The policeman beamed at him and took him back to the waiting area. He bustled around behind the desk. Arthur could hear talking round the back but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Maybe someone senior would come and talk to him. Why had he come? He had come to confess, hadn’t he? He thought that if they came now, someone sympathetic, who could see into his soul and see the rot there, if they came with a cup of tea and a kind word, a hand on the shoulder, he would tell them everything, all of it, just to rid himself of the sickness. But he waited and no one came except thin-faced Constable Blowers. He said that if Jack had gone missing from Wells as Arthur said he had, then the chances were his body would turn up further along the coast. ‘Could be anywhere up to Cromer now, but you can never be too sure of these things.’ Arthur began to think that the young policeman was more astute than his slow, Norfolk drawl implied. He was conscious of the twitching of his fingers, the involuntary tapping of his foot. He must scream suspicious, even to a local plod like Blowers. But he couldn’t very well refuse to help find his ‘friend’.

As they drove in the police car, Blowers chattered on about the nightmares of the last week as if he and Arthur were old friends. He talked as if he was an old hand at policing although he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

‘My poor aunt lost a littlun,’ he said, ‘tiny mite of a thing he was, she couldn’t hold onto him and he was taken from her arms. Terrible thing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Wave came and swept him away. We found him, though, that’s something.’

Arthur muttered a platitude. He thought of Muriel running to her family, the mass of them in those slum-like cottages, exposed, so close to the sea. They drove back through the town to Beach Road.

‘Aren’t we going on the coast road?’ he asked.

‘I doubt he’s gone far,’ replied Blowers, cranking the gears.

‘But what about what you said?’

Blowers continued to talk as he parked the black Wolseley next to the harbourmaster’s house, right on the quay.

‘Truth is, I read a lot of crime novels. Got a bit carried away. They don’t float away usually, bodies, they sink.’