George and Molly sat in the kitchen in the midst of the dirty plates and pans, and drank from big, round cups of tea.

“I’m worried about that child,” said Molly, and George was surprised because she seemed so anxious and so serious. “You realize that he’s frightened.”

“Social workers don’t have a monopoly on perception.”

“Do you think that he killed Tom French?”

“Ah, so that occurred to you.”

“Will you answer my question?”

“I think that it’s possible. He’s certainly very worried. He had the opportunity. He admits that he was alone on the morning of the murder, and he owns two telescopes, either of which could have been the weapon. But he’s very slight and thin, and he doesn’t own a car, so I can’t imagine how he would have moved the body. And why would he have wanted to murder Tom? They were friends.”

Molly seemed only a little reassured.

“What are you going to do about him?”

“Keep an eye on him, try to get to know him better, gain his trust and find out why he’s so scared. And talk again to the other people who were at Rushy that day to see if we can build up an alibi for him.”

“All evening I was expecting him to say something important,” Molly said, “some dramatic revelation. Maybe we’re overreacting, and we’re just not used to teenagers any more.” She lapsed into nostalgia for the time when her children were teenagers, gawky and rebellious and still dependent.

She felt tired and uneasy, but knew he would not leave the matter alone. The only occasions of real ill feeling within their family had occurred because of his insistence on getting to the root of problems. The children, as adolescents, had deeply resented the intrusion, the endless inquests, their father’s flawless and irritating reason.

She watched her husband and felt a deep and overwhelming tenderness as he shuffled his notes on the table before him. He could have been an undergraduate again, revising mindlessly for finals, reading texts he knew already by memory. The demands were his own and she knew that she could not share the responsibility, but she knew too, by experience, that she could help him.

“What conclusions have you reached?” she asked, dragging his attention away from the abstract words on the pages.

“None,” he said angrily. “I’m incompetent. They were right to retire me.”

“Tell me how far you’ve got.”

He knew quite well what she was doing, that she could sense his panic, the fruitless activity. She was trying to soothe him. But she was not patronizing; she did want to know.

“I’ve written down the sequence of events on the morning of the murder, a kind of timetable for everyone who might have been involved. That’s quite straightforward. It’s the connection between all the people which has been obsessing me. Of course, most of them are birdwatchers, but I have a feeling that there’s more to it than that. There’s some emotional connection. I can see a tension between them. They’re more aware of each other than they’re pretending …”