Candace said, “I suppose we’d better check the whole cottage, and then the garden and next door. Meanwhile I’ll get rid of this mess. The place stinks.”

She picked up the soiled plate and moved towards the sink. Lettie’s voice seemed as sharp as a command—“No, Candace, no!”—halting Candace in her tracks. She went on: “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout, but hadn’t we better leave things as they are? If Robin has had an accident, if something’s happened to him, timing might be important.”

Candace returned to the table and replaced the plate. “I suppose you’re right, but all this tells us is that he ate a meal, probably lunch or dinner, before setting off.”

They went upstairs. There were only two bedrooms, both a good size and each with a bathroom and shower. The slightly smaller one at the back was obviously unused, the bed made up with clean sheets covered with a patchwork counterpane.

Candace opened the door of the fitted wardrobe, then closed it and said defensively, “God knows why I thought he could be in here, but if we’ve come to search, we might as well be thorough.”

They moved to the front bedroom. It was simply and comfortably furnished but now looked as if it had been ransacked. A towelling dressing gown was lying on the bed with a crumpled T-shirt and a Terry Pratchett paperback. Two pairs of shoes had been flung into a corner, and the low padded chair was heaped with a jumble of woollen sweaters and trousers. Boyton had at least come prepared for the worst of December weather. The wardrobe door was open to reveal three shirts, a suede jacket and a dark suit. Was the suit, Lettie wondered, brought to be worn when he was at last admitted to see Rhoda Gradwyn?

Candace said, “This looks ominously like either a fight or a hasty departure, but taken with the state of the kitchen, I think all we can safely assume is that Robin was exceptionally untidy, and that I knew already. Anyway, he isn’t in the cottage.”

Lettie said, “No, he isn’t here,” and turned towards the door. But in one sense, she thought, he was there. The half-minute in which she and Candace had surveyed the bedroom had intensified her sense of foreboding. Now it had deepened into an emotion which was a puzzling mixture of dread and pity. Robin Boyton was absent but paradoxically he seemed more fully present than he had been three days ago when he erupted into the library. He was here in the jumble of youthful clothes, in the shoes, one pair with worn-down heels, in the carelessly discarded book, the crumpled T-shirt.