George had told Ella that he would lock up. He was not tired. They sat in the kitchen surrounded by the debris of the party. Molly made another pot of tea. They had finished the scotch.

“Did anyone see Adam today?”

There had been lazy, companionable gossip at the table. They were enjoying the safe outcome of the drama. The question broke through the gentle conversation with a rudeness and authority which Rob resented immediately.

“Why? Should we have wiped his nose, taken his hand and told him to find somewhere safer to play?”

“No. But you might have seen who pushed him.”

“But he said that he fell by accident.”

“Yes. He said that he fell.”

“But you think that he was pushed.”

Tina interrupted aggressively:

“Who do you think pushed him? What makes you think that it wasn’t an accident?”

George was irritated by their questions. There was no time for polite explanation.

“Just accept that I need to know if anyone saw him. Perhaps you could all tell me what you were doing this afternoon.”

But they had no sense of urgency and began to speculate about Adam’s story and the possibility that he was telling the truth.

“He could have fallen,” Peter said. “Those planks were really rotten.”

“Why does he say that he fell if he was pushed?” Tina asked.

Molly answered before George had a chance to speak:

“Because he’s frightened. He’s so frightened that he can’t think clearly, and he can’t trust anyone enough to tell them what really happened.” She saw that she had hurt Tina and went on quickly, “He’s the sort of person who can’t confide easily. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to.”

Peter was continuing his own line of thought.

“It seemed strange that he was so vague about the time he fell,” he said. “I know that he didn’t have a watch, but I would have thought he could have made a rough guess.”

“He did say that he had been in the well for some time when the cars arrived for the party,” Rob reminded him. “ He says that he shouted but no one heard him. That’s not surprising. Everyone arrived at the same time and there was a lot of noise.”

“It must have been horrible,” Tina said. “ To be there in the dark, to know that people were so close to you, and not to be able to make them hear.”

Peter was still trying to fix the time of the incident.

“If he was telling the truth about hearing the cars at the party, he fell or was pushed some time in the late afternoon or early evening. I was here at about four o’clock.” After this announcement he went on to answer George’s question, smiling as if to apologize, that it had taken so long to come to the point.

“I stayed in the cottage all morning, then met Rob as I’d arranged in the hide, at about two thirty. Tina was with him. Tina and Rob went off on their own, Tina first. They both headed for the Windmill, but I saw Rob on the shingle bank soon after. I went for a walk on the marsh, then did the coastguard garden and came back past the Windmill. I didn’t go in. I thought that Ella might rope me in to make sandwiches. I went straight back to the cottage and it was half past four when I arrived home.”