“It’ll be all right,” he said awkwardly, putting his arms around her, touching the bare skin of her shoulder, stroking it. “We’re tired. It’s the shock. We’re all upset about Greg.”

“I’m not upset,” she said. He thought, looking at her so closely, at the lines around her eyes, the strain in her dark and heavy face, that she must be older than he. He had always thought of himself as boringly middle-aged in comparison to her, and the idea was flattering. He felt she had paid him a compliment. “I’m not upset,” she said again. “Don’t you understand? I’m bloody relieved that he’s not around to trouble us anymore.”

She laid her head on his shoulder, and for a moment Gerald stood in the warm half light of the nursery, quite content. It seemed a moment of great promise and significance, the beginning of something magnificent. He had never been happy before.

Then Rose broke away. She did it gently, because even in her distress she could not bring herself to be unkind. She took his hands in hers and lifted them away from her body.

“Look,” she said. “This won’t do. It isn’t fair. You’ll have to go.”

“No,” he cried. “ I want to be with you. I want to help.”

“No one can do that now,” she said, and took his hand again and led him to the door and sent him away.

She returned to the window, listening again to the voices of the people in the room below, trying to hear where their conversation might be leading. Soon after, the voices stopped. There were footsteps, the front door shutting, and the sound of a car engine being started. The headlights were reflected on the dense green leaves, and the car moved up the valley.

It was what Rose had been waiting for. She thought that now she was safe. She assumed that both police officers had left Porthkennan. In her anxiety and need for reassurance Inspector Bingham’s promise to leave a policeman to “keep an eye on them“ was forgotten.

She left the baby’s room and walked carefully downstairs. At the front door she paused to make sure the house was quiet. She did not want Gerald and his clumsy sympathy again that night. Outside, she listened again, but there was only the screech of a tawny owl hunting on the moor by the tin mine, and she began to follow the lane down the valley. She was wearing no shoes, and the tarmac road outside the house, which had been unbearably hot during the day, was pleasantly warm. Even in the dark she could follow the path without a torch. She avoided the worst of the bramble and nettle.