The night was warm and still and the air full of pleasant scents from the lock-keeper’s garden: stocks, tobacco flowers, newly watered earth and at the back of these the cold dank smell of The River. These scents, she thought, made up one of the three elements of night; the next was composed of things that were to be seen before the moon rose: ambiguous pools of darkness, lighted windows, stars, the shapes of trees and the dim whiteness of a bench hard by their moorings. Troy sat there for a time to listen to the third element of night: an owl somewhere in a spinney downstream, the low, intermittent colloquy of moving water, indefinable stirrings, the small flutters and bumps made by flying insects and the homely sound of people talking quietly in the lockhouse and in the saloon of the Zodiac.

A door opened and the three Tretheways who had been spending the evening with the lock-keeper’s family, exchanged goodnights and crunched down the gravel path towards Troy.

‘Lovely evening, Mrs Alleyn,’ Mrs Tretheway said. The Skipper asked if she was enjoying the cool air and as an afterthought added: ‘Telegram from Miss Rickerby-Carrick, by the way, Mrs Alleyn. From Carlisle.’

‘Oh!’ Troy cried, ‘I am glad. Is she all right?’

‘Seems so. Er—what does she say exactly, dear? Just a minute.’

A rustle of paper. Torchlight darted about the Tretheways’ faces and settled on a yellow telegram in a brown hand. ‘ “Sorry abrupt departure collected by mutual friends car urgent great friend seriously ill Inverness awfully sad missing cruise cheerio everybody Hay Rickerby-Carrick”.’

‘There! She’s quite all right, you see,’ Mrs Tretheway said comfortably. ‘It’s the friend. Just like they said on the phone at Crossdyke.’

‘So it wasn’t a taxi firm that rang through to Crossdyke,’ Troy pointed out. ‘It must have been her friends in the car.’

‘Unless they were in a taxi and asked the office to ring. Anyway,’ Mrs Tretheway repeated, ‘it’s quite all right.’

‘Yes. It must be.’ Troy said.

But when she was in bed that night she couldn’t help thinking there was still something that didn’t quite satisfy her about the departure of Miss Rickerby-Carrick.

‘Tomorrow,’ she thought, ‘I’ll ask Dr Natouche what he thinks.’

Before she went to sleep she found herself listening for the sound she had heard—where? At Tollardwark? At Crossdyke? She wasn’t sure—the distant sound of a motorbicycle. And although there was no such sound to be heard that night she actually dreamt she had heard it.

V