Kane wondered. He could see how the Land Rover made a very different situation out of the whole thing. That and the police being close to Petra. Very different, very deep.

“Was the British engineer involved in all this?”

“I think he’d been sucked in.”

“To what, exactly?”

“To that. To the culture here. I only met him a couple of times. He struck me as someone who was here to escape something, willing to throw himself into whatever escapism offered itself.”

“Really?”

“Don’t get me wrong, he was pleasant enough, intelligent. Quite charming. He certainly charmed the local kids.”

“What do you mean?”

“Kids loved him. He’d mess around, giving them medals and tasks. Like he was running a scouts club. But a lot of the adults loved him too. He played the ukulele and sometimes he’d sing. Any entertainment’s going to win you points around here. I was never quite so sure, but then I was never in the bars at three a.m.”

“And you think he killed Petra Wade? That’s why he killed himself?”

“I’m not saying he did or didn’t do either. I’m saying whatever happened, he might not have been alone.”

This was a new option. More complex than solitary innocence or guilt. Rory had got involved in something.

“What would he do with her body?”

“It could be anywhere: taken by sharks, taken by birds, taken by rats. I don’t see how anyone could have successfully buried anything here—it’s rock all the way down, but there are places you could hide a body, perhaps. It’s not a big island, but there wasn’t a big search team. We get rollers. You heard about them?”

“No.”

“They’re coming in again now. Giant waves, nothing to do with the trade winds—they appear without warning, from the northwest. Huge. Ships can’t dock. The whole island’s locked down. In the past there’s been people swept out by them. And the sides of the island plunge straight under the water, totally sheer, which means there’s a vicious undertow. That’s why the rocks and beaches are all picked clean. Everything’s sucked away, nothing’s left: There’s no flotsam. A body in the water isn’t necessarily going to be washed up, not necessarily seen again at all.”

He stood up, walked to the pond’s edge, hands in his pockets.

“That’s where I think she went, but I don’t think that’s how she ended up there.”

“Did Connor tell the police all this?”