Before I reached the village of Rock with its post office and shop I came upon several vehicles parked beside the road. One of them was an ambulance and I recognized another as a police motorcar. As I slowed to a crawl, trying to negotiate past them, a group of men came up from the seashore, two of them carrying a stretcher on which a form was covered in a blanket. And following this procession was Jago. Of course my curiosity was now overwhelming. I drove to a spot where I could pull off the road and walked back to where the action was taking place, noticing as I did so that we were beside Trengilly, right at the spot where Belinda and I had accessed the grounds from climbing over the rocks at the seashore. The men were now loading the body—for body it must have been, into the back of the ambulance. Jago was deep in conversation with a policeman.

I went up to them. They broke off as they saw me approaching. “Has something happened?” I asked. “I noticed the ambulance.”

“Just a sad accident, miss,” the police constable said. He was one I hadn’t encountered before, a friendly looking lad not much younger than me. “Local chap. Simple sort of fellow. Not quite right in the head, you know.”

“Old Harry, you mean?” I asked, glancing at Jago for confirmation. “What happened to him?”

“Drowned,” the policeman said. “He must have got caught by the tide. He often hung about on the seashore, didn’t he?”

“Where did you find him?” I asked.

“He’d washed up on the rocks where you and Belinda were the other day,” Jago said. “I was just telling the constable, some of our visitors were taking an evening stroll and spotted something at the water’s edge. They came to find me.”

“What was he doing on the rocks here? I wonder,” the policeman said. “Nothing for the old man around here. Do you think he was trying to get onto the Trengilly estate?”

“I doubt it,” Jago said. “I’d made it very clear to him once before that I’d hand him to the police for trespassing if he came here, and he was mortally afraid of the police, you know.” He looked out up the estuary. “The tide’s coming in. I reckon he must have fallen in somewhere closer to the headlands.”

I followed his gaze. The land ahead of us curved in a sweeping bay and on the far side of that bay would be Trewoma. I pictured that narrow beach where we had met him once before. And the high cliffs where rocks had rained down . . .

“Did he have any injuries?” I asked.

“He was battered around a bit by the rocks,” Jago said. “That’s to be expected, I suppose, poor old fellow.”