That was true. Rose’s instinct to mother them all had returned. While Matilda played on a rug on the kitchen floor, she made soup in a vast pan. She thought the birdwatchers on the headland would need feeding when it was all over. So she stood in the kitchen peeling vegetables, pretending that her tears were caused by onion skins or tiredness. But when Molly went in to offer help, the tension was suddenly too much for her.

“The police think Louis killed Greg Franks, don’t they?” she cried. “ Why don’t they arrest him and take him back to Heanor? What sort of game are they playing?”

“It’s no game.” Molly said.

By late morning it was raining heavily. There was a sudden downpour which flooded the drains and turned the lane into a river. Soon it became clear that even if the police had wanted to get to Porthkennan for Rosco, the journey would have been impossible.

With an echoing crash that might have been thunder, the chimney of the old tin mine at the top of the valley toppled like a pile of children’s building bricks, and the road was blocked by rock and rubble. A farmer who lived up the lane brought the news that they were cut off.

“It’ll take them days to dig us out,” he said with gloomy satisfaction. His Wellington boots spread mud over the kitchen floor. “ There’s nothing we can do about it. The fall brought the phone lines down, too.”

He made them switch on the local radio, and they listened, fascinated, to the stories of wreckage and destruction. All the boats left in Heanor harbour had been smashed against the harbour wall by freak gusts of wind, said a disc jockey, with the same forced jollity with which he announced the latest hit. Rose thought that at least the Jessie Ellen, which had been winched up to a slipway while the police scientists tested for traces of heroin, would be safe. That gave her some comfort. The farmer, with his talk of flooded fields and financial disaster, gave her none, and they were glad when he went at last.

In the wind Jane Pym felt closer to Roger than she had for years. As they walked into the full force of it down the headland, Roger put his arm around her and pulled her inside his jacket. She carried his tripod over her shoulder as she had done when they were students. They stumbled together over the flattened heather.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” he said. “You can wait with Rose if you’d rather. She won’t mind.”

“No,” she said. “ I’m enjoying it.” In the wild weather the differences between them seemed insignificant, and she felt that they could face any trouble together.