‘You were seen,’ I said. ‘You were seen taking out the dinghy at four o’clock on the morning of the tenth. The day after Salton disappeared.’

Her interest sharpened considerably. ‘Who saw me?’

‘Does it matter? Hanna knows about it. He’s having you investigated.’

‘What’s to investigate?’ Although she shrugged it off it seemed to trouble her. Her teeth worried her lower lip and she frowned. ‘He was alive,’ she said at last, but her tone was unconvincing.

‘But not for long,’ I said. ‘He died in the dinghy.’

‘How long has Hanna known?’ I was silent and the muzzle of the gun swung around and centred on me. ‘How long?’

‘The day before yesterday.’

‘That’s all right then,’ she said. ‘He’s too late. He won’t have time to check me out.’

‘What is there to check?’

She chuckled. ‘Oh, quite a bit, but the pieces are scattered. He’ll never put them together in time.’

‘In time for what?’

She didn’t answer that but relapsed into silence. I waited a few more long, hot minutes before poking her again. ‘But you did kill Salton.’

‘I told you, he was still alive,’ she said irritably. ‘How many more times?’

There was something about the way she said it that caught my attention: still alive. I took a punt. ‘When did he have his heart attack?’

‘When he caught …’ She stopped. ‘There’s such a thing as knowing too much, Kemp. A little learning can be a dangerous thing.’

‘David Salton seemed to have learned something,’ I said. ‘Enough to bring on a heart attack. Were you scared he’d talk?’

‘You’re a fast man with a conclusion, Kemp,’ she said. ‘And the hell of it is that you’re right.’ Her teeth nibbled her lower lip again. ‘He couldn’t talk, though. The guy was paralysed. Christ, we thought he’d died on us. It might have been better if he had – we wouldn’t have had you coming here and screwing everything up.’

‘But you had to get rid of him,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t have him taken to hospital and recovering enough to talk, to tell anyone what had brought on his heart attack.’ I was jumping from conclusion to conclusion as a man jumps from boulder to boulder across a river; some of the boulders might move under foot and some are slippery with moss, and it’s only by moving fast that the man can get across.

‘Jesus,’ she said, remembering. ‘We thought Salton had loused everything up good.’ She laughed. ‘You wouldn’t think it, but it was that dumb clunk of a husband of mine who came up with the idea.’

‘So you put Salton in a boat and took him out to sea,’ I said flatly. ‘I suppose Haslam was waiting somewhere outside the lagoon to pick you up when you set the dinghy adrift.’

‘Turns out he has his uses.’