“I don’t know where you first met Peter, but I would guess that it was on St. Agnes. One of the lanes there is called Barnaby Lane, isn’t it? It’s an unusual name and it reminded me of St. Agnes as soon as I heard it. Peter loved you very much. Then, towards the end of the summer, the birdwatchers began to arrive on the islands. One of them was Tom French. He took a cottage on St. Mary’s and intended to spend the whole autumn there. He was a friend of Peter’s, so you came to meet him. Tom loved you too, but he didn’t have Peter’s personality, did he? Did you even notice, I wonder, that he was so infatuated with you?

“At the end of September Tom had a party. You already knew by that time that you were pregnant. You wanted to go to the party. You, who never made a fuss about anything, got so upset that you might have to miss it that Annie gave you the evening off. Did you mean to tell Peter that evening that you were expecting a baby? What happened? I think there was a police raid for drugs. The Scilly islanders are always worried that the birdwatchers will contaminate the morals of their young people. Peter was worried. He already had a conviction for drug abuse. A second, with a stiff Cornish court, could have meant a prison sentence. He planted whatever cannabis he had on Tom. In that way he would also remove a rival from the scene.”

“No,” she said. “No, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t tell Peter about the baby, because I didn’t want to put any pressure on him to leave his wife. I wanted him to leave her for me, not for the baby. That night was my own personal deadline. If he didn’t tell me that night that he wanted to come away with me, I was going to go on my own. That’s what made it so special. He left the party before the police arrived. He was very sweet. We had a good evening. But he said that he needed more time to decide. I could understand. He took the marriage seriously, even though it wasn’t working very well.

“I knew that he’d been to court before. That night he left the party early. He’d left his coat behind, and in the coat pocket there was some cannabis. When the police came I was terrified for Peter. Of course, they wanted to know who the coat belonged to. They didn’t seem very efficient. I didn’t think that they’d check. I persuaded Tom to say that the coat was his.”

“And Tom agreed. Just like that.”

She blushed. “As you said, he was infatuated.”

“So that’s why you always felt so obliged to him. It wasn’t just that he looked after you so well through your illness. He’d been to court, been sentenced to three years’ probation, to protect the man you loved. What did he want in return?”