Then, miraculously, an inflatable boat raced round the north end of the island. It appeared beyond the seawatching hide and circled, sending a cloud of waders from the rocks by the slipway before stopping by the boy. One of the men in the boat pulled Nicholas aboard.

Another man, one of the strangers, had joined Molly and George. “It’s all right, sir,” he said. “They’ve got him.”

“I should have known,” George said, “ that the cannon net was too obvious. What a blunderhead I was.”

“You were wrong about that perhaps, sir, but right about everything else.”

“The boy could have been drowned. You know that he was pushed.”

“It’s all right now,” the man repeated.

Molly interrupted. Her anxiety, her sense of exclusion, had made her furious. “George, what has been going on?”

He recognized her anger.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll explain. As Superintendent Savage says, there’s nothing to worry about now.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. Then: “George, you were right? About the murderer?”

“Yes,” Savage replied. “Mr. Palmer-Jones was right. I’ll just get Connibear, then I’ll be ready to make an arrest. Would you rather wait here?”

“No,” George said. “I’ll come.”

They walked through the gap in the wall, to where the others were ringing the waders. They sat in a semi-circle in two ringing teams. John and Jerry were putting the rings on the birds’ legs, Paul Derbyshire and Jasmine were weighing and measuring them and Elizabeth and Mark were writing details of the birds and ring numbers in a notebook.

As George, Molly and the policemen approached, they all looked up.

“Superintendent Savage,” Elizabeth said. “ What are you doing here? Do you want to train to be a ringer?”

“Where’s Nick?” asked John. “I saw the flare. Is he all right?”

George nodded, but said nothing.

“Miss Jasmine Carson,” Savage said. “ I arrest you for the murder of Pamela Marshall and Charles Todd, and for the attempted murder of Nicholas Mardle.”

Jasmine Carson stood up stiffly. She straightened her skirt over the swollen joints of her knees.

“I was surprised,” she said, “ at the strength of the instinct for survival. When I planned to kill Charles, I did not think that I would mind, too much, being caught. So long as I was successful. But when it came to it, I was prepared to fight like an animal to stay free. Well, it’s all over now. Somebody had to do it. There was no other way.”

She looked at them all, as if to say goodbye, then walked off between the policemen. When she came to the stile to the track, she refused to take Savage’s arm, and climbed it alone.

Chapter Seventeen

John insisted that they finish ringing all the waders. Nick was brought ashore. He was shocked and cold, but when the tide ebbed away to allow Savage and Connibear to take Jasmine Carson off in the Land Rover, he refused to go with them.

“I’m not going to miss this,” he said. “ I want to know exactly what happened.”