Elizabeth left the group in the yard and went out on to the Beacon. She watched the Land Rover cross the sand, and wished that she were with them.

Chapter Seven

Immediately after lunch George Palmer-Jones went to the Wendy House. The police had finished there, and Savage had given him permission to look around, and a key. The police search could not, he thought, have taken very long. There were only two rooms of any size, with a galley-like kitchen off the living room, and a shower room next to the bedroom. He had decided to visit the Wendy House, not so much because he wanted to see where Charlie lived, as to be on his own. His brief explanation at lunch of police procedure had made him, to the other residents of the observatory, an expert, someone who could relieve anxieties. He had encouraged a discussion about the murder, but now he needed to be on his own, to sort out the information he had gained so far. On such an island privacy was almost impossible, but no one would come to the Wendy House. He would have thought that in such a place it would have been impossible to commit murder, to do anything at all, unobserved. The murderer must have had considerable luck, or the crime had been very carefully planned. Yet would there have been time for such planning? Charlie Todd had arranged to be in the seawatching hide only the evening before he died.

He stood in the sitting room. It was lined with wood—floor, walls and sloping roof were made of varnished pine panels. There was a small kitchen table by the window. The tilly still stood there. There were no curtains at the window. George presumed that Charlie had taken down the burned remains to throw them away. What happened to rubbish on the island? He would have to find out. Against the middle of the opposite wall stood a Calor-Gas fire, and two easy chairs covered in bright orange folk-weave faced towards it. There was a pine dresser against the third wall with crockery, a few books, some photographs and postcards propped on the shelves. On the lowest shelf, which was wider than the others, was a wind-up gramophone and a pile of 78 r.p.m. records. From the position of the furniture it seemed inevitable that the fire had been arson. He wondered if Charlie had had any visitors between supper and the fire. Perhaps he had mentioned them to John and Elizabeth. But John would surely have told the superintendent, and all he had described had been some unidentified person walking towards the Wendy House. He would have to talk to John about that.

I wish that Molly were here, he thought suddenly. She is so much better at all this.

Molly was his wife. She enjoyed talking to people. She would have been quite happy, sitting in the common room, listening to repetition and irrelevance, instilling trust, until she noticed a contradiction, a small piece of useful information. He could listen too, but he was not so patient. He knew that the younger observatory members were a little in awe of him, because of his ornithological reputation, yet he would need them to talk freely to him. The tapes of Savage’s interviews would give him the background, show him which questions to ask, but he knew that if he were to achieve more than the police, it would be through talking—through asking the right questions and listening to the answers. The police had the advantage in every other field: they had technical knowledge, manpower.