“But that depends on what I am.” He smiled at Jury. “I’d never seen either of them before, so I can’t help you out much. He was tallish, dark, not very handsome. Good clothes, though. He kept his coat on …” Matthew looked puzzled, as if he were trying to work this out. “I got the impression he was not there to meet this woman, but had happened on her by chance, if you know what I mean.”

Jury nodded, as Josephine interrupted: “How did you ever come by that notion? Just seeing them for a moment or two?”

Matthew Bewley didn’t bother answering, but asked his own question of Jury: “What’s your interest in her, Superintendent? Has it got to do with this dead woman on the beach?”

“Very possibly.” Jury paused. “I was wondering about Daisy Cooke’s death. There seems to be some question as to whether it was suicide or accidental.”

After a few moments of contemplation, Matthew said, “I know one shouldn’t speak of a suicidal ‘type,’ as there is no type.”

“You’re suggesting Daisy Cooke would not be the type, if there were one.”

“Absolutely. Daisy, although in what I thought to be a despairing situation, would never have acceded to it. She’d switch her beleaguered hand to something else.”

“Beleaguered hand? Mr. Bewley, you’ve lost me.”

“Like a poker player: ‘I’ll play you another hand, but only with a fresh deck.’”

“The fresh deck being—?”

“Another way of looking at the situation.”

Jury smiled. “I like your cryptic language, but I’m having trouble with this metaphor.”

Matthew tch-tch’d. “And you a CID superintendent. What I mean is that Daisy Cooke wasn’t the type either to give in or to get out without a fight. And by ‘fight’ I mean some tough thinking. Daisy thought things through. Ouch! Th, th, th. Three th sounds in a row. I’d make a lousy poet.”

Jury smiled. “Or a really good one. So what was her despairing situation, the one she wouldn’t give in to?”

“Dan Cooke, is what I’d say,” offered Josephine, who, having put by her ledger, was now typing up something on the ancient machine and not stopping in order to comment.

The interruption didn’t throw off her brother, who was probably used to her answering his questions for him. “Her marriage. Not that there was anything wrong with Dan as such, but he hated living on Bryher, and Daisy loved it. Temperamentally, they were worlds apart. She liked solitude, silence, nature—and, of course, her mother was here.”

“Real sick was Mrs. Brownell. Cancer, I think,” said Josephine. “Poor woman.”

“So Daisy wouldn’t leave her mother, that it?”

“Yes.”

“But couldn’t she have left after her mother died?”

“Daisy felt tied to the place after that. She wouldn’t have left Bryher.”

“If her husband hated living here, why didn’t they just separate?”