‘Not really, he’s too many other problems facing him at the moment, but you never can tell what a man like Vernon might pull. We’d better give your father a ring just in case.’

‘But there isn’t a ’phone,’ she said. ‘He’s staying in our houseboat on the river at Grimsdyke.’

‘In the marshes?’

‘That’s right, he goes for the shooting.’

‘That’s about twenty miles, isn’t it?’

‘Eighteen on the clock.’

‘Good – we’ll drive down and see him. It’s early yet and the roads will be quiet. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour.’

She nodded briefly. ‘I’d better tell Jenny. I’ll only be a moment.’

She turned and ran across the lawn to the terrace and Miller walked back to the car.

It was no more than ten minutes after they had left when the ’phone rang and Jenny answered it on the kitchen extension.

‘Colonel Craig’s residence.’

The voice was smooth and charming. ‘Good morning – my name’s Fullerton. Gregory Fullerton. I’m a colleague of Colonel Craig’s. He told me he was going away for a few days and gave me his address so that I could get in touch with him if anything came up. Damned stupid of me, but I’ve mislaid it.’

‘It’s the houseboat you’ll be wanting, sir,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s on the river at Grimsdyke in the marshes about a mile south of Culler’s Bend.’

‘So kind of you.’

‘Not at all.’ She replaced the receiver and went back to her work.

When Max Vernon emerged from the telephone box at the end of the small country lane he was grinning wolfishly. He opened the door of the brake and climbed into the passenger seat next to Carver.

‘Right, Benny boy, we’re in business,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look at that map.’

14

The marsh at Grimsdyke on the river estuary was a wild lonely place of sea-creeks and mud flats and great pale barriers of reeds higher than a man’s head. Since the beginning of time men had come here for one purpose or another – Roman, Saxon, Dane, Norman, but in the twentieth century it was a place of ghosts, an alien world inhabited mainly by the birds, curlew and redshank and the brent geese coming south from Siberia to winter on the flats.

Miller turned the Cooper off the main road at Culler’s Bend and followed a track no wider than a farm cart that was little more than a raised causeway of grass. On either side, miles of rough marsh grass and reeds marched into the heavy rain and a thin sea mist was drifting in before the wind.

Harriet lowered the window and took a deep breath of the salt-laden air. ‘Marvellous – I love coming here. It’s like nowhere else on earth – a different world.’