“He probably did his boss a favour in the end,” the officer in Bristol said. “The place is all yuppie flats now.”

Wargan called Claire Bingham into his office, and she felt as she always did in his presence, like a naive schoolgirl.

“I can’t see your problem,” he said bluntly. “ Why are you making such a meal of it? One of your suspects, Louis Rosco, has already killed a man after a sudden fit of violence. All you need is to find a connection between him and the victim. You should be concentrating all your energy on that. Don’t bother with the rest of the bunch. Send them home if they want to go!”

“But Rosco didn’t even know that Franks would be on the trip,” Claire said. She knew she sounded shrill and defensive, but she wanted, more than anything, to complete the investigation without Wargan’s help or interference. He had told her too many times that a mother’s place was with her children.

“How do you know that?” he demanded. “ You’ve only Rosco’s word for it. Young Franks was into drug dealing, and Rosco had a boat. Perhaps they were working together. You need proof that they knew each other, that’s all.”

He paused, and she watched him in the laborious process of thought. “Then there’s the boat,” he said. “How could an ex-con afford a boat like the Jessie Ellen? No bank’s going to lend a penny to a man like that. Perhaps he was making his money from drugs, too.”

He smiled unpleasantly, and she was afraid for a moment that he was going to reach out and pat her hand. She hated him most when he tried to be fatherly.

“Have Rosco in for questioning,” he said. “ If you can’t handle him, I’ll talk to him myself.”

She was on her way to pick up Rosco when there was a phone call for her from George Palmer-Jones. George said that he was sorry, but he would not make it back to Cornwall after all tonight. There was an interesting lead which he felt he should follow. He was prepared to give her more details of his discovery, but her interview with Wargan had made her short-tempered. She said she was in a hurry and would speak to him on the following day.

Rosco had spent the afternoon at the cottage on the shore. He had been sawing a dead elm into logs, then splitting them with a heavy old-fashioned axe and stacking them in a honeycomb against the house, aware all the time that there was a uniformed policeman in the lane watching him. When Claire Bingham and Berry arrived, Rosco had put his axe away and was pegging out washing on the line in the small back garden, though by then it was almost dusk, and there was no chance of its drying.