“They’ll be about three-quarters of an hour,” he said. “There’s some problem with the Land Rover.”

“Nicholas is ready to answer some questions,” George said. “But if you prefer, we can wait for the superintendent.”

“No,” Nick said. “No. I want to talk now. I want to talk to you.”

George looked at Martindale. He nodded his consent and switched on the tape-recorder. George and Nicholas were sitting on the same side of the desk. The tilly on the desk threw strange shadows over their faces. George wondered if he should go to start the generator, so that they had proper light, but Nicholas was starting to talk.

“I hated the Todds,” he said. “ They killed my mother. Morally they killed her. Not by stabbing her with a knife, but by exploiting her, then deserting her when she needed them.” He spoke the melodramatic words as if they were familiar, as if he had repeated them often to himself. “They exploited her all her working life, then when she wasn’t any use to them, they got rid of her. I’ve dreamed about killing them. When it’s quiet at work I plan ways of murdering them, and if I can’t sleep at night I lie awake and think about it. It became a sort of game, planning how to kill them without getting caught. I never did anything about it. I suppose that I never really meant to do it. It was just something to stop me having to think about my mother’s death. I made all sorts of threats about it, but I never meant to do it. I’d even stopped thinking about it quite so often. Then Charlie threatened to sell the island, and it brought everything back. It was as if it was happening all over again. He’d bought the place, exploited it, made us dependent on him, then because he got fed up with it, he just decided to get rid of it. It never occurred to him to consider anyone else, to wonder what we might feel.”

He had run out of indignation, and sat quietly.

“Nicholas,” said George Palmer-Jones, “did you kill Charlie?”

“No,” he said. “No. I’m trying to explain. I dreamed about it. I thought about it. But I didn’t kill him. That’s why I was so shocked to see his body. To see him actually dead. It was as if I had killed him just by thinking about it. But when I saw him dead, I realized how terrible it was. I was sorry, really sorry. And guilty that I could ever have wanted it in the first place. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” George said.

“That’s why I went to see Pamela. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry that Charlie was dead. I’d threatened her family. I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t meant it, that I didn’t really want anything to happen to them.”

“And what did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything, you fool.” He was screaming. “She was already dead. Someone had killed her with my knife. It was like a nightmare. I went in. The tilly was lit over her bed and I saw straight away, but I couldn’t believe it. I tried to wake her. I did try. I took the knife out. I suppose it was an instinctive reaction. But it just made more blood. I didn’t know what to do. I had wanted to tell her that I was sorry, and she was dead.”