“Of course they never liked him. He was an outsider and a birdwatcher too, which made it worse. He lost his temper before he went. But those were childish things, hurtful but not vicious, and Barbara provoked him. I taught her, you know. Barbara Baxter she was then. Quite a pleasant little thing. A bit simple. Not at all academic. She tried her best, but she wasn’t up to it. Of course Ted Baxter blamed me for the poor school reports. Instead of letting her go with her friends to the comprehensive on St. Mary’s where she would have been perfectly happy, he sent her to a private school on the mainland. They didn’t teach her anything useful and made her sulky.”

“Did you see a lot of Peter Littleton?”

“He used to come down quite often. For some intelligent conversation.” She smiled at herself. “That sounds terribly arrogant and snobbish, doesn’t it? We’re just different, Peter and I. We didn’t fit in. Ted Baxter is an intelligent man. His intelligence makes him a lot of money. But he isn’t interesting. Peter would come to see me, perhaps one evening a week. We would listen to my music, talk about books. The islanders thought it was very strange that he took so much interest in me. When he went off as he did, they almost blamed me. Very medieval, as if I were a witch who’d cast a spell on him.”

“Did he ever mention a girl, Sally Johnson? She worked on Tresco. She would have been here two years ago.”

“I know that there was a girl. He never told me her name.”

“Did he tell you anything about her?”

“For that summer he talked about nothing else. No practical details like her name or where she worked. Just about how much in love he was. Madly in love like a teenager.”

George remembered fleetingly that Rob had described Tom’s love for Sally like that. Charlotte continued:

“Then came the agonizing about whether he should leave Barbara. He felt he owed her something. She had given him four years on St. Agnes and he loved the place. He had decided that he would leave her, when the girl disappeared. For a while he tried to find her, but she’d hurt his pride. He thought that she’d just decided that she didn’t want to know him.”

It was tantalizing. He knew that Peter and Sally had been seeing each other that summer, that they had fallen in love, but there was still no proof.

“If I’m right about the identity of the girl,” George said, “she was pregnant. Did Peter know that?”

“No,” she said, moved almost to tears. “Oh, the poor darling boy, the poor girl. He never knew. He thought that she just ran away.”

Ted Baxter was as hostile as George had expected him to be. He was a short, squat man, built like a Welsh miner. When George arrived he was scraping the mud from his wellingtons at the kitchen door. It was teatime. He must have been impressed by George’s air of authority because he asked him, grudgingly, into the house. When George explained why he was there Baxter’s hostility became focused not on George, but on his son-in-law. The farmer made no pretence at concern about the death of a birdwatcher, but although it was obvious that his only feeling for Peter was one of obsessive hatred, his attitude to his son-in-law’s involvement in the case was ambiguous. He was worried that his daughter might, in some way, become implicated, but he was delighted that all his suspicions about Peter’s character had been confirmed. He supposed, without question, that Peter was the murderer.