Adam began to relax, became, even, good company, surprising the others with a quirky sense of humour. Tina became less pompous, stopped lecturing about statistics and theories, and started to enjoy the birds she was seeing. Peter and Rob showed off their bird watching expertise. In an easy, tolerant way they were all getting on very well.

Each evening they made a phone call to get information.

“It’s crazy,” Tina said defiantly. “ You wouldn’t catch me coming with you to Cornwall to see something rare.”

“You would,” Rob said. “I can tell. You’re hooked.”

But they never phoned Ella. Rob had wanted to. He had argued that she was the best contact there was. She got to hear of everything, but Peter said that he wanted to forget Rushy for a while. It was good to get away from it. It pleased him to think that nobody in Rushy knew where they were.

Chapter Thirteen

George drove slowly down the steep hill to Rushy. The village of red-tiled roofs, with its trees and gardens, seemed suddenly precarious, separated from the sea only, by the marsh and the shingle bank. As he watched, the sun disappeared to be replaced by huge, solid storm clouds, which gathered out to sea. The place became tinted by a sinister, sulphurous light, like that in a sepia photograph. The village had never looked more striking. A motorist behind him sounded his horn, and George realized with embarrassment that he was driving too slowly, blocking the narrow road. Waving apologies he drove on, down into the strange brown light and the village.

He needed proof. Terry could have given it to him, so could Adam. Terry had been gone for nearly a week and George had begun to fear for his safety. He did not know when Adam would return. It occurred to him that it would help to look again at the marsh. He was beginning to think that he knew how the body had been moved, and a visit to the pool and the marsh track would confirm the feasibility of his speculation. He would collect Molly from the Windmill, and they could walk along the marsh track, and look at the pool on the way to Bernard Cranshaw’s home.

But when he pushed open the door of the Windmill he realized that he had not eaten all day, and the smell of cooking was irresistible. Molly was still there, still drinking tea. She was incapable of boredom, and it was an entertainment for her to gossip to Ella, and to listen to the customers talking.

There had been a variety of people in the place. Jack sat with her first. He was back from a morning’s fishing and described some of the technicalities of his craft. She listened, genuinely interested. Local people used the cafe, although it was a little way out of the village, and Molly listened unashamedly to the women talking. It mattered to her that the young girl with the bleached hair and the whining toddler was thinking of leaving her husband and moving in with her mother, and that the heavy, middle-aged woman with varicose veins was worried about having to go into hospital for an operation. When the women went back to Rushy to collect the children from school, to prepare tea for their husbands, there was still a small group of reed cutters and bait diggers, sitting with their backs to the birdwatchers. Their accents were so strange that although Molly listened and enjoyed the music of their speech, she could not understand what they were saying. But the birdwatchers still felt that the place belonged to them. They arrived, all day, in small groups, planning a weekend in the area, wanting to know if anything had been seen.