“I expect you’ve guessed that Savage and his officers came over very early this morning and installed themselves in the Wendy House. Connibear came in the inflatable while we were at lunch. I thought that she would see the cannon net as a weapon. She had talked about its danger, the possibility of an accident. Savage was in a position to watch it all day, but she didn’t go near it. She knew that Nicholas was to fire it. It would have been easy for her to turn the projectiles so that they faced him, and not the birds. But she didn’t. Of course it was too obvious. She was too intelligent. I had started to think that I was wrong, that I had mishandled the whole thing. We would never, then, have been able to convict her. But in the end, as she said, her instinct for survival was too strong. Perhaps she cared too much for the island, and not enough for the people who come here. When everyone was distracted by the cannons, by the spectacle of the net being fired, even Savage and I, she pushed Nick over the cliff. It was so simple. It could have been another accident. I didn’t even see her do it. I was watching Nick. I had seen that she had positioned herself next to him, under the wall, then I lost my concentration briefly, when he fired the cannons. When I looked back he had gone, and she had walked around the wall and was following the doctor to join the rest of you at the net. It was dreadful. For a moment I didn’t realize what she had done to him. It was as if she had made him disappear. Then I understood. One of the policemen fired a flare. It was to have been a signal to the men waiting in the inflatable that reinforcements were needed. We were just lucky that they were there. No,” he added fairly. “It was not luck. Savage is a good policeman. He had made sure that they were there.”

The party which had started that lunch-time continued. They fetched the gramophone from the Wendy House. They were, though, less frenetic, more reflective. There was not a lot of talk, but no one seemed inclined to go to bed.

Molly and George walked out on to the island. It was well after midnight. The gullies around the island were beginning to fill once more. A dog barked on the mainland, and the air was so still that they could hear it quite clearly. The light of the Seldom Seen Buoy flashed. There was a smell of bracken and of salt. Both were imagining a different island, man-made, with metalled causeway, neon lights, a pier of an island, with all trace of natural elements covered by litter and junk, the cries of the seabirds drowned by the shouts of salesmen.

“I can understand,” Molly said, “ why she did it.”

“So can I.”