‘I jumped back and bumped into the press. Then I didn’t move for a long time. I wanted to but I couldn’t. I kept thinking: “I ought to look at her.” But it was dark. I stooped down and grabbed up an armful of bales. I could just see something bright. It was that diamond thing. The other one was lost. Then I listened and there wasn’t any sound. And then, I put down my hand and it touched soft dead skin. My arms threw the bales down without my knowing what they did. I swear I meant to go and tell them, I swear I never thought, then, of anything else. It wasn’t till I was outside and he called out that I had any other idea.’

‘Albert Black called out?’

‘He was up the track a bit. He was drunk and stumbling. He called out: “Hey, Cliff, what have you been up to?” Then I felt suddenly like—well, as if I’d turned to water inside. It’s a lie to say people think when things like this happen to them. They don’t. And you don’t control your body either. It acts by itself. Mine did. I didn’t reason out anything, or tell myself what to do. It wasn’t really me that ran uphill, away from the track and round the back of the bunkhouse. It was me, afterwards, thawing back into my body, going to the annexe and beginning to think with the radio still playing. It was me remembering the row we’d had and what I’d said to her. It was me switching off the radio and playing, when I heard the door of our house bang and the dogs start barking. It was me, next day, when nobody said anything, and the next and the next. And the next three weeks, wondering where they’d put it, and whether it was somewhere near. I thought about that much more often than I thought about who had done it. Albie had the wind up, he thought I’d say he’d taken the whisky, and they’d start wondering if he had a grudge against her. She’d wanted Mr Rubrick to sack him. When he was drunk he used to talk as if he’d give her the works. Then, when they found her, he talked to me just like you said. He thought I did it, he still thinks I did it, and he was afraid I’d try and put it across him and say he was tight and went for her.’

He lurched round the chair and flung himself clumsily into it. His agitation, until now precariously under control, suddenly mastered him and he began to sob, angrily, beating his hands on the chair arm. ‘It’s gone,’ he stammered. ‘It’s gone. I can’t even listen now. There isn’t any music.’