'Oh yes,' said Dalgliesh. 'You can feel anger and grief together. That's the commonest reaction to bereavement.' Suddenly Pascoe began crying. The empty beer can rattled against the table and he bent his head low over it, his shoulders shaking. Women, thought Dalgliesh, are better at coping with grief than we are. He had seen them so many times, the women police officers moving unconsciously to take the grieving mother, the lost child, in their arms. Some men were good at it too, of course. Rickards had been in the old days. He himself was good with the words, but then words were his trade. What he found difficult was what came so spontaneously to the truly generous at heart, the willingness to touch and be touched. He thought: I'm here on false pretences. If I were not, perhaps I, too, could feel adequate.
He said: 'I think the wind is less strong than it was. Why don't we finish the burning and clear up that mess on the beach?'
It was over an hour before Dalgliesh was ready to set off for the mill. As he said goodbye to Pascoe at the door of the caravan a blue Fiesta with a young man at its wheel came bumping over the grass.
Pascoe said: 'Jonathan Reeves. He was engaged to Caroline Amphlett, or thought he was. She fooled him like Amy fooled me. He's been round once or twice to chat. We thought we might walk to the Local Hero for a game of bar billiards.'
It was not, thought Dalgliesh, an agreeable picture, the two men, bound by a common grievance, consoling each other for the perfidy of their women with beer and bar billiards. But Pascoe seemed to want to introduce Reeves and he found himself grasping a surprisingly firm hand and making his formal condolences.
Jonathan Reeves said: 'I still can't believe it, but I suppose people always say that after a sudden death. And I can't help feeling that it was my fault. I should have stopped them.'
Dalgliesh said: 'They were adult women. Presumably they knew what they were doing. Short of physically dragging them off the boat, which would hardly have been practicable, I don't see how you could have stopped them.'
Reeves reiterated obstinately: 'I should have stopped them.' Then he added: 'I keep having this dream, well, nightmare really. She's standing at the side of my bed with the child in her arms and saying to me, "It's all your fault. All your fault.'"
Pascoe said: 'Caroline comes with Timmy?'
Reeves looked at him as if surprised that he could be so obtuse. He said: 'Not Caroline. It's Amy who comes. Amy, whom I never met, standing there with water streaming from her hair, holding the child in her arms and telling me that it's all my fault.'
Just over an hour later Dalgliesh had left the headland and was driving west along the A1151. After twenty minutes he turned south along a narrow country road. Darkness had fallen and the low scudding clouds, torn by wind, moved like a tattered blanket over the moon and the high stars. He drove fast and unhesitatingly, hardly aware of the tug and howl of the wind. He had taken this route only once before, early that same morning, but he had no need to consult the map; he knew where he was going. On either side of the low hedges stretched the black, unbroken fields. The lights of the car silvered an occasional distorted tree flailing in the wind, briefly illuminated as if with a searchlight the blank face of an isolated farm cottage, picked out the pin-bright eyes of a night animal before it scuttled to safety. The drive was not long, less than fifty minutes, but, staring straight ahead and shifting the gear lever as if he were an automaton, he felt for a moment disorientated as if he had driven through the bleak darkness of this flat, secretive landscape for interminable hours.
The brick-built, early-Victorian villa stood on the outskirts of a village. The gate to the gravel drive lay open and he drove slowly between the tossing laurels and the high, creaking boughs of the beech trees and manoeuvred the Jaguar between the three cars already discreetly parked at the side of the house. The two rows of windows in the front were dark and the single bulb which illuminated the fanlight seemed to Dalgliesh less a welcoming sign of occupation than a private signal, a sinister indication of secret life. He did not need to ring. Ears had been alert for the approaching car and the door was opened just as he reached it by the same stocky, cheerful-faced janitor who had greeted him on his first summons earlier that morning. Now, as then, he was wearing blue overalls so sprucely well cut that they looked like a uniform. Dalgliesh wondered what was his precise role; driver, guard, general factotum? Or had he, perhaps, a more specialized and sinister function?
He said: 'They're in the library, sir. I'll bring in the coffee. Will you be wanting sandwiches, sir? There's some beef left or I could put up a bit of cheese.'
Dalgliesh said: 'Just the coffee, thank you.'
They were waiting for him in the same small room at the back of the house. The walls were panelled in pale wood and there was only one window, a square bay heavily curtained with faded blue velvet. Despite its name the function of the room was unclear. Admittedly the wall opposite the window was lined with bookshelves, but they held only half a dozen leather-bound volumes and piles of old periodicals which looked as if they were Sunday colour supplements. The room had an oddly disturbing air of being both makeshift yet not devoid of comfort, a staging post in which the temporary occupants were attempting to make themselves at home. Ranged round the ornate marble fireplace were six assorted armchairs, most of them leather and each with a small wine table. The opposite end of the room was occupied by a modern dining table in plain wood with six chairs. This morning it had held the remains of breakfast and the air had been oppressively heavy with the smell of bacon and eggs. But the debris had been cleared and replaced by a tray of bottles and glasses. Looking at the variety provided, Dalgliesh thought that they had been doing themselves rather well. The loaded tray gave the place the air of a temporary hospitality room in which little else was hospitable. The air struck him as rather chill. In the grate an ornamental fan of paper rustled with each moan of the wind in the chimney and the two-bar electric fire which stood in the fender was barely adequate, even for so meanly proportioned and cluttered a room.
Three pairs of eyes turned on him as he entered. Clifford Sowerby was standing against the fireplace in exactly the same pose as when Dalgliesh had last seen him. He looked, in his formal suit and immaculate linen, as fresh as he had at nine o'clock that morning. Now, as then, he dominated the room. He was a solid-fleshed, conventionally handsome man with the assurance and controlled benevolence of a headmaster or a successful banker. No customer need fear to enter his office, provided his account was well in credit. Meeting him for only the second time Dalgliesh felt again an instinctive and seemingly irrational unease. The man was both ruthless and dangerous and yet, in their hours apart, he had been unable accurately to recall either his face or his voice.
The same could not be said for Bill Harding. He stood over six foot tall and, with his pale freckled face and thatch of red hair, had obviously decided that anonymity was impossible and that he might as well opt for eccentricity. He was wearing a checked suit in heavy tweed with a spotted tie. Raising himself with some difficulty out of the low chair he ambled over to the drinks and, when Dalgliesh said he'd wait for coffee, stood holding the whisky bottle as if unsure what to do with it. But there was one addition since the morning. Alex Mair, whisky glass in hand, stood against the bookcase as if interested in the assortment of leather-bound volumes and piled periodicals. He turned as Dalgliesh entered and gave him a long, considering look, then nodded briefly. He was easily the most personable and the most intelligent of the three waiting men but something, confidence or energy, seemed to have drained out of him and he had the diminished, precariously contained look of a man in physical pain.