Another child, a little girl who looked several years younger than fourteen-year-old Zoe, was introduced as Zillah. That is, was pointed out, for Zillah, unlike Zoe, had no intention of joining the group. Zillah was sitting on the staircase and, upon hearing her name, inched herself farther back against the shadowed wall.

Macalvie could barely make her out, sealed in shadow as she was. He could see clearly only her hair, fine and light as puffball filaments.

Following the direction of his gaze, Zoe said, “That’s Zillah, but she won’t help.”

Her aunt, unhappy with this version of things, said, “Zillah’s too frightened to talk, Zoe, as you perfectly well know. Don’t make it sound as if the poor child is being stubborn.”

“She won’t talk, Aunt Hilda. She just won’t. You can see it in her eyes.”

Hilda flapped her hand, brushing her niece’s comments away. “Anyway, about this murder, it was Zoe and Zillah that found her—”

Zoe’s eyes widened in shock, not at the memory of the corpse but at her aunt’s stealing her thunder. “I can tell it!”

Hilda seemed about to protest when DCI Whitten jumped in. “She can, you know, and best she does. I’d like Commander Macalvie to hear it firsthand.”

Pleased, but giving Macalvie the once-over as if debating whether or not he was firsthand material, Zoe asked, “What’s a commander in the police?”

Whitten answered, “Very high up. Much higher up than me. He works in Exeter.”

Tongue literally in cheek, Zoe studied Macalvie. “Are you? Is that right?”

“What? That I work in Exeter?”

“No-o. That you’re really high up.”

“Not as high as you’d like me to be. Not the commissioner. But let’s hear it anyway.”

It hardly took persuading. “Okay.” Zoe’s gaze trailed off and over to a window, black-paned now in the darkness. “I was outside playing with Zillah and then we decided to go over to Hell Bay—”

“Which,” said her aunt, “you are not supposed to do, you know that.”

Zoe barely stopped in her stream of description and lowered her voice. “We went down to the water’s edge. We were collecting shells like we always do and it was dusk—you know, dusk.”

(Here was a word she apparently liked for its dark implications.)

“And the waves were really crashing on the rocks. And then I saw this … thing. Not up close yet, and I thought maybe it was a seal or something because the thing was so pale. Closer, paler still, like a ghost.”

There was a movement on the stair and Macalvie looked towards it. Was Zillah shaking her head in mute protest?

“And I grabbed Zillah’s hand and said we’d got to run to the hotel and tell them.”

“Where you should have run is straight home.”

Zoe didn’t bother to comment here. “We told the woman there, the one in charge.”