“It’s for you,” she said. “Graham Connibear.” They had been living in Gillicombe for ten years. In another ten he would have retired. Yet he still marvelled at the change in her. Graham Connibear was one of his detective constables. That meant that the call was probably a summons to work, but there were no tears, no pleas that he refuse to go. He missed the pace, the urgency of city policing, but perhaps it was a small price to pay.

His first reaction to the news of the Gillibry murder was a feeling of well-being, of health. His hangover disappeared. He felt immediately more vital. But his voice was restrained. Mary was listening.

“Sort out transport,” he said. “Notify the scene-of-crime team and the pathologist. And I’ll want a map of the island and some facts about it. Who lives there and what goes on there. I’ll come now. I’ll be in the office in a quarter of an hour.”

Mary looked up from the newspaper. “Work?” she asked. “Anything special?”

He hesitated. She would hear about it on the radio. “ Murder,” he said. “ Over on Gillibry, that island in the estuary. I expect it’ll be straightforward. They usually are. But it should be interesting. It’ll take some special organizing. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

He spoke gently, but she recognized the excitement. She smiled. She had long ago lost the habit of panic.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll look forward to hearing all about it when you get home. I’ll expect you when I see you.”

It was a dismissal.

Connibear was waiting for him in his office. He was flushed and excited, but in a file on his superior’s desk, was a large scale ordnance survey map of the island, a typewritten sheet explaining the function of the observatory, and even an old observatory report. Connibear needed a haircut. In any other circumstances Savage would have told him so, but today the superintendent ignored him, sat at the desk and read the notes with a desperate intensity. Savage was very thin, drawn, as if his body had been ravaged by disease, but the flesh had been burnt away not by illness but by a restless, insatiable energy. It had not made him popular in the force. He looked up from the papers.

“Stop dithering, lad,” he said to Connibear, who hovered just inside the door. Except for his training, and a holiday to Malta, Connibear had never been outside North Devon, and Savage, with his Liverpool accent, his Catholicism, his passion, was foreign, unpredictable. “Have we got transport?”

“Yes sir, Land Rovers. And according to Mr. Lansdown, the observatory warden, we can drive across now.”

“We’d better go, then.” He moved remarkably quickly and was out of the door before his constable.

The two men rode together in the first Land Rover. The sand blew in pretty swirls low over the shore and rattled against the windscreen.

“Do we know anything about the victim?” Savage asked. “Todd is a big name in Gillicombe, isn’t it?”