I went in search of Lionel, but I couldn’t find him. I scampered to the crown of the highest of the two comatose icthyosauri and looked out over the waters. There was nothing out there apart from a few bobbing buoys marking the whereabouts of lobster pots. Even the gull community was sparse and quiet. Grieving? Grieving for Camilla? I turned and slid down the rocks and headed back towards the harbour where the first walkers of the morning, now breakfasted, were gathering. I stopped everyone I passed, holiday-makers and locals alike, astonishing them with the urgency and I suppose the incoherence of my questions. Had they seen a girl, a lovely girl with fair hair, pulled back, and broad shoulders, wearing goggles, swimming out in that direction? None of them had. As usual, no one had seen anything.

I am not a good person in an emergency. Where others would run for help or start yelling their lungs out, I go self-conscious and fall to fretting over protocol. I knew that I should have alerted the coast guard, but then again, was that really the thing to do, ought I really to trouble them when I wasn’t dead certain that I had anything to trouble them about? I was debating this, leaning over the stone arched bridge which joins the northern and the southern banks of the Valency River, when Harry Vilbert found me. He was crossing the bridge on his way to open the Museum. I remember thinking that he was looking greyer and frailer than ever inside his denim suit. And I remember wondering whether I, thirty years his junior, looked any better.

‘Camilla’s out early today,’ he commented.

I started. ‘Have you seen her?’ The ferocity of my enquiry startled him. I know that I grabbed him by his shoulders because I can remember being startled myself by how difficult they were to find.

‘No, I haven’t seen her. I just thought that was who you were waiting for. And I noticed her things on the rocks.’

‘Her things? Where?’

The Off Wessex Museum of Nugatory Spells and Superstitions, occupying a converted grain store, is the last building on its side of the harbour. Seaward of it, a narrow ramp descends gently into the water. This is used for launching light pleasure boats, rubber dinghies and the like, and swimmers use it also, when the tide is right, to launch themselves. It’s convenient for them, too, because the natural ledges of the rocks from which it has been carved are ideal for congregating, for sunbathing, and for parking their belongings. It was on these rocks that Harry Vilbert, crossing the bridge, thought he’d seen a bundle that he recognized.