Late in the morning the superintendent arrived. Not, Claire thought, to offer assistance, to accept some of the responsibility in a difficult case, but to check up on her and because the trip to Porthkennan would be a pleasant break from the office before he went home for Sunday lunch. He was Cornish, a great bull of a man, wide, neckless, with a big, square head. His name was Wargan.

“Well,” he said in his growling voice, “How’s it going?”

She shook her head. “ No one will admit to speaking to him on the boat yesterday after he went to lie down,” she said. “They all seem to have been so excited about this rare bird that they took no notice of anything. The probation officer, Mrs. Pym, thinks she might have come across him at work, possibly when he was at a probation hostel on bail. Can we check their records on that?”

“No,” Wargan said, finding apparent satisfaction in making the investigation more difficult and complicated for her. “ I phoned them this morning. There was a fire at the hostel. I checked the date of the fire with our records on Franks. It will have been while he was on bail. The place was gutted, and all their records were lost.”

“What sort of fire?” she asked. “Arson?” It was, she thought, a coincidence. Rosco had been convicted of arson.

He shook his head. “Apparently not. There was a detailed investigation, and they found it was started by an electrical fault.”

“Have you got an address for Franks yet?” the inspector asked. “No one here seems to know where he’d been living since he left his parents.”

The superintendent shook his head. “ He seems to have disappeared from all the official records about a year ago,” he said. “He hasn’t claimed dole or social security in that time, and he hasn’t paid tax or national insurance. The car he was driving was registered and insured in his father’s name. We’ll put out a press statement this afternoon and get his picture in the papers tomorrow. Someone will know where he’s been living.”

He would enjoy doing that, Claire thought. Wargan always got on well with the media. He especially liked being on local television news, smiling roguishly at the female interviewer, developing his accent so nobody could mistake him for an incomer.

Berry had been sitting apart, listening to the conversation. Now, for the first time he spoke. “What about Louis Rosco?” he said. “Is he still on the Jessie Ellen? Should we get a search warrant and go over his cottage before he comes back?”