“No,” she said. “I think he was a bit frightened of Louis.” She paused. “Gerald knew something was going on,” she said. “ He hated Greg and made me promise not to have him here again. But I couldn’t turn him away. I didn’t know what he would do.”

“Did Gerald ever confront Greg? Tell him to keep away?”

“No,” Rose said scornfully. “He wouldn’t have the guts.”

Then Rose, wallowing in her muddled emotion, began to plead with Molly again to do something to free Louis so he could be returned to her. But Molly made no promise, and it was only when she had the phone call from the hospital that she decided to take more direct action.

When the superintendent discovered the link between Rosco and Franks, he was jubilant. That was enough to keep Rosco in custody at least overnight, he said. In the meantime they would have a look at his cottage. If they could find any illegal substances, it would all be over. But the search of the cottage on the shore ended up as a farce. No one had considered that there might not be electricity, and the lanterns they found were beyond them to operate.

They plundered the place, like burglars with torches, feeling through the drawers of the heavy old chest in the bedroom, stacking tins of soup from the kitchen cupboard in the middle of the floor. Berry lifted the mattress on the bed and felt the frame beneath, and his fingers came away scratched by rust. There was no gun.

Although it was very late when Inspector Bingham returned to the house in the smart new estate on the hill, Richard was waiting up for her. She could tell immediately that he was angry and that in the hours of waiting he had stoked the fury with distant wrongs and imagined hurts.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I’ve been worried stiff.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. It was much better, she had discovered, to apologise immediately. Sometimes an apology was enough to satisfy him, and he would become calm and gracious. “I should have phoned.”

Tonight, however, the apology was insufficient. He had obviously been waiting, brooding on all the things he would say to her when she got in, the painful home truths it would be good for her to hear.

She had hardly walked through the door when he began his lecture.

“It’s a matter of priorities,” he said, so quickly that she knew the sentence had been rehearsed. “ I mean, I don’t expect to come first—I’m only your husband after all—but what about your son? You haven’t seen him for days.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “We’ve taken someone into custody. It should be over soon.”