I hope we parted friends.

I really do think that Mr Pemberton is intensely unstable. I like him, though. And I am absolutely convinced now that it was he who put the shark under my bed in order to cast suspicion on Miss Hahn and make our relationship untenable. Hang on … Let me put that … uh … ‘our relationship’ (mine and Miss Hahn’s) into inverted commas. Yes. Good. That’s so much better.

I feel deeply sorry for him. I do. And for Miss Hahn, too. He must’ve been a thorn in her poor side for many a long year now. He plainly believes that every man she ever has contact with finds her completely irresistible!

Kimberly – poor, dead Kimberly (they were her photographs. In circulation. The compromising ones. They were hers) – was perfectly right about our Miss Hahn, though. She’s this story’s barbed wire. She is the thing that both contains and expels. She is the truth at the heart of it all. But if I see the truth (or the heart) how might I tell? My instincts for such things are notoriously unreliable, after all. And if I do find out the truth (stare it in the face, but don’t recognize it) will I find Kimberly (with her white-blonde hair and her beatnik style and her chattering camera) still more compromised? Will I discover that everything was a lie? My whole adult life? That I was just … That I am just … what’s that phrase again? In the approaches? On the outskirts? But never reaching a destination of any note? Just driving around on life’s eternal ring-road – too frightened, too unwitting, too stupid, too compromised to make that sharp turn into the very heart of the matter?

These were my thoughts as I walked home. And when I arrived, I discovered two things. The first was a line of dilapidated caravans (old cars, several horses) blocking the road to Toot Rock. Oh, and a host of disgruntled neighbours raising merry hell about it. The second was a painstakingly typed letter from Father Hugh Tierney (having been placed under considerable pressure by Miss Alys Jane Drury I don’t doubt. Ha! I knew the old trout would ultimately prove useful!), finally agreeing to meet up.

24

Miss Carla Hahn

Three phone calls – one straight after the other – from furious residents of the Coastguards’ Cottages, topped by a flustered Mrs Barrow ringing ‘on behalfs of poor Mr Huff’, who is ‘set about havin’ hisself a coronary’, and demanding (I can hear him muttering away in the background) that I COME IMMEDIATELY to sort everything out.

Well I don’t know what they’re expecting me to do, exactly, especially (the thudding realization dawns on me, halfway through my second call – Neil Oakley, from number 12) as it’s only two days before Orla’s birthday.

Aaaargh!

The birthday! Orla’s birthday! How on earth could it have slipped my mind? She’d have been … twenty … twenty-three this year? Twenty-four? And if the visiting party generating all this trouble belongs to Orla’s most passionate (and colourful), living advocate, Sorcha Jennett, self-styled ‘Pavee Princess’ (Mrs Barrow calls her ‘Lady Muck’ because of her lofty manner and because the knees on her skirts are always so muddy on account of a) her foraging lifestyle and b) her propensity to fall down on them in prayer at the drop of a hat), then I won’t have any chance of shifting her (or her vans, or her cohorts, or her kids, or her grandkids, or her horses) before the occasion has been celebrated with due Pavee-style ceremony.