He supposed that he should find somewhere to stay. He could spend the night in the hotel, and he imagined for a moment walking into the restaurant with Sylvia on his arm. It was a pleasant image, but he put it from his mind. He needed to be alone. At random he chose one of the cottages by the harbour, which had a bed and breakfast sign in the garden. A big woman with a flowered overall opened the door to him and showed him into a small square room with a window looking out to sea. The bed was old and high and had hard white sheets. He smiled his acceptance of the room. She relaxed, offered him tea, and when he refused, began a lengthy conversation.

“Would you like supper, then? I’ll be cooking for Jerry, my husband. It’ll be nothing special, but you could have a meal if you wanted. At about half past six …”

It turned out that Jerry worked on his father’s fishing boat. George enjoyed listening to the details of the fishing trips and her domestic life but he began to wonder, after a quarter of an hour, how he could tell her tactfully that he wanted to be alone. Then two children came through the back gate below him, their satchels heavy on their shoulders, knees and shoes scuffed with playground games, and she went downstairs to make hot, sweet tea for them and to cut lumps of sticky flapjack to keep them going to supper.

George sat on the bed, looked out over the sea, and considered the information he had gained that day. He had known for some time that Elspeth was hiding something. She was so tense, so reluctant to discuss her past, and her parents were too protective. Of course she had been recently divorced, but there was something else, too, and her peculiar reaction to the Sikh salesman proved it. Now he had a clue to her secret, and there was a possibility that he could discover what it was. The Woollie Man said that she had been on television. If she had taken part in a chat show or quiz show, there would have been no reason not to admit it. It must, George thought, have been a news item. Nothing else would have provoked that reaction. More specifically she must have been featured on a local news programme. If she was part of national news coverage, the people on Kinness would have seen it. But how can it be relevant anyway? he thought. If Elspeth had managed to keep her secret from the rest of Kinness, surely Mary would never have been able to find it out.

His thoughts returned to Sylvia and her intense shock at learning that Robert had been murdered. Perhaps her secret was more important, and the trip to Baltasay was a wild-goose chase.