“Do you think I haven’t tried?” she demanded, her voice hard and tense as the arm that held the gun. “ I got foul medicine from the doctor which was supposed to make me sick if I had a drink. I stopped taking it. I bared my soul in Alcoholics Anonymous before I realise that half of them were my clients. You don’t know.”

He did not know. He had no idea what she was talking about. But he sat by the window, inviting her to continue, waiting for the water to sweep them both away.

“Greg Franks recognised you,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” she said bitterly. “He recognised me. And that was partly my fault, wasn’t it? If I hadn’t said I thought I’d seen him before, he might have taken no notice. But he recognised me, and he tried to blackmail me. He sat on the deck, still green and seasick, and asked me for money.”

“So you hit him and threw him overboard?”

“It didn’t happen like that,” she cried. “It wasn’t planned. But he was grinning, teasing me. ‘Still like a drink,’ he said, ‘ don’t you? I saw you last night. If I hadn’t been at the hostel four years ago, someone might have died.’”

“Was that true?” Rosco was suddenly interested.

“Probably,” she said. It no longer mattered to her. “I was sleeping so heavily that I didn’t know what was going on. I suppose I was drunk. Franks got everyone else out and then came back for me.”

She seemed lost in her memory of the past. The gun jerked suddenly.

“I shouldn’t have been there,” she said. “I’d finished my contract at the hostel the month before. My friend was the warden. She was back from maternity leave, and it was her turn to sleep in. She phoned me up that day and begged me to do it for her. She couldn’t leave the baby, she said. It was teething and screamed all night. She couldn’t trust her husband not to strangle it. So I went in as a favour to her. It wasn’t my fault.”

He was not listening. He was mesmerized by the movement and closeness of the water. He had always thought it was the boats which attracted him and had caused all his trouble, but perhaps it was the sea after all. He waited with a sort of resigned anticipation for the water to come.

“You shouldn’t have tried to blackmail me, too,” she said sharply, demanding suddenly his attention. “ That’s what the letter was about, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose it was,” he said. He had written the letter to George’s dictation and had taken little notice of the words.