up now?
Or, The old man's getting fanciful.
Rickards said: ' We're not using Holmes.
The Met say the system is fully committed at present, and anyway we've got our own computer.
Not that there's much data to feed in.
The press and public know about Holmes, of course.
I get that at every press conference.
' Are you using the Home Office special computer, the one named after Sherlock Holmes? ' '
' No, ' ' I say, ' ' but we're using our own. ' '
Unspoken question: ' Then why the hell haven't you caught him? ' '
They think that you've only got to feed in your data and out pops an Identikit of sonny complete with prints, collar-size and taste in pop music. '
' Yes, ' said Dalgliesh, 'we're so sated now with scientific wonders that it's a bit disconcerting when we find that technology can do everything except what we want it to. '
' Four women so far and Valerie Mitchell won't be the last if we don't catch him soon.
He started fifteen months ago.
The first victim was found just after midnight in a shelter at the end of the Easthaven promenade, the local tart, incidentally, although he may not have known or cared.
It was eight months before he struck again.
Struck lucky, I suppose he'd say.
This time a thirty-year-old schoolteacher cycling home to Hunstanton who had a puncture on a lonely stretch of road.
Then another gap, just six months, before he got a barmaid from Ipswich who'd been visiting her granny and was daft enough to wait alone for the late bus.
When it arrived there was no one at the stop.
A couple of local youths got off.
They'd had a skinful so weren't in a particularly noticing mood but they saw and heard nothing, nothing except what they described as a kind of mournful whistling coming from deep in the wood. '
He took a gulp of his coffee, then went on: ' We've got a personality assessment from the trick-cyclist.
I don't know why we bother.
I could have written it myself.
He tells us to look for a loner, probably from a disturbed family background, may have a dominant mother, doesn't relate easily to people, particularly women, could be impotent, unmarried, separated or divorced, with a resentment and hatred of the opposite sex.
Well, we hardly expect him to be a successful, happily married bank manager with four lovely kids just coming up to GCE or whatever they call it now.
They're the devil, these serial murders.
No motive  no motive that a sane man can understand anyway  and he could come from anywhere, Norwich, Ipswich, even London.
It's dangerous to assume that he's necessarily working in his own territory.
Looks like it, though.
He obviously knows the locality well.
And he seems to be sticking now to the same MO.
He chooses a road intersection, drives the car or van into the side of one road, cuts across and waits at the other.
Then he drags his victim into the bushes or the trees, kills and cuts back to the other road and the car and makes his getaway.
With the last three murders it seems to have been pure chance that a suitable victim did, in fact, come along. '
Dalgliesh felt that it was time he contributed something to the speculation.
He said: ' If he doesn't select and stalk his victim, and obviously he didn't in the last three cases, he'd normally have to expect a long wait.
That suggests he's routinely out after dark, a night worker, mole-catcher, woodman, gamekeeper, that kind of job.
And he goes prepared; on the watch for a quick kill, in more ways than one. '
Rickards said: 'That's how I see it.
Four victims so far and three fortuitous, but he's probably been on the prowl for three years or more.
That could be part of the thrill.
' Tonight I could make a strike, tonight I could be lucky.
And, by God, he is getting lucky.
Two victims in the last six weeks. '
' And what about his trademark, the whistle? '
That was heard by the three people who came quickly on the scene after the Easthaven murder.
One just heard a whistle, one said it sounded like a hymn and the third, who was a church woman, claimed she could identify it precisely, ' Now the Day is Over' '.
We kept quiet about that.
It could be useful when we get the usual clutch of nutters claiming they're the Whistler.
But there seems no doubt that he does whistle. '
Dalgliesh said: ' ' Now the day is over / Night is drawing nigh/ Shadows of the evening/ Fall across the sky' '.
It's a Sunday-school hymn, hardly the kind that gets requested on Songs of Praise, I should have thought. '
He remembered it from childhood, a lugubrious, undistinguished tune which, as a ten-year-old, he could pick out on the drawing-room piano.
Did anyone sing that hymn now, he wondered?
It had been a favourite choice of Miss Barnett on those long dark afternoons m- winter before the Sunday school was released, when the outside light was fading and the small Adam Dalgliesh was already dreading those last twenty yards of his walk home where the rectory drive curved and the bushes grew thickest.
Night was different from bright day, smelt different, sounded different; ordinary things assumed different shapes; an alien and more sinister power ruled the night.
Those twenty yards of crunching gravel where the lights of the house were momentarily screened were a weekly horror.
Once through the gate to the drive he would walk fast, but not too fast since the power that ruled the night could smell out fear as dogs smell out terror.
His mother, he knew, would never have expected him to walk those yards alone had she known that he suffered such atavistic panic, but she hadn't known and he would have died before telling her.
And his father?
His father would have expected him to be brave, would have told him that God was God of the darkness as He was of the light.
There were after all a dozen appropriate texts he could have quoted.
' Darkness and light are both alike to Thee. '
But they were not alike to a sensitive ten-year-old boy.
It was on those lonely walks that he had first had intimations of an essentially adult truth, that it is those who most love us who cause us the most pain.
He said: ' So you're looking for a local man, a Loner, someone who has a night job, the use of a car or van and a knowledge of Hymns Ancient and Modern.
That should make it easier. '
Rickards said: ' You'd think so, wouldn't you. '
He sat in silence for a minute then said: 'l think I'd like just a small whisky now, Mr Dalgliesh, if it's all the same to you. '
It was after midnight when he finally left.
Dalgliesh walked out with him to the car.
Looking out across the headland Rickards said: ' He's out there somewhere, watching, waiting.
There's hardly a waking moment when I don't think of him, imagine what he looks like, where he is, what he's thinking.
Susie's ma is right.
I haven't had much to give her recently.
And when he's caught, that 'll be the end.
It's finished.
You move on.
He doesn't, but you do.
And by the end you know everything, or think you do.
Where, when, who, how?
You might even know why if you're lucky.
And yet, essentially, you know nothing.
All that wickedness, and you don't have to explain it or understand it or do a bloody thing about it except put a stop to it.
Involvement without responsibility.
No responsibility for what he did or for what happens to him afterwards.
That's for the judge and the jury.
You're involved, and yet you're not involved.
Is that what appeals to you about the job, Mr Dalgliesh? '
It was not a question Dalgliesh would have expected, even from a friend, and Rickards was not a friend.
He said: ' Can any of us answer that question? '
' You remember why I left the Met, Mr Dalgliesh. '
The two corruption cases?
Yes, I remember why you left the Met. '
' And you stayed.
You didn't like it any more than I did.
You wouldn't have touched the pitch.
But you stayed.
You were detached about it all, weren't you?
It interested you. '
Dalgliesh said: ' It's always interesting when men you thought you knew behave out of character. '
And Rickards had fled from London.
In search of what?
Dalgliesh wondered.
Some romantic dream of country peace, an England which had vanished, a gentler method of policing, total honesty?
He wondered whether he had found it.
Thursday 22 September to Friday 23 September
It was ten past seven and the saloon bar of the Duke of Clarence pub was already smoke-filled, the noise level rising and the crowd at the bar three feet deep.
Christine Baldwin, the Whistler's fifth victim, had exactly twenty minutes to live.
She sat on the banquette against the wall, sipping her second medium sherry of the evening, deliberately making it last, knowing that Colin was impatient to order the next round.
Catching Norman's eye, she raised her left wrist and nodded significantly at her watch.
Already, it was ten minutes past their deadline and he knew it.
Their agreement was that this was to be a pre-supper drink with Colin and Yvonne, the limit both of time and alcohol consumption clearly understood between her and Norman before they left home.
The arrangement was typical of their nine-month-old marriage, sustained less by compatible interests than by a carefully negotiated series of concessions.
Tonight it had been her turn to give way, but agreeing to spend an hour in the Clarence with Colin and Yvonne didn't extend to any pretence that she actually enjoyed their company.
She had disliked Colin since their first meeting; the relationship, at a glance, had been fixed in the stereotyped antagonism between newly acquired fiance and slightly disreputable old schoolmate and drinking partner.
He had been best man at their wedding  a formidable pre-nuptial agreement had been necessary for that capitulation  and had carried out his duties with a mixture of incompetence, vulgarity and irreverence which, as she occasionally enjoyed telling Norman, had spoilt for her the memory of her big day.
It was typical of him to choose this pub.
God knew, it was vulgar enough.
But at least she could be certain of one thing: it wasn't a place where there was a risk of meeting anyone from the power station, at least not anyone who mattered.
She disliked everything about the Clarence, the rough scrape of the moquette against her legs, the synthetic velvet which covered the walls, the baskets of ivy spiked with artificial flowers above the bar, the gaudiness of the carpet.
Twenty years ago, it had been a cosy Victorian hostelry, seldom visited except by its regulars, with an open fire in winter and horse brasses polished to whiteness hung against the black beams.
The lugubrious publican had seen it as his job to repel strangers and had employed to that end an impressive armoury of taciturnity, malevolent glances, warm beer and poor service.
But the old pub had burnt down in the 1960s and been replaced by a more profitable and thrusting enterprise.
Nothing of the old building remained and the long extension to the bar, dignified by the name Banqueting Hall, provided for the undiscriminating a venue for weddings and local functions and on other nights served a predictable menu of prawns or soup, steak or chicken, and fruit salad with ice-cream.
Well, at least she had put her foot down over dinner.
They had worked out their monthly budget to the last pound, and if Norman thought she was going to eat this overpriced muck with a perfectly good cold supper waiting in the refrigerator at home and a decent programme on the telly he could forget it.
And they had better uses for their money than to sit here drinking with Colin and his latest tart who had opened her legs to half Norwich, if rumour were to be believed.
There were the hire purchase repayments on the sitting-room furniture and the car, not to mention the mortgage.
She tried again to meet Norman's eye but he was rather desperately keeping his attention on that slut Yvonne.
And that wasn't proving difficult.
Colin leaned over to her, his bold treacle-brown eyes half mocking, half inviting, Colin Lomas, who thought every woman would swoon when he beckoned.
' Relax, darling.
Your old man's enjoying himself.
It's your round, Norm. '
Ignoring Colin she spoke to Norman: ' Look, it's time we were going.
We agreed we'd leave at seven. '
' Oh, come on, Chrissie, give the lad a break.
One more round. '
Without meeting her eyes, Norman said: ' What 'll you have, Yvonne?
The same again?
Medium sherry? '
Colin said: ' Let's get on to spirits.
I 'll have a Johnny Walker. '
He was doing it on purpose.
She knew that he didn't even like whisky.
She said: ' Look, I've had enough of this bloody place.
The noise has given me a head. '
' A headache?
Nine months married and she's started the headaches.
No point in hurrying home tonight, Norm. '
Yvonne giggled.
Christine said, her face burning, ' You were always vulgar, Colin Lomas, but now you're not even funny with it.
You three can do what you like.
I 'm going home.
Give me the car keys. '
Colin leaned back and smiled.
' You heard what your lady wife said.
She wants the car keys. '
Without a word, shamefaced, Norman took them out of his pocket and slid them over the table.
She snatched them up, pushed back the table, struggled past Yvonne and rushed to the door.
She was almost crying with rage.
It took her a minute to unlock the car and then she sat shaking behind the wheel, waiting until her hands were steady enough to switch on the ignition.
She heard her mother's voice on the day when she had announced her engagement: ' Well, you're thirty-two and if he's what you want I suppose you know your own mind.
But you 'll never make anything of him.
Weak as water, if you ask me. '
But she had thought that she could make something of him and that small semi-detached house outside Norwich represented nine months of hard work and achievement.
Next year he was due for promotion at the insurance office.
She would be able to give up her job as secretary in the medical physics department at Larksoken Power Station and start the first of the two children she had planned.
She would be thirty-four by then.
Everyone knew that you shouldn't wait too long.
She had only passed her driving test after her marriage and this was the first time that she had driven unaccompanied by night.
She drove slowly and carefully, her anxious eyes peering ahead, glad that at least the route home was familiar.
She wondered what Norman would do when he saw that the car had gone.
Almost certainly he would expect to find her sitting there, fuming but ready to be driven home.
Now he'd have to rely for a lift on Colin who wouldn't be so keen on coming out of his way.
And if they thought that she was going to invite Colin and Yvonne in for a drink when they arrived they would get a shock.
The thought of Norman's discomfiture at finding her gone cheered her a little and she pressed her foot down on the accelerator, anxious to distance herself from the three of them, to reach the safety of home.
But suddenly the car gave a stutter and the engine died.
She must have been driving more erratically than she thought for she found herself half skewed across the road.
It was a bad place to be stranded, a lonely stretch of country lane with a thin band of trees on either side and it was deserted.
And then she remembered.
Norman had mentioned that they needed to fill up with petrol and must be sure to call at the all-night garage after they left the Clarence.
It was ridiculous to have let the tank get so low but they had had an argument only three days earlier on whose turn it was to call at the garage and pay for the petrol.
All her anger and frustration returned.
For a moment she sat there, beating her hands impotently on the wheel, desperately turning the key in the ignition, willing the engine to start.
But there was no response.
And then irritation began to give way to the first tricklings of fear.
The road was deserted and even if a motorist came by and drew up, could she be certain that he wasn't a kidnapper, a rapist, even the Whistler?
There had been that horrible murder on the A3 only this year.
Nowadays you could trust no one.
And she could hardly leave the car where it was, slewed across the road.
She tried to recall when she had last passed a house, an AA box, a public telephone, but it seemed to her that she had been driving through deserted countryside for at least ten minutes.
Even if she left the dubious sanctuary of the car she had no clue to the best direction in which to seek help.
Suddenly a wave of total panic swept across her like nausea and she had to resist the urge to dash from the car and hide herself among the trees.
But what good would that do?
He might be lurking even there.
An then, miraculously, she heard footsteps and, looking round, saw a woman approaching.
She was dressed in trousers and a trenchcoat and had a mane of fair hair beneath a tight-fitting beret.
At her side on a leash trotted a small, smooth-haired dog.
Immediately all her anxiety vanished.
Here was someone who would help her push the car into the side of the road, who would know in which direction lay the nearest house, who would be a companion on her walk.
Without even troubling to slam the door of the car she called out happily and ran smiling towards the horror of her death.
The dinner had been excellent and the wine, a Chateau Potensac '78, an interesting choice with the main course.
Although Dalgliesh knew of Alice Mair's reputation as a cookery writer he had never read any of her books and had no idea to what culinary school, if any, she belonged.
He had hardly feared being presented with the usual artistic creation swimming in a pool of sauce and accompanied by one or two undercooked carrots and mange-tout elegantly arranged on a side plate.
But the wild ducks carved by Alex Mair had been recognizably ducks, the piquant sauce, new to him, enhanced rather than dominated the taste of the birds, and the small mounds of creamed turnip and parsnip were an agreeable addition to green peas.
Afterwards they had eaten orange sorbet followed by cheese and fruit.
It was a conventional menu but one intended, he felt, to please the guests rather than to demonstrate the ingenuity of the cook.
The expected fourth guest, Miles Lessingham, had unaccountably failed to arrive, but Alice Mair hadn't rearranged her table and the empty chair and unfilled wineglass were uncomfortably evocative of Banquo's ghost.
Dalgliesh was seated opposite Hilary Robarts.
The portrait, he thought, must have been even more powerful than he realized if it could so dominate his physical reaction to the living woman.
It was the first time they had met although he had known of her existence as he had of all the handful of people who lived, as the Lydsett villagers said, ' t' other side of the gate '.
And it was a little strange that this was their first meeting; her red Golf was a frequent sight on the headland, her cottage had frequently met Iris eyes from the top storey of the mill.
Now, physically close for the first time, he found it difficult to keep his eyes off her, living flesh and remembered image seeming to fuse into a presence both potent and disturbing.
It was a handsome face, a model's face, he thought, with its high cheekbones, long, slightly concave nose, wide, full lips and dark, angry eyes deeply set under the strong brows.
Her crimped, springing hair, held back with two combs, fell over her shoulders.
He could imagine her posed, mouth moistly open, hips jutting and staring at the cameras with that apparently obligatory look of arrogant resentment.
As she leaned forward to twitch another grape from the bunch and almost toss it into her mouth he could see the faint freckles which smudged the dark forehead, the glisten of hairs above a carved upper lip.
On the other side of their host sat Meg Dennison, delicately but unfussily peeling her grapes with pink-tipped fingers.
Hilary Robarts's sultry handsomeness emphasized her own very different look, an old-fashioned, carefully tended but unselfconscious prettiness which reminded him of photographs of the late thirties.
Their clothes emphasized the contrast.
Hilary wore a shirtwaister dress in multicoloured Indian cotton, three buttons at the neck undone.
Meg Dennison was in a long black skirt and a blue patterned silk blouse with a bow at the neck.
But it was their hostess who was the most elegant.
The long shift in fine dark brown wool worn with a heavy necklace of silver and amber hid her angularity and emphasized the strength and regularity of the strong features.
Beside her Meg Dennison's prettiness was diminished almost to insipidity and Hilary Robarts's strong-coloured cotton looked tawdry.
The room in which they were dining must, he thought, have been part of the original cottage.
From these smoke-blackened beams Agnes Poley had hung her sides of bacon, her bundles of dried herbs.
In a pot slung over that huge hearth she had cooked her family's meals and, perhaps, at the end had heard in its roaring flames the crackling faggots of her dreadful martyrdom.
Outside the long window had passed the helmets of marching men.
But only in the name of the cottage was there a memory of the past.
The oval dining table and the chairs were modern as were the Wedgwood dinner service and the elegant glasses.
In the drawing room, where they had drunk their pre-dinner sherry, Dalgliesh had a sense of a room which deliberately rejected the past, containing nothing which could violate the owner's essential privacy; no family history in photograph or portrait, no shabby heirlooms given room out of nostalgia, sentimentality or family piety, no antiques collected over the years.
Even the few pictures, three recognizably by John Piper, were modern.
The furniture was expensive, comfortable, well heart of the cottage wasn't there.
It was in that large, warm-smelling and welcoming kitchen.
He had only been half listening to the conversation but now he forced himself to be a more accommodating guest.
The talk was general, candlelit faces leaned across the table and the hands which peeled the fruit or fidgeted with the glasses were as individual as the faces.
Alice Mair's strong but elegant hands with their short nails, Hilary Robarts's long, knobbled fingers, the delicacy of Meg Dennison's pink-tipped fingers, a little reddened with housework.
Alex Mair was saying: ' All right, let's take a modern dilemma.
We know that we can use human tissue from aborted foetuses to treat Parkinson ' s disease and probably Alzheimer 's.
Presumably you'd find that ethically acceptable if the abortion were natural or legal but not if it were induced for the purpose of providing the tissue.
But you can argue that a woman has a right to the use that she makes of her own body.
If she's particularly fond of someone who has Alzheimer's and wants to help him by producing a foetus, who has the right to say no?
A foetus isn't a child. '
Hilary Robarts said: ' I notice that you assume the sufferer to be helped is a man.
I suppose he'd feel entitled to use a woman's body for this purpose as he would any other.
But why the hell should he?
I can't imagine that a woman who's actually had an abortion wants to go through that again for any man's convenience. '
The words were spoken with extreme bitterness.
There was a pause then Mair said quietly: ' Alzheimer's is rather more than an inconvenience.
But I 'm not advocating it.
In any case, under present law, it would be illegal. '
' Would that worry you? '
He looked into her angry eyes.
' Naturally it would worry me.
Happily it isn't a decision that I shall ever be required to make.
But we're not talking about legality, we're talking about morality. '
His sister asked: ' Are they different? '
' That's the question, isn't it?
Are they, Adam? '
It was the first time he had used Dalgliesh's Christian name.
Dalgliesh said: ' You're assuming there's an absolute morality independent of time or circumstance. '
' Wouldn't you make that assumption? '
' Yes, I think I would, but I 'm not a moral philosopher. '
Mrs Dennison looked up from her plate a little flushed and said: ' I 'm always suspicious of the excuse that a sin is justified if it's done to benefit someone we love.
We may think so, but it's usually to benefit ourselves.
I might dread the thought of having to look after an Alzheimer patient.
When we advocate euthanasia is it to stop pain or to prevent our own distress at having to watch it?
To conceive a child deliberately in order to kill it to make use of its tissue, the idea is absolutely repugnant. '
Alex Mair said: ' I could argue that what you are killing isn't a child and that repugnance at an act isn't evidence of its immorality. '
Dalgliesh said: ' But isn't it?
Doesn't Mrs Dennison's natural repugnance tell us something about the morality of the act? '
She gave him a brief, grateful smile and went on: ' And isn't this use of a foetus particularly dangerous?
It could lead to the poor of the world conceiving children and selling the foetuses to help the rich.
Already I believe there's a black market in human organs.
Do you think a multi-millionaire who needs a heart-lung transplant ever goes without? '
Alex Mair smiled.
' As long as you aren't arguing that we should deliberately suppress knowledge or reject scientific progress just because the discoveries can be abused.
If there are abuses, legislate against them. '
Meg protested: ' But you make it sound so easy.
If all we had to do was to legislate against social evils Mr Dalgliesh for one would be out of work. '
' It isn't easy but it has to be attempted.
That's what being human means, surely, using our intelligence to make choices. '
Alice Mair got up from the table.
She said: ' Well, it's time to make a choice now on a somewhat different level.
Which of you would like coffee and what kind?
There's a table and chairs in the courtyard.
I thought we could switch on the yard lights and have it outside. '
They moved through to the drawing room and Alice Mair opened the french windows leading to the patio.
Immediately the sonorous booming of the sea flowed into and took possession of the room like a vibrating and irresistible force.
But once they had stepped out into the cool air, paradoxically, the noise seemed muted, the sea no more than a distant roar.
The patio was bounded on the road side by a high flint wall which, to the south and east, curved to little more than four feet to give an unimpeded view across the headland to the sea.
The coffee tray was carried out by Alex Mair within minutes and, cups in hand, the little party wandered aimlessly among the terracotta pots like strangers reluctant to be introduced or like actors on a stage set, self-absorbed, pondering their lines, waiting for the rehearsal to begin.
They were without coats and the warmth of the night had proved illusory.
They had turned as if by common consent to go back into the cottage when the lights of a car, driven fast, came over the southern rise of the road.
As it approached its speed slackened.
Mair said: ' Lessingham's Porsche. '
No one spoke.
They watched silently as the car was driven at speed off the road to brake violently on the turf of the headland.
As if conforming to some prearranged ceremony they grouped themselves into a semicircle with Alex Mair a little to the front, like a formal welcoming party but one bracing itself for trouble rather than expecting pleasure from the approaching guest.
Dalgliesh was aware of the heightening tension: small individual tremors of anxiety which shivered on the still, sea-scented air, unified and focused on the car door and on the tall figure which unwound from the driver's seat, leapt easily over the low stone wall and walked deliberately across the courtyard towards them.
Lessingham ignored Mair and moved straight to Alice.
He took her hand and gently kissed it, a theatrical gesture which Dalgliesh felt had taken her by surprise and which the others had watched with an unnaturally critical attention.
Lessingham said gently: ' My apologies, Alice.
Too late for dinner, I know, but not, I hope, for a drink.
And God, do I need one. '
' Where have you been?
We waited dinner for forty minutes. '
It was Hilary Robarts who asked the obvious question, sounding as accusatory as a peevish wife.
Lessingham kept his eye on Alice.
He said: ' I've been considering how best to answer that question for the last twenty minutes.
There are a number of interesting and dramatic possibilities.
I could say that I've been helping the police with their inquiries.
Or that I've been involved in a murder.
Or that there was a little unpleasantness on the road.
Actually it was all three.
The Whistler has killed again.
I found the body. '
Hilary Robarts said sharply: ' How do you mean, ' found' '?
Where? '
Again Lessingham ignored her.
He said to Alice Mair: ' Could I have that drink?
Then I 'll give you all the gory details.
After unsettling your seating plan and delaying dinner for forty minutes that's the least I owe you. '
As they moved back into the drawing room Alex Mair introduced Dalgliesh.
Lessingham gave him one sharp glance.
They shook hands.
The palm which momentarily touched his was moist and very cold.
Alex Mair said easily: ' Why didn't you ring?
We would have kept some food for you. '
The question, conventionally domestic, sounded irrelevant, but Lessingham answered it.
' Do you know, I actually forgot.
Not all the time, of course, but it honestly didn't cross my mind until the police had finished questioning me and then the moment didn't seem opportune.
They were perfectly civil but I sensed that my private engagements had a pretty low priority.
Incidentally, you get absolutely no credit from the police for finding a body for them.
Their attitude is rather, ' 'Thank you very much, sir, very nasty, I 'm sure.
Sorry you've been troubled.
But we 'll take over now.
Just go home and try to forget all about it. ' '
I have a feeling that that isn't going to be so easy. '
Back in the drawing room, Alex Mair threw a couple of thin logs on to the glowing embers and went to get the drinks.
Lessingham had refused whisky but had asked for wine.
' But don't waste your best claret on me, Alex.
This is purely medicinal. '
Almost imperceptibly they edged their chairs closer.
Lessingham began his story deliberately, pausing at times to take gulps of the wine.
It seemed to Dalgliesh that he was subtly altered since his arrival, had become charged with a power both mysterious and oddly familiar.
He thought: He has acquired the mystique of the story-teller and, glancing at the ring of fire-lit and intent faces, he was suddenly reminded of his first village school, of the children clustered round Miss Douglas at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon for the half hour of story-time, and felt a pang of pain and regret for those lost days of innocence and love.
He was surprised that the memory should have come back so keenly and at such a moment.
But this was to be a very different story and one unsuited to the ears of children.
Lessingham said: ' I had an appointment with my dentist in Norwich at five o'clock and then briefly visited a friend in the Close.
So I drove here from Norwich, not from my cottage.
I'd just turned right off the B1 150 at Fairstead when I nearly crashed into the back of this unlit car skewed across the road.
I thought it was a damn silly place to park if someone wanted to take a leak in the bushes.
Then it crossed my mind that there could have been an accident.
And the right-hand door was open, that seemed a bit odd.
So I drew into the side and went to take a look.
There was no one about.
I 'm not sure why I walked into the trees.
A kind of instinct I suppose.
It was too dark to see anything and I wondered whether to call out.
Then I felt a fool and decided to leave it and mind my own business.
And it was then that I almost tripped over her. '
He took another gulp of the wine.
' I still couldn't see anything, of course, but I knelt down and groped about with my hands.
And it was then that I touched flesh.
I think I touched her thigh, I can't be sure.
But flesh, even dead flesh, is unmistakable.
So I went back to the car and got my torch.
I shone it on her feet and then slowly up her body to her face.
And then, of course, I saw.
I knew it was the Whistler. '
Meg Dennison asked gently: ' Was it very terrible? '
He must have heard in her voice what she obviously felt, not prurience but sympathy, an understanding that he needed to talk.
He looked at her for a moment as if seeing her for the first time then paused, giving the question serious thought.
' More shocking than terrible.
Looking back my emotions were complicated, a mixture of horror, disbelief and, well, shame.
I felt like a voyeur.
The dead, after all, are at such a disadvantage.
She looked grotesque, a little ridiculous, with thin clumps of hair sticking out of her mouth as if she was munching.
Horrible, of course, but silly at the same time.
I had an almost irresistible impulse to giggle.
I know it was only a reaction to shock but it was hardly admirable.
And the whole scene was so, well, banal.
If you had asked me to describe one of the Whistler's victims that's exactly how I should have seen her.
You expect reality to be different from imaginings. '
Alice Mair said: ' Perhaps because the imaginings are usually worse. '
Meg Dennison said gently: ' You must have been terrified.
I know I should have been.
Alone and in darkness with such horror. '
He shifted his body towards her and spoke as if it were important that she, of all those present, should understand.
' No, not terrified, that was the surprising part.
I was frightened, of course, but only for a second or two.
After all, I didn't imagine he'd wait around.
He'd had his kicks.
He isn't interested in men anyway.
I found myself thinking the ordinary, commonplace thoughts.
I mustn't touch anything.
I mustn't destroy the evidence.
I've got to get the police.
Then, walking back to the car, I started rehearsing what I'd say to them, almost as if I were concocting my story.
I tried to explain why it was that I went into the bushes, tried to make it sound reasonable. '
Alex Mair said: ' What was there to justify?
You did what you did.
It sounds reasonable enough to me.
The car was a danger slewed across the road.
It would have been irresponsible just to drive on. '
' It seemed to need a lot of explaining, then and later.
Perhaps because all the subsequent police sentences began with ' why' '.
You get morbidly sensitive to your own motives.
It's almost as if you have to convince yourself that you didn't do it. '
Hilary Robarts said impatiently: ' But the body, when you first went back for the torch and saw her, you were certain she was dead? '
' Oh yes, I knew she was dead. '
' How could you have known?
It could have been very recent.
Why didn't you at least try to resuscitate her, give her the kiss of life?
It would have been worth overcoming your natural repugnance. '
Dalgliesh heard Meg Dennison make a small sound between a gasp and a groan.
Lessingham looked at Hilary and said coolly: ' It would have been if there had been the slightest point in it.
I knew she was dead, let's leave it at that.
But don't worry, if I ever rind you in extremis I 'll endeavour to overcome my natural repugnance. '
Hilary relaxed and gave a little self-satisfied smile, as if gratified to have stung him into a cheap retort.
Her voice was more natural as she said: ' I 'm surprised you weren't treated as a suspect.
After all, you were the first on the scene, and this is the second time you've been, well almost, in at the death.
It's becoming a habit. '
The last words were spoken almost under her breath but her eyes were fixed on Lessingham's face.
He met her glance and said, with equal quietness: ' But there's a difference, isn't there?
I had to watch Toby die, remember?
And this time no one will even try to pretend that it isn't murder. '
The fire gave a sudden crackle and the top log rolled over and fell into the hearth.
Mair, his face flushed, kicked it viciously back.
Hilary Robarts, perfectly calm, turned to Dalgliesh.
' But I 'm right, aren't I?
Don't the police usually suspect the person who finds the body? '
He said quietly: ' Not necessarily. '
Lessingham had placed the bottle of claret on the hearth.
Now he leaned down and carefully refilled his glass.
He said: ' They might have suspected me, I suppose, but for a number of lucky circumstances.
I was obviously out on my lawful occasions.
I have an alibi for at least two of the previous killings.
From their point of view I was depressingly free of blood.
I suppose they could see I was in a mild state of shock.
And there was no sign of the ligature which strangled her, nor of the knife. '
Hilary said sharply: ' What knife?
The Whistler's a strangler.
Everyone knows that's how he kills. '
' Oh, I didn't mention that, did I?
She was strangled all right, or I suppose she was.
I didn't keep the torchlight on her face longer than was necessary.
But he marks his victims, apart from stuffing their mouths with hair.
Pubic hair, incidentally.
I saw that all right.
There was the letter L cut into her forehead.
Quite unmistakable.
A detective-constable who was talking to me later told me that it's one of the Whistler's trademarks.
He thought that the L could stand for Larksoken and that the Whistler might be making some kind of statement about nuclear power, a protest perhaps. '
Alex Mair said sharply: ' That's nonsense. '
Then added more calmly: ' There's been nothing on television or in the papers about any cut on the victims' foreheads.
' The police are keeping it quiet, or trying to.
It's the kind of detail they can use to sort out the false confessions.
There have been half a dozen of those already apparently.
There's been nothing in the media about the hair either, but that piece of unpleasantness seems to be generally known.
After all, I 'm not the only one to have found a body.
People do talk. '
Hilary Robarts said: ' Nothing has been written or said, as far as I know, about it being pubic hair. '
' No, the police are keeping that quiet too, and it's hardly the sort of detail you print in a family newspaper.
Not that it's so very surprising.
He isn't a rapist but there was bound to be some sexual element. '
It was one of the details which Rickards had told Dalgliesh the previous evening but one, he felt, which Lessingham could well have kept to himself, particularly at a mixed dinner party.
He was a little surprised at his sudden sensitivity.
perhaps it was his glance at Meg Dennison's ravaged face.
And then his ears caught a faint sound.
He looked across to the open door of the dining room and glimpsed the slim figure of Theresa Blaney standing in the shadows.
He wondered how much of Lessingham's account she had heard.
However little, it would have been too much.
He said, hardly aware of the severity in his voice: 'Didn't Chief Inspector Rickards ask you to keep this information confidential? '
There was an embarrassed silence.
He thought, They had forgotten for a moment that I 'm a policeman.
Lessingham turned to him.
' I intend to keep it confidential.
Rickards didn't want it to become public knowledge and it won't.
No one here will pass it on. '
But that single question, reminding them of who he was and what he represented, chilled the room and changed their mood from fascinated and horrified interest to a slightly embarrassed unease.
And when, a minute later, he got up to say his goodbyes and thank his hostess, there was an almost visible sense of relief.
He knew that the embarrassment had nothing to do with the fear that he would question, criticize, move like a spy among them.
It wasn't his case and they weren't suspects, and they must have known that he was no cheerful extrovert, flattered to be the centre of attraction while they bombarded him with questions about Chief Inspector Rickards's likely methods, the chance of catching the Whistler, his theories about psychopathic killers, his own experience of serial murder.
But merely by being there he increased their awakening fear and repugnance at this latest horror.
On each of their minds was imprinted the mental image of that violated face, the half-open mouth stuffed with hair, those staring, sightless eyes, and his presence intensified the picture, brought it into sharper focus.
Horror and death were his trade and, like an undertaker, he carried with him the contagion of his craft.
He was at the front door when, on impulse, he turned back and said to Meg Dennison: ' I think you mentioned that you walked from the Old Rectory, Mrs Dennison.
Could I walk home with you, that is if it's not too early for you? '
Alex Mair was beginning to say that he, of course, would drive her but Meg extricated herself clumsily from her chair and said, a little too eagerly: ' I'd be grateful if you would.
I would like the walk and it would save Alex getting out the car. '
Alice Mair said: ' And it's time Theresa was on her way.
We should have driven her home an hour ago.
I 'll give her father a ring.
Where is she, by the way? '
Meg said: ' I think she was next door clearing the table a minute ago.
' Well, I 'll find her and Alex can drive her home. '
The party was breaking up.
Hilary Robarts had been slumped back in her chair, her eyes fixed on Lessingham.
Now she got to her feet and said: ' I 'll get back to my cottage.
There's no need for anyone to come with me.
As Miles has said, the Whistler's had his kicks for tonight. '
Alex Mair said: ' I'd rather you waited.
I 'll walk with you once I've taken Theresa home. '
She shrugged and, without looking at him, said: ' All right, if you insist.
I 'll wait. '
She moved over to the window, staring out into the darkness.
Only Lessingham stayed in his chair, reaching again to fill his glass.
Dalgliesh saw that Alex Mair had silently placed another opened bottle in the hearth.
He wondered whether Alice Mair would invite Lessingham to stay the night at Martyr's Cottage or whether he would be driven home later by her or her brother.
He would certainly be in no state to drive himself.
Dalgliesh was helping Meg Dennison into her jacket when the telephone rang, sounding unnaturally strident in the quiet room.
He felt her sudden shock of fear and for a moment, almost involuntarily, his hands strengthened on her shoulders.
They heard Alex Mair's voice.
' Yes, we've heard.
Miles Lessingham is here and gave us the details.
Yes, I see.
Yes.
Thank you for letting me know. '
Then there was a longer silence, then Mair's voice again.
' Completely fortuitous, I should say, wouldn't you?
After all, we have a staff of five hundred and thirty.
But naturally everyone at Larksoken will find the news deeply shocking, the women particularly.
Yes, I shall be in my office tomorrow if there's any help I can give.
Her family have been told, I suppose?
Yes, I see.
Good night, Chief Inspector. '
He put down the receiver and said: ' That was Chief Inspector Rickards.
They've identified the victim.
Christine Baldwin.
She is  she was  a typist at the station.
You didn't recognize her then, Miles? '
Lessingham took his time refilling his glass.
He said: The police didn't tell me who she was.
Even if they had, I wouldn't have remembered the name.
And no, Alex, I didn't recognize her.
I suppose I must have seen Christine Baldwin at Larksoken, probably in the canteen.
But what I saw earlier tonight wasn't Christine Baldwin.
And I can assure you that I didn't shine the torch on her longer than I needed to satisfy myself that she was beyond any help that I could give. '
Without looking round from the window Hilary Robarts said: ' Christine Baldwin.
Aged thirty-three.
Actually, she's only been with us for eleven months.
Married last year.
Just transferred to the medical physics department.
I can give you her typing and shorthand speeds if you're interested. '
Then she turned round and looked Alex Mair in the face.
' It looks as if the Whistler's getting closer, doesn't it, in more ways than one. '
The final goodbyes were said and they stepped out from the smell of wood smoke, food and wine from a room which Dalgliesh was beginning to find uncomfortably warm into the fresh, sea-scented air.
It took a few minutes before his eyes had adjusted to semi-darkness and the great sweep of the headland became visible, its shapes and forms mysteriously altered under the high stars.
To the north the power station was a glittering galaxy of white lights, its stark geometric bulk subsumed in the blue-black of the sky.
They stood for a moment regarding it, then Meg Dennison said: ' When I first came here from London it almost frightened me, the sheer size of it, the way it dominates the headland.
But I 'm getting used to it.
It's still disturbing but it does have a certain grandeur.
Alex tries to demystify it, says its function is just to produce electricity for the National Grid efficiently and cleanly, that the main difference between this and any other power station is that you don't have beside it a huge pyramid of polluting coal dust.
But atomic power to my generation always means that mushroom cloud.
And now it means Chernobyl.
But if it were an ancient castle standing there against the skyline, if what we looked out at tomorrow morning was a row of turrets, we'd probably be saying how magnificent it is. '
Dalgliesh said: ' If it had a row of turrets it would be a rather different shape.
But I know what you mean.
I should prefer the headland without it but it's beginning to look as if it had a right to be there. '
They turned simultaneously from contemplating the glittering lights and looked south to the decaying symbol of a very different power.
Before them, at the edge of the cliff, crumbling against the skyline like a child's sandcastle rendered amorphous by the advancing tide, was the ruined Benedictine abbey.
He could just make out the great empty arch of the east window and beyond it the shimmer of the North Sea while above, seeming to move through and over it like a censer, swung the smudged yellow disc of the moon.
Almost without conscious will they took their first steps from the track on to the rough headland towards it.
Dalgliesh said: ' Shall we?
Can you spare the time?
And what about your shoes? '
' Reasonably sensible.
Yes, I'd like to, it looks so wonderful at night.
And I don't really need to hurry.
The Copleys won't have waited up for me.
Tomorrow, when I have to tell them how close the Whistler is getting, I may not like to leave them alone after dark.
This may be my last free night for some time. '
' I don't think they'd be in any real danger as long as you lock up securely.
So far all his victims have been young women and he kills out of doors.
' I tell myself that.
And I don't think they'd be seriously frightened.
Sometimes the very old seem to have moved beyond that kind of fear.
The trivial upsets of daily living assume importance but the big tragedies they take in their stride.
But their daughter is constantly ringing up to suggest they go to her in Wiltshire until he's caught.
They don't want to but she's a strong-minded woman and very insistent, and if she telephones after dusk and I 'm not there it will increase the pressure on them. '
She paused and then said: ' It was a horrible end to an interesting but rather strange dinner party.
I wish Mr Lessingham had kept the details to himself, but I suppose it helped him to talk about it, especially as he lives alone. '
Dalgliesh said: ' It would have needed superhuman control not to have talked about it.
But I wish he'd omitted the more salacious details. '
' It will make a difference to Alex, too.
Already some of the women staff demand to be escorted home after the evening shifts.
Alice has told me that that isn't going to be easy for Alex to organize.
They 'll only accept a male escort if he has an unbreakable alibi for one of the Whistler murders.
People cease to be rational even when they've known and worked with someone for the last ten years. '
Dalgliesh said: ' Murder does that, particularly this kind of murder.
Miles Lessingham mentioned another death: Toby.
Was that the young man who killed himself at the station?
I seem to remember a paragraph in one of the papers. '
' It was an appalling tragedy.
Toby Gledhill was one of Alex's most brilliant young scientists.
He broke his neck by throwing himself down on top of the reactor. '
' So there was no mystery about it? '
' Oh no, absolutely none, except why he did it.
Mr Lessingham saw it happen.
I 'm surprised you remember it.
There was very little about it in the national press.
Alex tried to minimize the publicity to protect his parents. '
And to protect the power station, thought Dalgliesh.
He wondered why Lessingham had described Gledhill's death as murder but he didn't question his companion further.
The allegation had been spoken so quietly that he doubted whether she had in fact heard it.
Instead he asked: ' Are you happy living on the headland? '
The question did not appear to surprise her but it did surprise him, as did the very fact that they were walking so companionably together.
She was curiously restful to be with.
He liked her quiet gentleness with its suggestion of underlying strength.
Her voice was pleasant and voices were important to him.
But six months ago none of this would have been enough to make him invite her company for longer than was politely necessary.
He would have escorted her back to the Old Rectory and then, a minor social obligation performed, turned with relief to walk alone to the abbey, drawing his solitude around him like a cloak.
That solitude was still essential to him.
He couldn't tolerate twenty-four hours in which the greater part wasn't spent entirely alone.
But some change in himself, the inexorable years, success, the return of his poetry, perhaps the tentative beginning of love, seemed to be making him sociable.
He wasn't sure whether this was something to be welcomed or resisted.
He was aware that she was giving his question careful thought.
' Yes, I think that I am.
Sometimes very happy.
I came here to escape from the problems of my life in London and, without really meaning to, I came as far east as I could get. '
' And found yourself confronting two different forms of menace, the power station and the Whistler. '
' Both frightening because both mysterious, both rooted in a horror of the unknown.
But the menace isn't personal, isn't directed specifically against me.
But I did run away and, I suppose, all refugees carry with them a small burden of guilt.
And I miss the children.
Perhaps I should have stayed and fought on.
But it was becoming a very public war.
I 'm not suited to the role of popular heroine of the more reactionary press.
All I wanted was to be left alone to get on with the job I'd been trained for and loved.
But every book I used, every word I spoke was scrutinized.
You can't teach in an atmosphere of rancorous suspicion.
In the end I found I couldn't even live in it. '
She was taking it for granted that he knew who she was; but then anyone who had read the papers must know that.
He said: ' It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately.
When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve one's sanity. '
They were approaching the abbey now and the grass of the headland was becoming more hillocky.
She stumbled and he put out his hand to steady her.
She said: ' In the end it came down to just two letters.
They insisted that the blackboard should be called the chalkboard.
Black or chalk.
I didn't believe, I still don't believe that any sensible person, whatever his colour, objects to the word blackboard.
It's black and it's a board.
The word black in itself can't be offensive.
I'd called it that all my life so why should they try to force me to change the way I speak my own language?
And yet, at this moment, on this headland, under this sky, this immensity, it all seems so petty.
Perhaps all I did was to elevate trivia into a principle.
Dalgliesh said: ' Agnes Poley would have understood.
My aunt looked up the records and told me about her.
She went to the stake, apparently, for an obstinate adherence to her own uncompromising view of the universe.
She couldn't accept that Christ ' s body could be present in the sacrament and at the same time physically in heaven at God's right hand.
It was, she said, against common sense.
Perhaps Alex Mair should take her as patron of his power station, a quasi-saint of rationality. '
' But that was different.
She believed her immortal soul was in jeopardy. '
Dalgliesh said: ' Who knows what she believed?
I think she was probably activated by a divine obstinacy.
I find that rather admirable. '
Meg said: ' I think Mr Copley would argue that she was wrong, not the obstinacy, but her earthbound view of the sacrament.
I 'm not really competent to argue about that.
But to die horribly for your own common-sense view of the universe is rather splendid.
I never visit Alice without standing and reading that plaque.
It's my small act of homage.
And yet I don't feel her presence in Martyr's Cottage.
Do you? '
' Not in the slightest.
I suspect that central heating and modern furniture are inimical to ghosts.
Did you know Alice Mair before you came here? '
' I knew no one.
I answered an advertisement by the Copleys in The Lady.
They were offering free accommodation and food to someone who would do what they described as a little gentle housework.
It's a euphemism for dusting, but of course it never works out like that.
Alice has made a great difference.
I hadn't realized how much I was missing female friendship.
At school we only had alliances, offensive or defensive.
Nothing ever cut across political divisions. '
Dalgliesh said: ' Agnes Poley would have understood that atmosphere too.
It was the one she breathed. '
For a minute they walked in silence hearing the rustle of the long grasses over their shoes.
Dalgliesh wondered why it was that, when walking towards the sea, there came a moment when its roar suddenly increased as if a menace, quiescent and benign, had suddenly realized and gathered up its power.
Looking up at the sky, at the myriad pinpricks of light, it seemed to him that he could feel the turning earth beneath his feet and that time had mysteriously come to a stop, fusing into one moment the past, the present and the future; the ruined abbey, the obstinately enduring artefacts of the last war, the crumbling cliff defences, the windmill and the power station.
And he wondered whether it was in such a disorientating limbo of time, listening to the ever-restless sea, that the previous owners of Martyr's Cottage had chosen their text.
Suddenly his companion stopped and said: ' There ' s a light in the ruins.
Two small flashes, like a torch. '
They stood still and watched in silence.
Nothing appeared.
She said, almost apologetically: ' I 'm sure I saw it.
And there was a shadow, something or somebody moving against the eastern window.
You didn't see it? '
' I was looking at the sky. '
She said, almost with a note of regret: ' Well, it's gone now.
I suppose I could have imagined it. '
And when, five minutes later, they made their way cautiously over the humpy grass into the heart of the ruins there was no one and nothing to be seen.
Without speaking they walked through the gap of the east window and on to the edge of the cliff and saw only the moon-bleached beach stretching north and south, the thin fringe of white foam.
If anyone had been there, thought Dalgliesh, there was plenty of opportunity for concealment behind the hunks of concrete or in the crevices of the sandy cliff.
There was little point and no real justification in attempting to give chase, even if they had known the direction in which he had disappeared.
People were entitled to walk alone at night.
Meg said again: ' I suppose I could have imagined it, but I don't think so.
Anyway, she's gone now. '
' She? '
' Oh yes.
Didn't I say?
I had the distinct impression it was a woman. '
By four o'clock in the morning, when Alice Mair woke with a small despairing cry from her nightmare, the wind was rising.
She stretched out her hand to click on the bedside light, checked her watch, then lay back, panic subsiding, her eyes staring at the ceiling while the terrible immediacy of the dream began to fade, recognized for what it was, an old spectre returning after all these years, conjured up by the events of the night and by the reiteration of the word ' murder ' which, since the Whistler had begun Iris work, seemed to murmur sonorously on the very air.
Gradually she reentered the real world, manifested in the small noises of the night, the moan of the wind in the chimneys, the smoothness of the sheet in her clutching hands, the unnaturally loud ticking of her watch and, above all, in that oblong of pale light, the open casement and the drawn curtains which gave her a view of the faintly luminous star-studded sky.
The nightmare needed no interpretation.
It was merely a new version of an old horror, less tenable than the dreams of childhood, a more rational, more adult terror.
She and Alex were children again, the whole family living with the Copleys at the Old Rectory.
That, in a dream, wasn't so surprising.
The Old Rectory was only a larger, less pretentious version of Sunnybank  ridiculously named since it had stood on level ground and no sun ever seemed to penetrate its windows.
Both were late Victorian, built in solid red brick, both had a strong, curved door under a high, peaked porch, both were isolated, each in its own garden.
In the dream she and her father were walking together through the shrubbery.
He was carrying his billhook and was dressed as he was on that last dreadful autumn afternoon, a singlet stained with his sweat, the shorts high cut, showing as he walked the bulge of the scrotum, the white legs, matted with black hair from the knees down.
She was worried because she knew that the Copleys were waiting for her to cook lunch.
Mr Copley, robed in cassock and billowing surplice, was impatiently pacing the back lawn seeming oblivious to their presence.
Her father was explaining something to her in that overloud, careful voice which he used to her mother, the voice which said: ' I know you are too stupid to understand this but I will talk slowly and loudly and hope that you won't try my patience too far. '
He said: ' Alex won't get the job now.
I 'll see that he doesn't.
They won't appoint a man who's murdered his own father. '
And as he spoke he swung the billhook and she saw that its tip was red with blood.
Then suddenly he turned towards her, eyes blazing, lifted it, and she felt its point pierce the skin of her forehead, and the sudden spurt of blood gushing into her eyes.
Now wide awake, and breathing as if she had been running, she put her hand up to her brow and knew that the cold wetness she felt was sweat not blood.
There was little hope of falling asleep again; there never was when she woke in the early hours.
She could get up, put on her dressing gown, go downstairs and make tea, correct her proofs, read, listen to the BBC World Service.
Or she could take one of her sleeping tablets.
God knew they were powerful enough to knock her into oblivion.
But she was trying to wean herself off them and to give in now would be to acknowledge the potency of the nightmare.
She would get up and make tea.
She had no fear of waking Alex.
He slept soundly, even through the winter gales.
But first there was a small act of exorcism to be performed.
If the dream were to lose its power, if she were somehow to prevent it recurring, she must face again the memory of that afternoon nearly thirty years ago.
It had been a warm autumnal day in early October and she, Alex and her father were working in the garden.
He was Wearing a thick hedge of brambles and overgrown shrubs at the bottom of the shrubbery and out of sight of the house, slashing at them with a billhook while Alex and she dragged the freed branches clear ready to build a bonfire.
Her father was under clad for the time of year but was sweating heavily.
She saw the arm lifting and falling, heard the crack of twigs, felt again the thorns cutting her fingers, heard his high commands.
And then, suddenly, he gave a cry.
Either the branch had been rotten or he had missed his aim.
The billhook had sliced into his naked thigh and, turning, she saw the great curve of red blood begin to bubble in the air, saw him slowly sink like a wounded animal, his hands plucking the air.
His right hand dropped the billhook and he held it out to her, shaking, palm upward, and looked at her beseechingly, like a child.
He tried to speak but she couldn't make out the words.
She was moving towards him, fascinated, when suddenly she felt a clutch on her arm laurels towards the orchard.
She cried: ' Alex, stop!
He's bleeding.
He's dying.
We've got to get help. '
She couldn't remember whether she actually said the words.
All she later remembered was the strength of his hands on her shoulders as he forced her back against the bark of an apple tree and held her there, imprisoned.
And he spoke a single word.
' No. '
Shaking with terror, her heart pounding, she couldn't have broken free even if she had wanted.
And she knew now that this powerlessness was important to him.
It had been his act and his alone.
Compelled, absolved, she had been given no choice.
Now, thirty years later, lying rigid, her eyes fixed on the sky, she remembered that single word, his eyes looking into hers, his hands on her shoulders, the bark of the tree scraping her back through her Aertex shirt.
Time seemed to stop.
She couldn't remember now how long he had held her imprisoned, only that it seemed an eternity of immeasurable time.
And then, at last, he gave a sigh and said: ' All right.
We can go now. '
And that, too, amazed her, that he should have been thinking so clearly, calculating how long it would take.
He dragged her after him until they stood over her father's body.
And, looking down at the still-outstretched arm, the glazed and open eyes, the great scarlet pool soaking into the earth, she knew that it was a body, that he had gone for ever, that there was nothing she need fear from him ever again.
Alex turned to her and spoke each word loudly and clearly as if she were a subnormal child.
' Whatever he's been doing to you, he won't do it again.
Ever.
Listen to me and I 'll tell you what happened.
We left him and went down to climb the apple trees.
Then we decided that we'd better get back.
Then we found him.
That's all there is, it's as simple as that.
You don't need to say anything else.
Just leave the talking to me.
Look at me, look at me, Alice.
You understand? '
Her voice, when it came, sounded like an old woman's voice, cracked and tremulous, and the words strained her throat.
' Yes, I understand. '
And then he was dragging her by the hands, racing across the lawn, nearly pulling her arm from its socket, crashing through the kitchen door, crying aloud so that it sounded like a whoop of triumph.
She saw her mother's face draining as if she too were bleeding to death, heard his panting voice.
' It's Father.
He's had an accident.
Get a doctor quick. '
And then she was alone in the kitchen.
It was very cold.
There were cold tiles under her feet.
The surface of the wooden table on which she rested her head was cold to her cheeks.
No one came.
She was aware of a voice telephoning from the hall, and other voices, other steps.
Someone was crying.
Now there were more footsteps and the crunch of car wheels on gravel.
And Alex had been right.
It had all been very simple.
No one had questioned her, no one had been suspicious.
Their story had been accepted.
She didn't go to the inquest but Alex did, although he never told her what happened there.
Afterwards some of the people concerned, their family doctor, the solicitor, a few of her mother's friends, came back and there was a curious tea party with sandwiches and home-made fruitcake.
They were kind to her and Alex.
Someone actually patted her head.
A voice said, ' It was tragic that there was no one there.
Common sense and a rudimentary knowledge of first aid would have saved him. '
But now the memory deliberately evoked had completed its exorcism.
The nightmare had been robbed of its terror.
With luck it might not return for months.
She swung her legs out of bed and reached for her dressing gown.
She had just poured the boiling water on the tea and was standing waiting for it to brew when she heard Alex's footsteps on the stairs and, turning, she saw his tall figure blocking the kitchen door.
He looked boyish, almost vulnerable, in the familiar corded dressing gown.
He pushed both hands through his sleep-tousled hair.
Surprised, because he was usually a sound sleeper, she said: ' Did I disturb you?
Sorry. '
' No, I woke earlier and couldn't get off again.
Holding dinner for Lessingham made it too late for comfortable digestion.
Is this fresh? '
' About ready to pour. '
He took down a second mug from the dresser and poured tea for them both.
She seated herself in a wicker chair and took her mug without speaking.
He said: ' The wind's rising. '
' Yes, it has been for the last hour. '
He went over to the door and unbolted the top wooden panel, pushing it open.
There was a sensation of rushing white coldness, scentless, but obliterating the faint tang of the tea and she heard the low growling roar of the sea.
As she listened it seemed to rise in intensity so that she could imagine, with an agreeable frisson of simulated terror, that the low friable cliffs had finally crumbled and that the white foaming turbulence was rolling towards them across Alex's face.
Looking at him as he stared into the night, she felt a surge of affection as pure and as uncomplicated as the flow of cold air against her face.
Its fleeting intensity surprised her.
He was so much a part of her that she never needed nor wanted to examine too closely the nature of her feeling for him.
She knew that she was always quietly satisfied to have him in the cottage, to hear his footfalls on the floor above, to share with him the meal she had cooked for herself at the end of the day.
And yet neither made demands of the other.
Even his marriage had made no difference.
She had been unsurprised at the marriage since she had rather liked Elizabeth, but equally unsurprised when it ended.
She thought it unlikely that he would marry again, but nothing between them would change, however many wives entered, or attempted to enter, his life.
Sometimes as now she would smile wryly, knowing how outsiders saw their relationship.
Those who assumed that the cottage was owned by him, not her, saw her as the unmarried sister, dependent on him for houseroom, companionship, a purpose in life.
Others, more perceptive but still nowhere near the truth, were intrigued by their apparent independence of each other, their casual comings and goings, their non-involvement.
She remembered Elizabeth saying in the first weeks of her engagement to Alex, ' Do you know, you're a rather intimidating couple? ' and she had been tempted to reply, ' Oh, we are, we are. '
She had bought Martyr's Cottage before his appointment as Director of the power station and he had moved in by an unspoken agreement that this was a temporary expedient while he decided what to do, keep on the Barbican flat as his main home or sell the flat and buy a house in Norwich and a smaller pied  terre in London.
He was essentially an urban creature; she didn't see him settling permanently other than in a city.
If, with the new job, he moved back to London she wouldn't follow him, and nor, she knew, would he expect her to.
Here on this sea-scoured coast she had at last found a place which she was content to call home.
That he could walk in and out of it unannounced never made it less than her own.
It must, she thought sipping her tea, have been after one o'clock when he returned from seeing Hilary Robarts home.
She wondered what had kept him.
Sleeping lightly as always in the early hours, she had heard his key in the lock, his foot on the stairs, before drifting again into sleep.
Now it was getting on for five o'clock.
He couldn't have had more than a few hours' sleep.
Now, as if suddenly aware of the morning chill, he closed the top half of the door, drove home the bolt, then came and stretched himself out in the armchair opposite her.
Leaning back, he cradled his mug in his hands.
He said: ' It's a nuisance that Caroline Amphlett doesn't want to leave Larksoken.
I don't relish beginning a new job, particularly this job, with an unknown PA.
Caroline knows the way I work.
I'd rather taken it for granted that she'd come to London with me.
It's inconvenient. '
And it was, she suspected, rather more than inconvenient.
Pride, even personal prestige, were also at stake.
Other senior men took their personal assistants with them when changing jobs.
The reluctance of a secretary to be parted from her boss was a flattering affirmation of personal dedication.
She could sympathize with his chagrin but it was hardly enough to keep him awake at night.
He added: ' Personal reasons, or so she says.
That means Jonathan Reeves, presumably.
God knows what she sees in him.
The man isn't even a good technician. '
Alice Mair controlled her smile.
She said: 'l doubt whether her interest in him is technical. '
' Well, if it's sexual she has less discrimination than I gave her credit for. '
He wasn't, she told herself, a poor judge of men or women.
He rarely made fundamental mistakes and never, she suspected, about a man's scientific ability.
But he had no understanding of the extraordinary complexities and irrationalities of human motives, human behaviour.
He knew that the universe was complex but that it obeyed certain rules, although, she supposed, he wouldn't have used the word ' obey ' with its implication of conscious choice.
This, he would say, is how the physical world behaves.
It is open to human reason and, to a limited extent, to human control.
People disconcerted him because they could surprise him.
Most disconcerting of all was the fact that he occasionally surprised himself.
He would have been at home as a sixteenth-century Elizabethan, categorizing people according to their essential natures; choleric, melancholic, mercurial, saturnine, qualities mirroring the planets that governed their birth.
That basic fact established, then you knew where you were.
And yet it could still surprise him that a man could be a sensible and reliable scientist in his work and a fool with women, could show judgement in one area of his life and act like an irrational child in another.
Now he was peeved because his secretary, whom he had categorized as intelligent, sensible, dedicated, preferred to stay in Norfolk with her lover, a man he despised, rather than follow him to London.
She said: ' I thought you said once that you found Caroline sexually cold. '
' Did I?
Surely not.
That would suggest a degree of personal experience.
I think I said I couldn't imagine ever finding her physically attractive.
A PA who is personable and highly efficient but not sexually tempting is the ideal. '
She said drily: ' I imagine that a man's idea of the ideal secretary is a woman who manages to imply that she would like to go to bed with her boss but nobly restrains herself in the interests of office efficiency.
What will happen to her? '
' Oh, her job's secure.
If she wants to stay at Larksoken there will be plenty of competition to get her.
She's intelligent as well as tactful and efficient. '
' But presumably not ambitious, else why should she be content to remain at Larksoken? '
She added: ' Caroline may have another reason for wanting to stay in the area.
I saw her in Norwich Cathedral about three weeks ago.
She met a man in the Lady Chapel.
They were very discreet but it looked to me like an assignation. '
He asked, but without real curiosity: ' What kind of man? '
' Middle-aged.
Nondescript.
Difficult to describe.
But he was too old to be Jonathan Reeves. '
She said no more, knowing that he wasn't particularly interested, that his mind had moved elsewhere.
And yet, looking back, it had been an odd encounter.
Caroline's blonde hair had been bundled under a large beret and she was wearing spectacles.
But the disguise, if it were meant as a disguise, had been ineffective.
She herself had moved on swiftly, anxious not to be recognized or to seem a spy.
A minute later she had seen the girl slowly walking along the aisle, guidebook in hand, the man strolling behind her carefully distanced.
They had moved together and had stood in front of a monument, seemingly absorbed.
And when, ten minutes later, Alice was leaving the cathedral she had glimpsed him again.
This time it was he who was carrying the guidebook.
He made no further comment about Caroline but after a minute's silence he said: 'Not a particularly successful dinner party. '
' An understatement.
Beta-minus, except, of course, for the food.
What's the matter with Hilary?
Is she actually trying to be disagreeable or is she merely unhappy? '
' People usually are when they can't get what they want. '
' In her case, you. '
He smiled into the empty fire grate but didn't reply.
After a moment she said: ' Is she likely to be a nuisance? '
' Rather more than a nuisance.
She's likely to be dangerous. '
' Dangerous?
How dangerous?
You mean dangerous to you personally? '
' To rather more than me. '
' But nothing you can't cope with? '
' Nothing I can't cope with.
But not by making her Administrative Officer.
She'd be a disaster.
I should never have appointed her in an acting capacity. '
' When are you making the appointment? '
' In ten days' time.
There's a good field. '
' So you've got ten days to decide what to do about her. '
' Rather less than that.
She wants a decision by Sunday. '
A decision about what? she wondered.
Her job, a possible promotion, her future life with Alex?
But surely the woman could see that she had no future with Alex.
She asked, knowing the importance of the question, knowing, too, that only she would dare ask it, ' Will you be very disappointed if you don't get the job? '
' I 'll be aggrieved, which is rather more destructive of one's peace of mind.
I want it, I need it and I 'm the right person for it.
I suppose that's what every candidate thinks but in my case it happens to be true.
It's an important job, Alice.
One of the most important there is.
The future lies with nuclear power, if we're going to save this planet, but we've got to manage it better, nationally and internationally. '
' I imagine you're the only serious candidate.
Surely this is the kind of appointment which they only decide to make when they know they've got the right man available.
It ' s a new job.
They've managed perfectly well without a nuclear supremo up to now.
I can see that, given the right man, the job has immense possibilities.
But in the wrong hands it's just another public relations job, a waste of public money. '
He was too intelligent not to know that she was reassuring him.
She was the only person from whom he ever needed reassurance or would ever take it.
He said: ' There's a suspicion that we could be getting into a mess.
They want someone to get us out of it.
Minor matters like his precise powers, who he 'll be responsible to and how much he 'll be paid have yet to be decided.
That's why they're taking so long over the job specification. '
She said: ' You don't need a written job specification to know what they're looking for.
A respected scientist, a proven administrator and a good public relations expert.
They 'll probably ask you to take a TV test.
Looking good on the box seems to be the prerequisite for anything these days. '
' Only for future presidents or prime ministers.
I don't think they 'll go that far. '
He glanced at the clock.
' It's already dawn.
I think I 'll get a couple of hours' sleep. '
But it was an hour later before they finally parted and went to their rooms.
Dalgliesh waited until Meg had unlocked the front door and stepped inside before saying his final goodnight, and she stood for a moment watching his tall figure striding down the gravel path and into the darkness.
Then she passed into the square, tessellated hall with its stone fireplace, the hall which, on winter nights, seemed to echo faintly with the childish voices of Victorian rectors' children and which, for Meg, had always held a faintly ecclesiastical smell.
Folding her coat over the ornate wooden newel post at the foot of the stairs, she went through to the kitchen and the last task of the day, setting out the Copleys' early-morning tray.
It was a large, square room at the back of the house, archaic when the Copleys had bought the Old Rectory and unaltered since.
Against the left-hand wall stood an old-fashioned gas stove so heavy that Meg was unable to move it to clean behind it and preferred not to think of the accumulated grease of decades gumming it to the wall.
Under the window was deep porcelain sink stained with the detritus of seventy years' washing-up and impossible to clean adequately.
The floor was of ancient stone slabs, hard on the feet, from which in winter there seemed to rise a damp, foot-numbing miasma.
The wall opposite the sink and the window was covered with an oak dresser, very old and probably valuable, if it had been possible to remove it from the wall without its collapse, and the original row of bells still hung over the door each with its Gothic script; drawing room, dining room, study, nursery.
It was a kitchen to challenge rather than enhance the skills of any cook ambitious beyond the boiling of eggs.
But now Meg hardly noticed its deficiencies.
Like the rest of the Old Rectory it had become home.
After the stridency and aggression of the school, the hate-mail, she was happy to find her temporary asylum in this gentle household where voices were never raised, where no one obsessively analysed her every sentence in the hope of detecting racist, sexist or fascist undertones, where words meant what they had meant for generations, where obscenities were unknown or at least unspoken, where there was the grace of good order symbolized for her in Mr Copley's reading of the Church's daily offices, Morning Prayer and Evensong.
Sometimes she saw the three of them as expatriates, stranded in some remote colony, obstinately adhering to old customs, a lost way of life, as they did to old forms of worship.
And she had grown to like both her employers.
She would have respected Simon Copley more if he had been less prone to venial selfishness, less preoccupied with his physical comfort, but this she told herself was probably the result of fifty years of spoiling by a devoted wife.
And he loved his wife.
He relied on her.
He respected her judgement.
How lucky they were, she thought; secure in each other's affection and presumably fortified in increasing age by the certainty that if they weren't granted the grace of death on the same day there would be no lasting separation.
But did they really believe this?
She would like to have asked them, but knew that it would have been impossibly presumptuous.
Surely they must have some doubts, made some mental reservations to the creed they so confidently recited morning and night.
But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all.
The job wasn't arduous, but she knew that gradually she was taking on much more than the advertisement had suggested and she sensed that the main anxiety of their life was whether she would stay.
Their daughter had provided all the labour-saving devices: dishwasher, washing machine, spin-dryer, all housed in a disused still room near the back door, although until she came the Copleys had been reluctant to use them in case they couldn't turn them off, visualizing the machines whirling away all night, overheating, blowing up, the whole rectory pulsating with an uncontrollable power.
Their only child lived in a manor house in Wiltshire and rarely visited, although she telephoned frequently, usually at inconvenient times.
It was she who had interviewed Meg for the Old Rectory and Meg now found it difficult to connect that confident, tweeded, slightly aggressive woman with the two gentle old people she knew.
And she knew, although they would never have dreamt of telling her, perhaps didn't even admit it to themselves, that they were afraid of her.
She bullied them, as she would have claimed, for their own good.
Their second greatest fear was that they might be forced to comply with her frequently telephoned suggestion, made purely from a sense of duty, that they should go to stay with her until the Whistler was caught.
Unlike their daughter, Meg could understand why, after retirement, they had used all their savings to buy the rectory and had in old age burdened themselves with a mortgage.
Mr Copley had in youth been a curate at Larksoken when the Victorian church was still standing.
It was in that ugly repository of polished pine, acoustic tiles and garish, sentimental stained glass that he and his wife had been married, and in a flat in the rectory, living above the parish priest, that they had made their first home.
The church had been partly demolished by a devastating gale in the 1930s, to the secret relief of the Church Commissioners who had been considering what to do with a building of absolutely no architectural merit serving a congregation at the major festivals of six at the most.
So the church had been finally demolished and the Old Rectory, sheltering behind it and proving more durable, had been sold.
Rosemary Duncan-Smith had made her views plain when driving Meg back to Norwich station after her interview.
' It's ridiculous for them to be living there at all, of course.
They should have looked for a two-bedded, well-equipped flat in Norwich or in a convenient village close to the shops and post office, and to a church, of course.
But Father can be remarkably obstinate when he thinks he knows what he wants and Mother is putty in his hands.
I hope you aren't seeing this job as a temporary expedient. '
Meg had replied: ' Temporary, but not short-term.
I can't promise that I 'll stay permanently, but I need time and peace to decide on my future.
And I may not suit your parents. '
' Time and peace.
We'd all be glad of that.
Well, I suppose it's better than nothing, but I'd be grateful for a month or two's notice when you do decide to go.
And I shouldn't worry about suiting.
With an inconvenient house and stuck out on that headland with nothing to look at but a ruined abbey and that atomic power station they 'll have to put up with what they can get. '
But that had been sixteen months ago and she was still here.
But it was in that beautifully designed and equipped, but comfortable and homely kitchen at Martyr's Cottage that she had found her healing.
Early in their friendship, when Alice had to spend a week in London and Alex was away, she had given Meg one of her spare keys to the cottage so that she could go in to collect and forward her post.
On her return, when Meg offered it back, she had said: ' Better keep it.
You may need it again. '
Meg had never again used it.
The door was usually open in summer and, when shut, she would always ring.
But its possession, the sight and weight of it on her key ring, had come to symbolize for her the certainty and the trust of their friendship.
She had been so long without a woman friend.
She had forgotten, sometimes she told herself, that she had never before known the comfort of a close, undemanding, asexual companionship with another woman.
Before the accidental drowning of her husband four years earlier, she and Martin had needed only the occasional companionship of friendly acquaintances to affirm their self-sufficiency.
Theirs had been one of those childless, self-absorbing marriages which unconsciously repel attempts at intimacy.
The occasional dinner party was a social duty; they could hardly wait to get back to the seclusion of their own small house.
And after his death it seemed to her that she had walked in darkness like an automaton through a deep and narrow canyon of grief in which all her energies, all her physical strength, had been husbanded to get through each day.
She thought and worked and grieved only for a day at a time.
To allow herself even to think of the days, the weeks, the months or years stretching ahead would have been to precipitate disaster.
For two years she had hardly been sane.
Even her Christianity was of little help.
She didn't reject it, but it had become irrelevant, its comfort only a candle which served fitfully to illumine the dark.
But when, after those two years, the valley had almost imperceptibly widened and there was for the first time, not those black enclosing cliffs, but the vista of a normal life, even of happiness, a landscape over which it was possible to believe the sun might shine, she had become unwittingly embroiled in the racial politics of her school.
The older members of staff had moved or retired, and the new headmistress, specifically appointed to enforce the fashionable orthodoxies, had moved in with crusading zeal to smell out and eradicate heresy.
Meg realized now that she had, from the first, been the obvious, the predestined victim.
She had fled to this new life on the headland and to a different solitude.
And here she had found Alice Mair.
They had met a fortnight after Meg's arrival when Alice had called at the Old Rectory with a suitcase of jumble for the annual sale in aid of St Andrew's Church in Lydsett.
There was an unused scullery leading off a passage between the kitchen and the back door which was used as a collecting point for unwanted items from the headland; clothes, bric--brac, books and old magazines.
Mr Copley took an occasional service at St Andrew's when Mr Smollett, the vicar, was on holiday, an involvement in church and village life which, Meg suspected, was as important to him as it was to the church.
Normally, little jumble could be expected from the few cottages on the headland, but Alex Mair, anxious to associate the power station with the community, had put up a notice on the staff board and the two tea chests were usually fairly full by the time the October sale came round.
The back door of the Old Rectory, giving access to the scullery, was normally left open during daylight hours and an inner door to the house locked, but Alice Mair had knocked at the front door and made herself known.
The two women, close in age, both reserved, both independent, neither deliberately seeking a friend, had liked each other.
The next week Meg had received an invitation to dinner at Martyr's Cottage.
And now there was rarely a day when she didn't walk the half mile over the headland to sit in Alice's kitchen and talk and watch while she worked.
Her colleagues at school would, she knew, have found their friendship incomprehensible.
Friendship there, or what passed for friendship, never crossed the great divide of political allegiance and in the acrimonious clamour of the staffroom could swiftly deteriorate into gossip, rumours, recriminations and betrayal.
This peaceable friendship, asking nothing, was as devoid of intensity as it was of anxiety.
It was not a demonstrative friendship; they had never kissed, had never indeed touched hands except at that first meeting.
Meg wasn't sure what it was that Alice valued in her, but she knew what she valued in Alice.
Intelligent, well-read, unsentimental, unshockable, she had become the focus of Meg's life on the headland.
She seldom saw Alex Mair.
During the day he was at the power station and at weekends, reversing the normal peregrination, he was at his London flat, frequently staying there for Part of the week if he had a meeting in town.
She had never felt that Alice had deliberately kept them apart, fearing that her brother would be bored by her friend.
In spite of all the traumas of the last four years Meg's inner self was too confidently rooted to be prone to that kind of sexual or social self-abasement.
But she had never felt at home with him, perhaps because, with his confident good looks and the air of arrogance in his bearing, he seemed both to represent and to have absorbed something of the mystery and potency of the power he operated.
He was perfectly amiable to her on the few occasions when they did meet; sometimes she even felt that he liked her.
But their only common ground was in the kitchen of Martyr's Cottage and even there she was always more at home when he was away.
Alice never spoke of him except casually but on the few occasions, like last night's dinner party, when she had seen them together they seemed to have the intuitive mutual awareness, an instinctive response to the other's needs, more typical of a long-standing successful marriage than of an apparently casual fraternal relationship.
And for the first time in nearly three years she had been able to talk about Martin.
She remembered that July day, the kitchen door open to the patio, the scent of herbs and sea stronger even than the spicy, buttery smell of newly baked biscuits.
She and Alice had sat opposite each other, across the kitchen table, the teapot between them.
She could remember every word.
' He didn't get many thanks.
Oh, they said how heroic he was and the headmaster said all the right things at the school memorial service.
But they thought that the boys shouldn't have been swimming there anyway.
The school disclaimed any responsibility for his death.
They were more anxious to escape criticism than to honour Martin.
And the boy he saved hasn't turned out very well.
I suppose I 'm silly to worry about that. '
' It would be perfectly natural to hope that your husband hadn't died for someone second-rate, but I suppose the boy has a point of view.
It could be an awesome responsibility knowing that someone has died for you. '
Meg said: ' I tried to tell myself that.
For a time I was  well, almost obsessed with that boy.
I used to hang about the school waiting for him to come out.
Sometimes I had the need almost to touch him.
It was as if some part of Martin had Passed into him.
But he was only embarrassed, of course.
He didn't want to see me or talk to me, he or his parents.
He wasn't, in fact, a very nice boy, a bully and rather stupid.
I don't think Martin even liked him although he never said so.
He was spotty, too  oh dear, that wasn't his fault, I don't know why I even mentioned it. '
And she had wondered how it was she was speaking of him at all.
for the first time after all these years.
And that business about her obsession with him; she had never mentioned that to a living soul.
Alice had said: ' It's a pity your husband didn't leave him to drown and save himself, but I suppose that on the spur of the moment he didn't weigh up the relative value of a useful teaching career and pimpled stupidity. '
' Leave him to drown?
Deliberately?
Oh Alice, you know you couldn't do that yourself. '
' Perhaps not.
I 'm perfectly capable of irrational folly.
I'd probably pull him out if I could do it without too much danger to myself. '
' Of course you would.
It's human instinct, surely, to save others, particularly a child. '
' It's human instinct, and a thoroughly healthy one in my view, to save oneself.
That's why, when people don't, we call them heroes and give them medals.
We know they're acting against nature.
I can't understand how you can have such an extraordinarily benign view of the universe. '
' Have I?
I suppose I have.
Except for the two years after Martin drowned I've always been able to believe that at the heart of the universe there is love. '
' At the heart of the universe there is cruelty.
We are predators and are preyed upon, every living thing.
Did you know that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds, piercing the weak spot in their armour?
Then the grub grows and feeds on the living ladybird and eats its way out, tying the ladybird's legs together.
Whoever thought of that has, you have to admit, a peculiar sense of humour.
And don't quote Tennyson at me. '
' Perhaps it doesn't feel anything, the ladybird. '
' Well, it ' s a comforting thought but I wouldn't bet on it.
You must have had an extraordinarily happy childhood. '
' Oh, I did, I did!
I was lucky.
I would have liked brothers and sisters but I don't remember that I was ever lonely.
There wasn't much money but there was a great deal of love. '
' Love.
Is that so very important?
You were a teacher, you ought to know.
Is it? '
' It's vital.
If a child has it for the first ten years hardly anything else matters.
If he hasn't, then nothing does. '
There had been a moment's silence and then Alice had said: ' My father died, killed in an accident when I was fifteen. '
' How terrible.
What kind of accident?
Were you there?
Did you see it? '
' He cut an artery with a billhook.
He bled to death.
No, we didn't see it, but we were on the scene soon afterwards.
Too late, of course. '
' Alex too, and he was even younger.
How awful for you both. '
' It had its effect on our lives undoubtedly, particularly mine.
Why don't you try one of those biscuits?
It's a new recipe but I 'm not sure that it's entirely successful.
A little too sweet, and I may have overdone the spice.
Tell me what you think. '
Recalled to the present by the cold of the flagstones numbing her feet and automatically aligning the cup handles, she suddenly realized why she had remembered that summer teatime in Martyr's Cottage.
The biscuits she would add to the tray next morning were a later batch of the same recipe provided by Alice.
But she wouldn't take them from the tin until tomorrow.
There was nothing more to do tonight except to fill her hot-water bottle.
There was no central heating in the Old Rectory and she seldom switched on the two-bar electric fire in her bedroom, knowing how worried the Copleys were by their her bills.
Finally, hugging the bottle's warmth to her chest, she checked on the bolts of the front and back doors and made her way up the uncarpeted stairs to bed.
On the landing she met Mrs Copley, dressing-gowned, scurrying furtively to the bathroom.
Although there was a cloakroom on the ground floor the Old Rectory had only one bathroom, a defect which necessitated embarrassed, low-voiced inquiries before anyone upset their carefully worked out rota by taking an unexpected bath.
Meg waited until she heard the main bedroom door shut before going herself to the bathroom.
Fifteen minutes later she was in bed.
She knew rather than felt that she was very tired and recognized the symptoms of an overstimulated brain in an exhausted body, the restless limbs and inability to get comfortable.
The Old Rectory was too far inland for her to hear the crash of the waves but the smell and the throb of the sea were always present.
In summer the headland would vibrate with a gentle rhythmic humming which, on stormy nights or at the spring tides would rise to an angry moan.
She slept always with her window open and would drift into sleep soothed by that distant murmur.
But tonight it had no power to lull her into unconsciousness.
Her bedside book, often reread, was Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington but tonight it could no longer translate her to the reassuring, comfortable, nostalgic world of Barsetshire, to croquet on Mrs Dale's lawn and dinner at the squire's table.
The memories of the evening were too traumatic, too exciting, too recent to be easily assuaged by sleep.
She opened her eyes to the darkness, a darkness too often populated before sleep by those familiar, reproachful, childish faces, brown, black and white, bending over her, asking why she had deserted them when they loved her and thought that she had loved them.
Usually it was a relief to be free of those gentle and accusing ghosts, which in the last few months had visited her less often.
And sometimes they were replaced by a more traumatic memory.
The headmistress had tried to insist that she go on a racial awareness course, she who had taught children of different races for over twenty years.
There was one scene which for months she had tried resolutely to put out of her mind, that last meeting in the staffroom, the circle of implacable faces, brown, black and white, the accusing eyes, the insistent questions.
And in the end, worn down by bullying, she had found herself helplessly weeping.
No nervous breakdown, that useful euphemism, had been more humiliating.
But tonight even that shameful memory was replaced by more recent and more disquieting visions.
She glimpsed again that girlish figure momentarily outlined against the walls of the abbey only to slip away like a wraith and be lost among the shadows of the beach.
She sat again at the dinner table and saw in the candlelight Hilary Robarts's dark, discontented eyes staring intently at Alex Mair; watched the planes of Miles Lessingham's face fitfully lit by the leaping flames of the fire, saw his long-fingered hands reaching down for the bottle of claret, heard again that measured rather high voice speaking the unspeakable.
And then, on the verge of sleep, she was crashing with him through the bushes of that dreadful wood, feeling the briars scratching her legs, the low twigs whipping against her cheeks, staring with him as the pool of light from the torch shone down on that grotesque and mutilated face.
And in that twilight world between waking and sleeping she saw that it was a face she knew, her own.
she jerked back to consciousness with a little cry of began resolutely to read.
Half an hour later, the book slipped out of her hand and she fell into the first of the night's uneasy periods of slumber.
It took only two minutes of lying stretched and rigid on his bed for Alex Mair to realize that sleep was unlikely to come.
To lie in bed wakeful had always been intolerable to him.
He could manage with little sleep but that was invariably sound.
Now he swung his legs out of bed, reached for his dressing gown and walked over to the window.
He would watch the sun rise over the North Sea.
He thought back over the last few hours, the acknowledged relief of talking to Alice, the knowledge that nothing shocked her, nothing surprised her, that everything he did, if not right in her eyes, was judged by a different standard from the one she rigorously applied to the rest of her life.
The secret that lay between them, those minutes when he had held her shaking body against the tree trunk and stared into her eyes, compelling obedience, had bound them with a cord so strong that it couldn't be frayed, either by the enormity of their shared guilty secret, or by the small rubs of living together.
And yet they had never spoken of their father's death.
He didn't know whether Alice ever thought of it, or whether the trauma had erased it from her mind so that she now believed the version he had formulated, had taken the lie into her unconscious and made it her truth.
When, quite soon after the funeral, seeing how calm she was, he had imagined that possibility he had been surprised at his reluctance to believe it.
He didn't want her gratitude.
It was degrading even to contemplate that she would feel an obligation towards him.
Obligation and gratitude were words they had never needed to use.
But he did want her to know and to remember.
The deed was to him so monstrous, so surprising, that it would have been intolerable not to have shared it with a living soul.
In those early months he had wanted her to know the magnitude of what he had done and that he had done it for her.
And then, six weeks after the funeral, he had suddenly found himself able to believe that it hadn't happened, not in that way, and that the whole horror was a childhood fantasy.
He would lie awake at night and see his father's crumbling figure, the leap of blood like a scarlet fountain, would hear the harshly whispered words.
In this revised and comforting version there had been a second of delay, no more, and then he had raced for the house shouting for help.
And there was a second and even more admirable fantasy in which he had knelt at his father's side, had pressed his clenched fist hard into the groin, quenching the spurting blood, had whispered reassurance into those dying eyes.
It had been too late, of course; but he had tried.
He had done his best.
The coroner had praised him, that precise little man with his half-moon spectacles, his face like a querulous parrot.
' I congratulate the deceased's son who acted with commendable promptness and courage and did everything possible to try to save his father's life. '
The relief of being able to believe in his innocence was at first so great that temporarily it overwhelmed him.
He had lain in bed night after night drifting into sleep on a tide of euphoria.
But he had known, even then, that this self-administered absolution was like a drug in the bloodstream.
It was comforting and easy, but it wasn't for him.
That way lay a danger more destructive even than guilt.
He had told himself: ' I must never believe that a lie is the truth.
I may tell lies all my life if it's expedient but I must know them for what they are and I must never tell them to myself.
Facts are facts.
I have to accept them and face them and then I can learn how to deal with them.
I can look for reasons for what I did and call those reasons excuses; what he did to Alice, how he bullied Mother, how I hated him.
I can attempt to justify his death at least to myself.
But I did what I did and he died as he died. '
And with that acceptance came a kind of peace.
After a few years he was able to believe that guilt itself was an indulgence, that he didn't need to suffer it unless he chose.
And then there came a time when he felt a pride in the deed, in the courage, the audacity, the resolution which had made it possible.
But that, too, he knew was dangerous.
And for years afterwards he hardly thought of his father.
Neither his mother nor Alice ever spoke of him except in the company of casual acquaintances who felt the need to utter embarrassed condolences from which there was no escape.
But in the family only once was his name mentioned.
A year after the death his mother had married Edmund Morgan, a widowed church organist of mind-numbing dullness, and had retired with him to Bognor Regis where they lived on his father's insurance money in a spacious bungalow in sight of the sea, in an obsessive mutual devotion which mirrored the meticulous order and tidiness of their world.
His mother always spoke of her new husband as Mr Morgan.
' If I don't talk to you about your father, Alex, it isn't that I've forgotten him, but Mr Morgan wouldn't like it. '
The phrase had become a catchword between him and Alice.
The conjunction of Morgan's job and his instrument offered endless possibilities of adolescent jokes, particularly when he and -their mother were on honeymoon.
' I expect Mr Morgan is pulling out all Iris stops. '
' Do you suppose Mr Morgan is changing his combinations? '
' Poor Mr Morgan, labouring away.
I hope he doesn't run out of wind. '
They were wary, reticent children, yet this joke would reduce them to screams of helpless laughter.
Mr Morgan and his organ releasing them into hysterical laughter had anaesthetized the horror of the past.
And then, when he was about eighteen, reality of another kind intruded itself and he said aloud, ' I didn't do it for Alice, I did it for myself ', and thought how extraordinary it was that it had taken four years to discover that fact.
And yet was it a fact, was it the truth, or was it merely a psychological speculation which in certain moods he found it interesting to contemplate?
Now, looking out over the heartland to the eastern sky already flushed with the first faint gold of dawn, he said aloud: ' I let my father die deliberately.
That is a fact.
All the rest is pointless speculation. '
In fiction, he thought, Alice and I should have been tormented by our joint knowledge, distrustful, guilt-ridden, unable to live apart yet miserable together.
Yet since his father's death there had been nothing between him and his sister but companionship, affection, peace.
But now, nearly thirty years later, when he thought he had long come to terms with the deed and his own reaction to it, memory had begun to stir again.
It had started with the first Whistler murder.
The word ' murder ' itself constantly on someone's lips, like a sonorous curse, seemed to have the power to evoke those half-suppressed images of his father's face which had become as unclear, as devoid of any life, as an old photograph.
But in the last six months his father's image had begun to intrude on his consciousness at odd moments, in the middle of a meeting, across a boardroom table, in a gesture, the droop of an eyelid, the tone of a voice, the line of a speaker's mouth, the shape of fingers splayed to an open fire.
His father's ghost had returned in the tangle of late-summer foliage, the first fall of the leaves, the tentative autumn smells.
He wondered if the same thing was happening to Alice.
For all their mutual sympathy, for all the sense he had of their being irrevocably bound together, this was the one question he knew he would never ask.
And there were other questions, one question in particular, which he had no need to fear from her.
She wasn't in the least curious about his sexual life.
He knew enough psychology to have at least some insight into what those early shaming and terrifying experiences had done to her.
Sometimes he thought that she regarded his affairs with a casual, slightly amused indulgence as if, herself immune to a childish weakness, she was nevertheless indisposed to criticize it in others.
Once, after his divorce, she had said: 'l find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil.
Does sex have to be taken so seriously? '
And now he found himself wondering whether she knew or guessed about Amy.
And then, as the flaming ball rose from the sea, the gears of time slipped, went into reverse and he was back only five days ago lying with Amy in the deep hollow of the dunes, smelling again the scent of sand and grasses and the salt tang of the sea as the late afternoon warmth drained out of the autumn air.
He could recall every sentence, every gesture, the timbre of her voice, could feel again the hairs rising on his arms at her touch.
She turned towards him, her head propped on her hand, and he saw the strong afternoon light shafting with gold the cropped brightly dyed hair.
Already the warmth was draining from the air and he knew that it was time they were moving.
But lying there beside her, listening to the susurration of the tide and looking up at the sky through a haze of grasses he was filled, not with post-coital sadness, but with an agreeable languor as if the long-committed Sunday afternoon still stretched ahead of them.
It was Amy who said: ' Look, I'd better be getting back.
I told Neil I wouldn't be more than an hour and he gets fussy if I 'm late because of the Whistler. '
' The Whistler kills at night not in daylight.
And he'd hardly venture on the heartland.
Too little cover.
But Pascoe's right to be concerned.
There isn't much danger, but you shouldn't be out alone at night.
No woman should until he's caught. '
She said: ' I wish they would catch him.
It'd be one thing less for Neil to worry about. '
Making Iris voice carefully casual, he asked: ' Doesn't he ever ask where you're going when you sneak out on Sunday afternoons leaving him to look after the child? '
' No, he doesn't.
And the child is called Timmy.
And I don't sneak.
I say I 'm going and I go. '
' But he must wonder. '
' Oh, he wonders all right.
But he thinks people are entitled to their privacy.
He'd like to ask but he never will.
Sometimes I say to him, ' OK, I 'm off now to fuck my lover in the sand dunes. ' '
But he never says a word, just looks miserable because he doesn't like me saying ' 'fuck' '. '
' Then why do you?
I mean, why torment him?
He's probably fond of you. '
' No, he isn't, not very fond.
It's Timmy he likes.
And what other word is there?
You can't call it going to bed.
I've only been in your bed with you once and then you were as jumpy as a cat thinking that sister of yours might come back unexpectedly.
And you can't say we sleep together. '
He said: ' We make love.
Or, if you prefer it, we copulate. '
' Honestly, Alex, that's disgusting.
I think that word is really disgusting. '
' And do you do it with him?
Sleep, go to bed, make love, copulate? '
' No, I don't.
Not that it ' s any business of yours.
He thinks it would be wrong.
That means he doesn't really want to.
If men want to they usually do. '
He said: 'That has been my experience, certainly. '
They lay side by side like effigies, both staring at the sky.
She seemed content not to talk.
So the question had at last been put and answered.
It had been with shame and some irritation that he had recognized in himself for the first time the nagging of jealousy.
More shaming had been his reluctance to put it to the test.
And there were those other questions he wanted to ask but daren't.
' What do I mean to you? ',
' Is this important? ',
' What do you expect of me? '
And most important of all, but unanswerable, ' Do you love me? '
With his wife he had known precisely where he was.
No marriage had begun with a more definite understanding of what each required of the other.
Their unwritten, unspoken, only half-acknowledged pre-nuptial agreement had needed no formal ratification.
He would earn most of the money, she would work if and when she chose.
She had never been particularly enthusiastic about her job as interior designer.
In return his home would be run with efficiency and reasonable economy.
They would take separate holidays at least once every two years; they would have at most two children and at a time of her choosing; neither would publicly humiliate the other; the spectrum of marital offences under this heading ranging from spoiling the other's dinner-party stories to a too-public infidelity.
It had been a success.
They had liked each other, got on with remarkably little rancour and he had been genuinely upset, if principally in his pride, when she had left him.
Fortunately marital failure had been mitigated by the public knowledge of her lover's wealth.
He realized that to a materialistic society losing a wife to a millionaire hardly counted as failure.
In their friends' eyes it would have been unreasonably proprietorial of him not to have released her with a minimum of fuss.
But to do her justice, Liz had loved Gregory, would have followed transformed laughing face, heard her ruefully apologetic voice.
' It's the real thing this time, darling.
I never expected it and I can still hardly believe it.
Try not to feel too badly, it isn't your fault.
There's nothing to be done. '
The real thing.
So there was this mysterious real thing before which everything went down, obligations, habit, responsibility, duty.
And now, lying in the dunes, seeing the sky through the rigid stalks of marram grasses, he thought about it almost with terror.
Surely he hadn't found it at last and with a girl less than half his age, intelligent but uneducated, promiscuous and burdened with an illegitimate child.
And he didn't deceive himself about the nature of her hold on him.
No lovemaking had ever been as erotic or as liberating as their half-illicit couplings on unyielding sand within yards of the crashing tide.
Sometimes he would find himself indulging in fantasy, would picture them together in London in his new flat.
The flat, as yet unsought, no more than a vague possibility among others, would assume dimensions, location, a horribly plausible reality in which he found himself arranging his pictures carefully on a non-existent wall, thinking over the disposal of his household goods, the exact location of his stereo system.
The flat overlooked the Thames.
He could see the wide windows giving a view over the river as far as Tower Bridge, the huge bed, Amy's curved body striped with bands of sunlight from the slatted wooden blinds.
Then the sweet, deluding pictures would dissolve into bleak reality.
There was the child.
She would want the child with her.
Of course she would.
Anyway, who else could look after it?
He could see the indulgent amusement on the faces of his friends, the pleasure of his enemies, the child lurching, sticky-fingered, about the flat.
He could smell in imagination what Liz had never let him know in actuality  the smell of sour milk and dirty nappies, could picture the dreadful lack of peace and privacy.
He needed these realities, deliberately emphasized, to bring him back to sanity.
He was horrified that even for a few minutes he could seriously have contemplated such destructive stupidity.
He thought: I 'm obsessed by her.
All right, just for these last few weeks I 'll enjoy my obsession.
This late summer would be brief enough, the warm unseasonable days of mellow sunshine couldn't last.
Already the evenings were darkening.
Soon he would smell the first sour tang of winter on the sea breezes.
There would be no more lying in the warm sand dunes.
She couldn't visit Martyr's Cottage again, that would be recklessly stupid.
It was easy to convince himself that with care, when Alice was in London and no visitors expected, they could be together in his bedroom perhaps even for a whole night, but he knew that he would never risk it.
Little on the headland was private for long.
This was his St Martin's summer, an autumnal madness, nothing that the first cold of winter couldn't wither.
But now she said, as if there had been no period of silence between them, ' Neil's my friend, OK?
Why do you want to talk about him
' I don't.
But I wish he'd civilize his living arrangements.
That caravan is in direct line of my bedroom windows.
It's an eyesore. '
' You'd need binoculars to see it from your windows.
And so is your bloody great power station an eyesore.
That's in everyone's direct line; we all have to look at that. '
He put out his hand to her shoulder, warm under the gritty film of sand and said with mock pomposity.
' It's generally agreed that, given the constraints imposed by its function and the site, the power station is rather successful architecturally. '
' Agreed by whom? '
' I think so for one. '
' Well, you would, wouldn't you?
Anyway, you ought to be grateful to Neil.
If he didn't look after Timmy I wouldn't be here. '
He said: ' That whole thing is primitive.
He's got a wood stove in there, hasn't he?
If that blows up you won't last a minute, all three of you, particularly if the door jams. '
' We don't lock it.
Don't be daft.
And we let the fire go out at night.
And suppose your place blows up.
It won't be just the three of us, will it?
Bloody hell it won't.
Not only humans either.
What about Smudge and Whisky?
They've got a point of view. '
' It won't blow up.
You've been listening to his scaremongering nonsense.
If you're worried about nuclear power ask me.
I 'll tell you what you want to know. '
' You mean while you're poking me you 'll explain all about nuclear power?
Oh boy, I 'll certainly be able to take it in. '
And then she turned to him again.
The pattern of sand on her shoulder glistened and he felt her mouth moving over his upper lip, his nipples, his belly.
And then she knelt over him and the round childish face with its bush of bright hair shut out the sky.
Five minutes later she rolled apart from him and began shaking the sand from her shirt and jeans.
Tugging the jeans over her thighs, she said: ' Why don't you do something about that bitch at Larksoken, the one suing Neil?
You could stop her.
You're the boss. '
The question  or was it a demand  shocked him out of his fantasy as crudely as if, unprovoked, she had suddenly slapped his face.
In their four meetings she had never questioned him about his job, had seldom mentioned the power station except, as on this afternoon, to complain half seriously that it spoilt the view.
He hadn't made a deliberate decision to keep her out of his private and professional life.
When they were together that life hardly entered into his own consciousness.
The man who lay with Amy in the dunes had nothing to do with that burdened, ambitious, calculating scientist who ran Larksoken, nothing to do with Alice's brother, with Elizabeth's ex-husband, with Hilary's ex-lover.
Now he wondered, with a mixture of irritation and dismay, whether she had deliberately chosen to ignore those invisible keep-out signs.
And if he had been unconfiding, then so had she.
He knew little more about her now than when they had first encountered each other in the abbey ruins on a blustery August evening less than six weeks earlier, had for a minute stood and gazed and had then moved silently towards each other in a wordless, amazed recognition.
Later that evening she had told him that she came from Newcastle, that her widowed father had remarried and that she and her stepmother couldn't get on.
She had moved down to London and lived in squats.
It had sounded commonplace enough but he hadn't quite believed it and nor, he suspected, did she care whether or not he did.
Her accent was more Cockney than Geordie.
He had never asked about the child, partly from a kind of delicacy but mainly because he preferred not to think of her as a mother, and she had volunteered no information about Timmy or his father.
She said: ' Well, why don't you?
Like I said, you're the boss. '
' Not over my staff's private lives.
If Hilary Robarts thinks she has been libelled and seeks redress I can't prevent her from going to law. '
' You could if you wanted to.
And Neil only wrote what was true. '
' That is a dangerous defence to a libel action.
Pascoe would be ill advised to rely on it. '
' She won't get any money.
He hasn't got any.
And if he has to pay costs it will ruin him. '
' He should have thought of that earlier. '
She lay back with a little thud and for a few minutes they were both silent.
Then she said as casually as if the previous conversation had been trivial small talk which was already half forgotten: ' What about next Sunday?
I could get away late afternoon.
OK by you? '
So she bore no grudge.
It wasn't important to her, or if it was, she had decided to drop it, at least for now.
And he could put from him the treacherous suspicion that their first meeting had been contrived, part of a plan devised by her and Pascoe to exploit his influence with Hilary.
But that, surely, was ridiculous.
He had only to recall the inevitability of their first coming together, her passionate, uncomplicated, animal gusto in their lovemaking to know that the thought was paranoid.
He would be here on Sunday afternoon.
It might be their last time together.
Already he had half decided that it had to be.
He would free himself from this enslavement, sweet as it was, as he had freed himself from Hilary.
And he knew, with a regret which was almost as strong as grief, that with this parting there would be no protests, no appeals, no desperate clinging to the past.
Amy would accept his leaving as calmly as she had accepted his arrival.
He said: ' OK.
About four thirty then.
Sunday the twenty-fifth. '
And now time, which in the last ten minutes seemed mysteriously to have halted, flowed again and he was standing at his bedroom window five days later watching the great ball of the sun rise out of the sea to stain the horizon and spread over the eastern sky the veins and arteries of the new day.
Sunday the twenty-fifth.
He had made that appointment five days ago and it was one that he would keep.
But lying there in the dunes he hadn't known what he knew now, that he had another and very different appointment to keep on Sunday, September the twenty-fifth.
Shortly after lunch Meg walked across the headland to Martyr's Cottage.
The Copleys had gone upstairs to take their afternoon rest and for a moment she wondered whether to tell them to lock their bedroom door.
But she told herself that the precaution was surely unnecessary and ridiculous.
She would bolt the back door and lock the front door after her as she left and she wouldn't be gone for long.
And they were perfectly happy to be left.
Sometimes it seemed to her that old age reduced anxiety.
They could look at the power station without the slightest premonition of disaster and the horror of the Whistler seemed as much beyond their interest as it was their comprehension.
The greatest excitement in their lives, which had to be planned with meticulous care and some anxiety, was a drive into Norwich or Ipswich to shop.
It was a beautiful afternoon, warmer than most in the past disappointing summer.
There was a gentle breeze and from time to time Meg paused and lifted her head to feel the warmth of the sun and the sweet-smelling air moving against her cheeks.
The turf was springy beneath her feet and to the south the abbey stones, no longer mysterious or sinister, gleamed golden against the blue untroubled sea.
She did not need to ring.
The door at Martyr's Cottage stood open as it often did in sunny weather, and she called out to Alice before, in response to her answering voice, moving down the corridor to the kitchen.
The cottage was redolent with the zesty smell of lemon overlaying the more familiar tang of polish, wine and wood smoke.
It was a smell so keen that it momentarily brought back the holiday she and Martin had spent in Amalfi, the trudge hand-in-hand up the winding road to the mountain-top, the pile of lemons and oranges by the roadside, putting their noses to those golden, pitted skins, the laughter and the happiness.
The image experienced in a flash of gold, a flush of warmth to her face, was so vivid that for a second she hesitated at the kitchen door as if disorientated.
Then her vision cleared and she saw the familiar objects, the Aga and the gas stove with the nearby working surfaces, the table of polished oak in the middle of the room with its four elegantly crafted chairs, and at the far end Alice's office with the walls covered with bookshelves and her desk piled with proofs.
Alice was standing working at the table, wearing her long fawn smock.
She said: ' As you can see, I 'm making lemon curd.
Alex and I enjoy it occasionally and I enjoy making it, which I suppose is sufficient justification for the trouble. '
' We hardly ever had it  Martin and l, that is.
I don't think I've eaten it since childhood.
Mother bought it occasionally as a treat for Sunday tea. '
' If she bought it, then you don't know what it ought to taste like. '
Meg laughed and settled into the wicker chair to the left of the fireplace.
She never asked if she could help in the kitchen since she knew Alice would be irritated by an offer which she knew to be impractical and insincere.
Help was neither needed nor welcomed.
But Meg loved to sit quietly and watch.
Was it perhaps a memory of childhood, she wondered, that made watching a woman cooking in her own kitchen so extraordinarily reassuring and satisfying.
If so, modern children were being deprived of yet one more source of comfort in their increasingly disordered and frightening world.
She said: ' Mother didn't make lemon curd but she did enjoy cooking.
It was all very simple, though. '
' That's the difficult kind.
And I suppose you helped her.
I can picture you in your pinafore making gingerbread men. '
' She used to give me a piece of the dough when she was making pastry.
By the time I'd finished pounding it, rolling it and shaping it, it was dun-coloured.
And I used to cut out shaped biscuits.
And yes, I did make gingerbread men with currants for their eyes, didn't you? '
