“Yes,” he said. “They got themselves into a right state, too. It started off like all the others. They saw Wilson’s petrels. That’s what they all came out to see. Then there was something else which really excited them. They couldn’t identify it; Mr. Earl said it must be something really rare. Perhaps it had never been seen before. That’s when we realised the boy was missing. They went to fetch him to show him the new bird, but they couldn’t find him.”

“He wasn’t birdwatching with the others?”

“No,” Rosco said. “ He’d been seasick in the night and still didn’t look well in the morning. He dragged himself out for a couple of hours, then went to lie down again.”

“In his bunk?”

“No,” Rosco said shortly. “On deck. Mostly they were birdwatching from the stern. He was up this end, where it was a bit quieter.”

“Couldn’t you see him from the wheelhouse, then?”

“Not directly, no. He was hidden by the saloon.”

“But you would have noticed someone going up to him and talking to him?”

Again the panic returned.

“No. You don’t know what it was like when they saw that bird. It was pandemonium. They were all shouting and running about. I wasn’t thinking about anything else but getting the boat exactly where they wanted her to be.”

Claire found the scene hard to imagine. In her experience adult birdwatchers were elderly, rather dotty women, who fed blue tits in their gardens and went for nature rambles. Most she had met were children—earnest and pretentious schoolboys. The variety described by Rosco seemed implausible. He sensed her incredulity.

“You talk to them,” he said. “ You’ll find out then what they’re like.”

She nodded reassuringly. She did not want to offend Louis Rosco. If Franks had been murdered, surely the skipper was the least likely to have anything to do with it. What would a Cornish boatman have to do with a young man from Bristol?

“There was nothing else unusual?” she asked. “ No arguments or disagreements?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Not a real row. You had the feeling they were getting at each other, winding each other up, but Friday night was like that on each of the trips. They were worried, Rob Earl said, that they wouldn’t see any birds. It seemed to get on their nerves. Then there was all that fuss about lists.”

“Lists?” She was mystified. Perhaps it was some obscure nautical term.

“They all make a list of the birds they’ve seen. They all wanted the boy that died to tell them the number of his, but he was teasing them, leading them on. ‘You’ll have to wait and see’ he said. ‘I’ll add it up and let you know tomorrow.’”

“It sounds very childish,” she said.