Parents began to arrive then to collect the children. George stood beside Anne James as she cut the cake and wrapped it in kitchen paper. She handed it out to them with little presents in silver paper decorated with ribbon. The adults gathered sticky and excitable children to them and drove off in expensive cars. When the lawn was empty and Lucy and Philip, shouting the last impatient goodbyes, had been released back to the orchard, Anne led him to a white garden bench in the shadow of a yew hedge.

“Is Duncan in some sort of trouble?” she asked. She was more intelligent than he had realised.

“I don’t know,” he said. It was hard to imagine Duncan James, upright and respectable, in trouble of any kind.

“There must be something,” she said, “or you’d not have come here.”

It was five o’clock, and in the long shadow it was pleasantly cool after the heat of the day. Somewhere in the village there was a bonfire.

“Did he ever talk to you about Greg Franks?” George asked.

She shook her head. “Is that the boy who died?”

“Yes.”

“No,” she said. “ I’ve never heard of him.”

“He’s a birdwatcher,” George said. “A twitcher. He’s quite famous in his own circles. The police believe he was bringing drugs into the country.”

“Duncan would never be involved in anything like that.”

“No,” George said. “I don’t believe he would. Unfortunately there is a connection between Duncan and Franks. About a year ago a letter arrived at Greg’s parents’ house. He was still officially living at home then, though he would disappear for days, even weeks, at a time. The letter arrived during one of his frequent absences, and his mother opened it. It was a large cheque, and it was sent from this address. You say you’ve never heard of Greg, so presumably you didn’t send it. That leaves Duncan.”

She shook her head. “ There must be some mistake,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“You do see how it looks,” George persisted. “Franks was a known drug dealer. Duncan paid him a large sum of money. That implicates Duncan in the drugs, don’t you see?”

“I can see how it looks,” she said, “ but it’s impossible.”

“You can think of no other reason Duncan might have had for paying Franks?”

“No,” she said. “ None at all.”

He found it impossible to follow the line of questioning, and there was a pause in the conversation. In the tall trees behind the house he heard wood pigeons calling, and in the garden behind the wall there was the sound of a hose.

“Why did Duncan go to Cornwall this weekend?” George asked at last.

“He was tired,” Anne said. “He needed the break.”

“I shouldn’t have thought it was his sort of thing at all. When did he decide to go?”