“It’s pretty unreasonable to expect you to go there all the way from Northamptonshire when he’s right there in Exeter.”

“Exeter isn’t exactly ‘right there.’ It’s a ninety-minute helicopter ride away.”

“Well, it’s a damned sight nearer the Scillies than Northants is.”

“Do you two,” said Tom Brownell, who’d stayed overnight along with his granddaughter, “usually argue like a couple of teenagers?”

“Pretty much,” said Melrose. “Maybe you’d like to go with him to Bryher.”

Tom looked out on the early day. “No. I’m going home with Sydney.” He turned to Jury. “You going to do this all in one day?”

“Hope so. At least, I intend to.”

The intention was fairly well borne out by the swiftness of his getting to Bryher that morning, first by plane from Heathrow to St. Mary’s, via Cornwall Newquay, thence by the same boat that had ferried him and Macalvie two nights before to Bryher, where he was met once again by DCI Whitten.

“Actually, I think Commander Macalvie and his team pretty nearly bled them dry,” said Whitten in answer to Jury’s asking who he should interview at the Hell Bay Hotel, toward which they were headed in the jeep. “With the exception of this one waitress, Amy Dudgeon.”

“Amy Dudgeon? Why wouldn’t she have been bled along with the others?” Jury laughed.

“I got the impression that although she hadn’t talked much to the victim, she knew something of a relationship between Manon Vinet and Dan Cooke.”

“Daisy Cooke’s husband?”

“Yes. We don’t know there was one, of course. That’s the point of the questions.”

Except for a couple at one other table, the dining room at this time was empty, given it was well after lunch hour. Jury wasn’t much of a lunch person anyway, but he was having a sandwich merely to employ the time of the waitress, Amy Dudgeon.

He made a few general comments to her about the peculiarity of what had happened on the beach two days before and, these not doing much to exact anything from her, turned to more specific comments, beginning with who he was. Backed up by his warrant card, that got her to sit down and look anxious.

“I hardly spoke to her at all,” said Amy Dudgeon. “Hardly beyond taking her order and asking her if she wanted, like, coffee or tea. You know.”

“I don’t, Amy; that’s why I’m asking. About Daisy Cooke’s husband: I understand he left her.”

“I don’t know about him leaving her. What I heard was she told him to leave. Packed up his wheel and clay and took off suddenly.”

“Wheel?”