When Clive Anderson came home from work to discover that his son was not there, he seemed to experience a little guilty relief. He told himself that it had been a hard day at work and that Adam’s presence always added to the stress. His son’s unprepossessing appearance, his apparent inability to communicate, always reminded him that, as a father, he was a failure. Tonight there would be no forced conversation over dinner, he would have to pretend no interest in what his son had been doing. After the meal he allowed himself a brandy to celebrate the luxury of being alone.

It was ten o’clock when Mrs. Pargeter pointed out that Adam’s binoculars, telescope and tripod were on the table in the hall. He always left them there and she always complained about it. Adam never went out for more than a few hours without his optical equipment. Mr. Anderson tried to think of other, reasonable explanations for his son’s absence, but realized that there were none. His only friends were birdwatchers and he would not be out all day without his binoculars. Mrs. Pargeter was surprised by her employer’s anxiety. Anderson dialled George Palmer-Jones’s number and let the telephone ring and ring, long after it was reasonable to expect a reply.

A windmill stood in the café car park and Ella had named her snack bar after it. It was not a real mill. It was, if anything, a wind pump, but the locals called it the windmill and it had become a landmark on the marshes. There was nothing attractive about Ella’s windmill: it was a rotten, wooden frame held together with enormous rusting bolts and pieces of scrap metal. It had been built twenty years previously by a group of undergraduates who wished to prove the potential of wind power. They had chosen the site because of its exposure to the north-easterly winds and because it contained an old, fresh-water well, the only relic perhaps of an ancient village, long since eroded by the sea. They decided that they would harness the wind to pump fresh water to the surface. This seemed to give the experiment some validity and did have a practical application because the cottage near to the site had no mains water. Later the coastguard service bought the cottage and converted it to house their staff. The students’ experiment had failed. The water in the well had been brackish, the structure poorly designed. The students went on to other projects.

No one from the university came to remove the windmill, and when Ella bought the site for the snack bar it was still there, ugly as a gallows, with tatters of canvas hanging from the sails. She had always meant to have it taken down, but when the workmen came to build the café they seemed to forget it and now she was used to it. It was the tallest object on the marsh, and it broke the clean line of the shingle bank against the sky, but usually she never noticed that it was there.