After the first exhilaration of walking, he began to think again about the accident. He tried to reconstruct it so that all the details would be clear in his mind and he would be able to communicate to the police precisely what had happened. When he started, he was quite sure that it was an accident. Mary must have run out of the hall sometime before the interval. He remembered her, as he had seen her the day before, running up the island with pigtails flying behind her. He supposed that some game of her own took her up to Ellie’s Head, or perhaps it was a desire to frighten the adults and draw attention to herself.

But what about the secret? he wondered. She was so eager to tell him her secret. It was not like her to forget a thing like that, but she was so unpredictable that perhaps her new game was more important to her. So, she was on Ellie’s Head and she must have slipped. He tried to guess how she must have fallen. It was a clear night and there was a moon. He had seen her before clambering about the rocks and down the steep gulleys or “geos” as the local people called them. She was as surefooted as a feral cat. Her deafness seemed not to have affected her sense of balance, and she knew every inch of the place. So how did she fall? Perhaps she had been drinking from the Cup, he thought. That would impair anyone’s judgement. If the police thought that it was necessary, they would order a post mortem and that would show whether she had been drinking. In the meantime Jim would know. But where was the green silk scarf? It had been tied tightly round her neck all day. He knew that it had not been left in the hall because he had asked, and it had not been near Mary on the rocks where she fell. He considered the problem all the way back to the school house, but he could think of no satisfactory explanation for the scarfs disappearance. Well then, he thought, perhaps she’s been murdered. He did not take this conclusion seriously—it was simply an absurd extension of his argument—but the idea was lodged in his mind and began to bother him.

Despite the weather the plane did land. The two policemen, when they climbed out of the small eight-seater aircraft, were shaking, ill. The pilot was English and it seemed at first that he treated the difficult landing into the gusting wind as a game. Throughout the manoeuvre he shouted flippancies to the terrified men behind him. Later, when they were safely back on Baltasay, he was to say to them:

“Sorry about that, but I had to have a go, you see. One needs to practise in difficult conditions. It might have been a hospital flight, a matter of life and death.”