“I must say the fellow has a nerve,” Belinda said. “I wonder what he was smuggling? Cigarettes and booze from the Continent, I shouldn’t wonder. Liquor has always been the smugglers’ favorite.” Then she frowned. “I just hope it isn’t something worse.”

“Like drugs, you mean? Cocaine and things?”

“Or even weapons.”

“Weapons?” I had to laugh at that. “What would the weapons be for? We are not exactly a race of anarchists.”

“There is good money to be had in the sale of weapons,” Belinda said, “and we do have extremists in the country, don’t we? Oswald Mosley and his gang of thugs. And some communists. And IRA activists. I expect he’d find a ready market if he chose. I just hope he hasn’t stashed anything in this house.”

“How did he get in, that’s what I want to know,” I said. “You locked the door.”

“That’s right. I did,” Belinda said. “Come on, let’s go and check.”

The front door was still locked. The windows all intact.

Belinda gave me a puzzled look. “He can’t have come down the chimney. Let’s take a look in the cellar.”

We went down those steps again. Now, by daylight, we noticed a small window, high up in the wall, that threw anemic light onto the stone floor.

“He didn’t climb in through that, anyway,” Belinda commented. “He had broad shoulders, didn’t he?”

“So you noticed that much, did you?” I teased. “I thought this was the woman who had renounced men forever and was going to remain pure and virginal.”

“That doesn’t stop me from admiring the human form, purely on an artistic level,” she said, making me laugh.

Further inspection of the cellar revealed the answer to our visitor’s midnight entrance. What we had taken to be an alcove in the wall partly concealed by an old oilskin coat hanging on a peg was actually a flight of narrow steps going down, with a glimmer of light at the bottom. “A smuggler’s stair. See, I told you,” Belinda said. “That is why this cottage was built. They’d sneak into the little harbor where nobody could see them and bring the goods up through the rock. I wonder if he’s stashed anything away down here.”

We went down the stairs cautiously as they were uneven, steep and slippery. They ended in a shallow cave among the rocks with sea spray lapping at the bottom of them.

“I wouldn’t enjoy coming in this way, would you?” I said. “It looks downright dangerous. But I can’t see anywhere he might have hidden smuggled goods.”

“Probably left the goods in the boat overnight,” Belinda said. “Come on. Let’s have breakfast. I’m starving, aren’t you?”