PETER MASSEY WANTED so much to talk. It was impossible to tell what had held him back before. Some instinct to put off the moment, a hope that the whole thing might be forgotten? Who could tell? But as soon as Cooper asked the right question, the words poured out of him as if the act of talking made him feel a lot better.

‘Mr Massey, did someone else come to visit you last week?’ said Cooper when Fry had arrived and they’d fetched the farmer out of his workshop. ‘Perhaps to ask about the old ROC post – 4 Romeo?’

‘Yes, he was here,’ said Massey, not even bothering to ask who they meant. ‘Wednesday, it was. I was out in the fields, mending a bit of wall that had collapsed. Too much rain. It washes away the footings.’

‘Mr Clay?’

‘Yes, Clay. Him.’

He spoke so quickly that there was almost no form to some of his sentences. They broke down into mere fragments of sound – part confession, part recollection, interspersed with snatches of narrated conversation, so that Cooper got Michael Clay’s words as well as Massey’s own. It was a spasmodic, convulsive purge, as if Massey was being physically sick, vomiting up the guilt and fear.

Fry tried to persuade him to go into the house, but he ignored her, a stubborn expression on his face. Instead, he sat down on an old, blackened bale of straw, removing his cap and turning his face up to the rain.

‘I recognized him then,’ he said. ‘Even after all that time, I knew him as well as I knew myself. His hair was grey, he’d put on weight, but I knew him all right. You don’t change the way you move, the way you speak, the way you hold your head. Just looking at him brought back all those memories.’

‘Do you want to have a look inside?’ I said.

A delighted expression came over his face. ‘May I? The hatch is padlocked.’

‘Yes, but I’ve got the key.’

‘Do you own it, then?’

‘It’s on my land, so I suppose I do. No one else wants the thing, anyway. Not any more.’

‘To be honest, I was surprised that he didn’t know me, the way I’d recognized him,’ said Massey. ‘But maybe he’d never taken much notice of me at the time. Yes, I suppose that’s what it was. He hadn’t studied me the way I’d studied him for all those weeks. He thought I was just some fool in the background, not worth bothering about. Well, that was his mistake.’

‘So you opened the hatch?’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. It hadn’t been used for quite a while, but luckily it’s never been vandalized, unlike some of the other posts, and the hinges are good. There’s a bit of water standing in the bottom, though. That’s as you might expect – it leaches through the ground and gets in through any cracks it can find. The floor is solid concrete, you see, so there’s no way for it to drain off. I told him that, but he said he had waterproof boots on. He was really keen to go inside.’