“Too old?” she said with surprise. She gulped. It could not be Rupert. He was not much more than thirty, younger than she. “Are you sure?” She was fishing for time, trying to think of an excuse for asking him to describe the man in more detail.

The ferryman sucked in his cheeks and then blew them out again. “Mebbe I shouldn’t a said that. Still an ’andsome enough figure of a man.”

“Fair hair?” Hester asked, thinking of Rupert standing in the sun in the doorway of the clinic. “Slender, but quite tall?”

“No,” the ferryman said decisively. “Sorry, love. ’E’d a bin sixty, like as not, dark ’air, near black, close as I could tell in the lamplight, like. But a big man, ’e were, an’ not tall, as yer might say. More like most.”

Considering that the ferryman was unusually short, Hester wondered what he considered was average. However, it might only insult him to ask, and apart from anything else, she needed his help.

“Did he come back again later?” she asked, changing the subject. She felt awkward, now that she had established that it was not the mythical deserting husband she had suggested. Then a new idea occurred to her. “You see, I’m afraid it could have been my father. He has a terrible temper, and …” She left the rest unsaid, a suggestion in the air. “He wasn’t … hurt, was he?”

“Yer do pick ’em, don’t yer?” The ferryman shrugged. “But ’e were fine. Bit scruffed up, like ’e ’ad a bit of a tussle, but right as rain in ’isself. Walked down the bank an’ leaped inter his boat. Don’t you worry about ’im. Don’t know about the young feller with the fair ’air. I never see’d ’im.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t here.” She said it with an upsurge of relief. She knew it was foolish even as she welcomed it. It meant nothing, only one difficulty avoided of a hundred.

“Wot does it mean?” Scuff asked as they thanked the man and walked away along the path. “Is it good?”

“I’m not sure,” Hester replied. That at least was true. “It certainly wasn’t Rupert. Even in the pitch dark you couldn’t mistake him for sixty. And if this man were scruffed up, he would have been in a fight, which, from the sound of it, he won.”

“Like chokin’ Mickey Parfitt and sending ’im over the side?”

“Yes, something like that,” she agreed.

He shivered. “Was there other people in the boat?”

“Not that evening, apparently, except for the boys, locked in belowdecks.”

He hesitated. “Where are they now?”

Hester heard the strain in his voice, saw the memory bright and terrible in his eyes.

“They’re all safe,” she told him unwaveringly. “Looked after and clean and fed.”