At first, his excursions were short. But gradually he began taking long forced marches that kept him away for several hours at a time. Cloaked in his dark green Barbour coat with a flat cap pulled low over his brow, he would troop south along the cliffs to Kynance Cove and Lizard Point, or north past the Loe to Porthleven. There were times when he would appear lost in thought and times when he adopted the wariness of a scout on a reconnaissance mission. Vera Hobbs reckoned he was trying to remember something, a theory Dottie Cox found laughable. “It’s obvious as the nose on your face, Vera, you old fool. The poor dear isn’t trying to remember anything. He’s doing his very best to forget.”

Two matters served to raise the level of intrigue in Gunwalloe still higher. The first concerned the men who always seemed to be fishing in the cove whenever the stranger was away on one of his walks. Everyone in Gunwalloe agreed they were the worst fishermen anyone had ever seen—in fact, most assumed they were not fishermen at all. And then there was the couple’s only visitor, a broad-shouldered Cornish boy with movie-idol good looks. After much speculation, it was Malcolm Braithwaite, a retired lobsterman who smelled perpetually of the sea, who correctly identified the lad as the Peel boy. “The one who rescued little Adam Hathaway at Sennen Cove but refused to say a word about it,” Malcolm reminded them. “The odd one from Port Navas. Mother used to beat the daylights out of him. Or was it the boyfriend?”

The appearance of Timothy Peel ignited a round of intense speculation about the stranger’s true identity, most of which was conducted under the influence at the Lamb and Flag pub. Malcolm Braithwaite decreed he was an informant hiding out in Cornwall under police protection, while Duncan Reynolds somehow got it into his head that the stranger was a Russian defector. “Like that bloke Bulganov,” he insisted. “The poor sod they found dead in the Docklands a few months ago. Our new friend better watch his step or he might meet the same fate.”