His car was the fastest, but speed was hardly important, nor was it possible on the winding country road. It could be too late now to get to the sea before she walked to her death, if drowning was what she had in mind. It was impossible to know if her brother was speaking the truth but, remembering his anguished face, Dalgliesh thought that he probably was. Benton took only minutes fetching the Jaguar from the Old Police Cottage and was waiting as Dalgliesh and Westhall reached the road. Without speaking he opened the back door for Westhall to get in, then followed him. Apparently this passenger was too unpredictable to be left alone in the back of a car.

Benton took out his torch and gave directions for their route. The smell of paraffin from Dalgliesh’s clothes and hands filled the car. He lowered the window, and the night air, cold and sweet, filled his lungs. The narrow country roads, rising and falling, uncurled before them. On either side, Dorset stretched away, its valleys and hills, the small villages, the stone cottages. There was little traffic in this, the dead of night. All the houses were in darkness.

And now he could smell a change in the air, a freshness which was more a sensation than a smell but to him unmistakable: the salt tang of the sea. The lane narrowed as they descended through the silent village and then on to the quayside at Kimmeridge Bay. Before them the sea shimmered under the stars and the moon. Whenever Dalgliesh was in reach of the sea, he felt himself drawn to it like an animal to a pool of water. Here, down the centuries since man first stood upright on a shore, its immemorial plangency, unfailing, unseeing, uncaring, caught at so many emotions, not least, as now, the awareness of the transience of human life. They moved eastwards to the beach under the looming blackness of the shale cliff, rising dark as coal and tufted at its base with grass and bushes. The slabs of black shale ran out to sea in a pathway of sea-splashed rocks. The waves slid over them, hissing their retreat. In the moonlight they glistened like polished ebony.

They crunched on by the light of their torches, sweeping them over the beach and the causeway of black shale. Marcus Westhall, who had been silent on the journey, seemed now revitalised and plunged on through the pebbled fringe of shoreline as if tireless. They rounded a promontory and were faced by another narrow beach, another stretch of black fissured rocks. They found nothing.

And they could go no further. The beach ended as the cliffs, sloping to the sea, barred their way.

Dalgliesh said, “She’s not here. We could try the other beach.”