There was a sudden intense frustration that now he knew the right questions he had no one to answer them. Tom was dead. Sally refused to speak and Peter was in Perth, watching a black stork. Even Rob, who had spent a “few days” with Tom on St. Mary’s that autumn, was not available. But he had to know. Before he could make use of his information about Bernard Cranshaw, before he could come to any conclusion about Dennis, he had to know. The desire for sudden and dramatic action returned, and now it was irresistible. He had talked and listened for long enough, and he had achieved nothing. Now, perhaps, action was appropriate. There was nothing further he could do to protect Adam until he returned from Scotland. He would go that night. He opened the door into Ella’s kitchen.

“I’ll take you home,” he said to Molly. “I’m going to Scilly. I’ll go on my own.”

In the evenings Terry sat in his den and remembered his grandfather. He had never known his parents, but he could remember his grandfather well and all the things the old man had taught him. His grandfather had been good at running away—from fanners and keepers and the policeman in the village. He hadn’t mixed with the people in the village, although he had been born there. Terry knew that he had travelled a lot—to Canada and with the gypsies, picking fruit and vegetables. Grandfather had told him stories about the gypsies. When Terry lived with him, his home had still been a caravan, hidden from the road and the village by a small thicket and from the nearest farm by an enormous forest of bramble and gorse. The farmer, a drunken Welshman, had been mourning the death of a wife who had left him just enough money to allow him to grieve, and to let the farm grow derelict. Perhaps, at some time, he had given Terry’s grandfather permission to live in the rusty, filthy caravan, but he took no notice of his tenant.

Terry could remember his years with his grandfather more clearly than all his time in hospital. Sometimes they had done casual work for local farmers—his grandfather never sent him to school and Terry always worked with him. Some days his grandfather had stayed in bed until the afternoon. Terry was quite often left alone. He had learnt how to make snares and to cook rabbits, and the best farms and fields and gardens to steal from. The village children had laughed at him and the grown-ups had shouted at him. Sometimes he was hungry and quite often he was very cold.

His grandfather had frightened him with the stories of the Welfare Man. When the Welfare Man finally turned up, Terry was surprised because he was friendly. Terry liked him rather more than Grandfather and went with him quite happily. The children’s homes and the foster parents had been different, and he ran away from them.

Now, sitting in the evening sun, the farm seemed not much different. The caravan had gone and the house had been done up, but the thicket and the brambles and the gorse still made it a good place to hide. Terry was proud that he had found it again. He had walked from Skeffingham, and it had been evening when he had arrived. For a while the absence of the caravan had confused him; he expected everything to be the same. Then he had remembered the dens he made as a child and in the warm, still evening he had built a secret home, by tunnelling through the brambles, cutting out branches until he had cleared a space long and wide enough for him to lie in and just high enough for him to sit up.