She bullied him once, soon after they met, to take her to Cornwall to show her where he had been brought up. It was late autumn, raining, and the weekend was a bleak anticlimax. His parents, who had been older than most of his friends’ parents, were dead, and there were no other relatives to introduce her to. He showed her the rented cottage where he had lived as a child, and she made no comment then, no comparison with her own home. It was only after they were engaged that she drove him to meet her parents in Gloucestershire, and when he saw where they lived, he thought at first she was playing a trick on him. The long drive, the acres of garden, the house so old and grand that he might have been taken there as a schoolboy on an educational visit, astounded him. There were two farms on the estate and a gamekeeper; most of the village was dependent on Anne’s father for employment. It almost wrecked the relationship. For a time he lost all his confidence in her. He thought he must have misjudged her. Because she was rich, he supposed she must be different. Then she persuaded him that was ridiculous, and at last the old happiness returned. It was only later, when they were married, that he discovered that his fear had been justified and that in some important things she was different.

Now, sitting in the garden waiting for the ordeal of being questioned, he tried not to blame Anne for the mess he was in. He knew it was all his own fault.

The police kept him waiting all morning, and he wondered in the heightened state of nervous panic if they had done that on purpose to frighten him. It was early afternoon when Berry came to find him. The policeman saw a large, uncoordinated man walking backwards and forwards along the overgrown path by the stream. He was dressed with an old-fashioned shabbiness, and when Berry called to him, he turned with a sad and frightened look, like a child asking a stern parent not to deal with him too harshly. When Duncan was led into the sudden shadow of the dining room, he blinked shortsightedly and peered unhappily towards the inspector. She had been disturbed by the superintendent’s visit and the fact that they still had no recent address for Greg Franks. Her superiors would see that as incompetence, and she had wondered even if she should leave Berry to complete the statements while she devoted her energy to that. She had decided in the end to stay, but her attention was still on the problem of where Franks had been living, and her questions were mechanical and routine. She could not believe that this absentminded academic could help her.

“Dr. James,” Inspector Bingham said, “why did you decide to come to Cornwall this weekend?”