He did not hear the door of the cottage being opened though he noticed when he was in the bedroom that the noise of the wind had suddenly diminished. The birdwatchers on Porthkennan Head were aware of the moment of stillness, too. Suddenly they could speak to each other without having to shout, and they could breathe more easily. Perhaps it’s all over, they said. Perhaps it’s blown itself out. But the period of calm was only brief. It lasted perhaps for fifteen minutes; then the storm continued more ferociously than ever. And even when the wind had stopped, the momentum of the waves was unstoppable. It was still not quite high tide, and they fell with relentless power onto the rocks where the birdwatchers were sitting, so the men had to move back onto the grass and set up their telescopes there. Perhaps it was the sound of water which prevented Rosco hearing the door of the cottage being opened, or perhaps he was not sufficiently on his guard. It took him longer than he expected to find the photograph of his mother, but he continued to look because it was inconceivable now that he could leave the house without it. He discovered it at last, without a frame, trapped behind the drawer.

When he went back into the room, the figure, anonymous in anorak and hood and boots, was standing just inside the door, as if only just arrived, but his gun was missing from the chair and was in her hand. He stood across the room from her, still clutching the photograph and thought that Palmer-Jones had been right.

“So it was you,” Rosco said. “ You know, I couldn’t remember.”

“You wrote me a letter,” she said. “It was on my bed last night.”

“Yes,” he said. “I took a chance, but I wasn’t sure.”

Jane Pym took down her hood with her free hand, still holding the gun in front of her. Rosco could see that she was finding the revolver too heavy for her hand and that she held her arm rigid, so it was shaking. He had an impulse to tell her that unless she relaxed, she was bound to miss. Instead, he tried to remain calm. He walked back to the chair by the window and saw a wall of grey water break over the boulders nearest to the cottage. If I can keep her talking long enough, he thought, we’ll both be drowned. That seemed a more attractive way to die than to be shot by a middle-aged neurotic woman. Only then did he wonder what had happened to George Palmer-Jones and think that he had some responsibility to get at the truth.

“You’d been drinking,” he said. “That night of the fire.”

“Oh,” she said, and she was smiling, “I’ve always been drinking.”

“You should get help,” he said.