Alec met them in his car, a battered Escort eaten away by rust. It had no road tax, but the policemen did not notice. They were pleasant, sympathetic men, frightened of intruding on recent grief, and after they had talked together with gentle, northern voices, Agnes did not mind entrusting the body of her daughter to them.

The policemen called to see George on their way back to the airstrip. They were in a hurry because the light was falling and it was still windy. The last thing that they wanted was to stay overnight on Kinness.

George explained in detail the circumstances surrounding Mary’s disappearance, the search for her, the discovery of the body. The policemen congratulated him on his attention to detail.

“It all seems very straightforward then,” one of them said. “An unfortunate accident.”

“There is one thing,” George said. “She was wearing a scarf at the dance. A silk scarf. It wasn’t on her when she died.”

“I expect it came off when she fell.” The younger man was looking at his watch. He was wondering if he could be home for his son’s bedtime. He liked to be back to read the boy a bedtime story. “Then the tide will have taken it.”

“It was tied with a knot round her neck. Quite tightly.”

“She must have taken it off then at some time before she fell. There’s not another explanation.”

There is, George thought, but you’re too young, and too trusting and too innocent to consider it. But he said nothing and let them rush off to their plane.

When the police had gone, George sat alone in the living room. Jonathan Drysdale had gone out to walk to the north end of the island, to a pool where there were sometimes wild swans. He was planning a trip to catch them and ring them, and he wanted to check that they were there before making the arrangements. He had gone out straight after lunch. Sylvia was in the school room. She was working on some of the craft work she had done with the children. So George could sit there, in the gloom in front of a dying fire, and go through every detail of the thing again, and still it seemed unlikely to him that Mary would have left the hall without telling him about her secret and claiming her dance, and still he could find no explanation for the disappearance of the scarf. So that the thought which had come to him as a ridiculous result of abstract thinking, of isolated reasoning, that the girl might have been murdered, grew more solid. It can’t be true, he thought. I’m a meddling old man. But he would not allow himself to escape the facts.

Then Sylvia came in and switched on the light, and threw a couple of logs on to the fire.