“So you fucked him.”

“No!” Her voice rose to a scream. “I did not. I wanted you to feel how I felt. I wanted you to hurt like I hurt, how you made me hurt by wanting from me all those things that I could never give you. Why did you break with me? And why-why-won’t you leave me now?”

“So you accused me…?” There. He’d finally said it directly.

“Yes! I did. Because you’re so good. You’re so God damn bloody good, and it’s your miserable sainthood that I could not tolerate. Not then and not now. You keep turning the other God damn cheek and when you do that, I completely despise you. And whenever I despised you, you broke with me, and that’s when I loved you and wanted you most.”

He was left with saying only, “You’re mad.”

Then he had to get away from her. To remain in the bedroom meant he was going to have to come to terms with having built his life on a lie. For when the Newquay police had focused their enquiries upon him for week after week and month after month, he had turned to Dellen for comfort and strength. She made him whole, he’d thought. She made him what he was. Yes, she was difficult. Yes, they had their occasional troubles. But when it was right between them, weren’t they better than they could ever have been with anyone else?

So when she’d followed him to Truro, he’d embraced what he decided that meant. When her trembling lips had pronounced the words, “I’m pregnant again,” he’d embraced this announcement as if an angel had appeared before him in a dream, as if the imaginary walking staff he daily carried had indeed bloomed with lilies upon his waking. And when she got rid of that baby as well-just as she’d done with the babies before it, his and the offspring of two others-he’d soothed her and agreed that she wasn’t quite ready, that they weren’t quite ready, that the time wasn’t right. He owed her the allegiance she’d shown him, he decided. She was a troubled spirit. He loved her and he could cope with that.

When they finally married, he felt as if he’d captured an exotic bird. She was not to be held in a cage, however. He could only have her if he set her free.

“You’re the only one I truly want,” she would say. “Forgive me, Ben. It’s you that I love.”

Now on the top of the cliff, Ben’s breath returned to normal from the climb. The sheen of sweat he wore chilled him in the sea breeze, and he became aware of the lateness of the day. He realised that in making the abseil down the face of the cliff, he’d ultimately stood in the very spot where Santo had lain, dead or dying. And it came to him that, while walking in Santo’s footsteps along the path from the road, while fastening the sling to the old stone post, while rappelling down and preparing for the climb back up, he’d not thought of Santo once. He’d come to do so, and he’d still not managed it. His mind had been filled-as always-with Dellen.

This seemed to him the ultimate betrayal, the monstrous one. Not that Dellen had betrayed him by casting suspicion on him all those years ago. But that he himself had just betrayed Santo. A pilgrimage to the very spot where Santo had perished had not been enough to exorcise the boy’s mother from his thoughts. Ben realised that he lived and breathed her as if she were a contagion afflicting only him. Away from her, he might as well have been with her, which was the reason he’d kept returning.

He was in this, he thought, as sick as she was. Indeed, he was sicker. For if she could not help being the Dellen she was and had always been, he could stop being the perversely loyal Benesek who’d made it far too simple for her just to continue.

When he rose from the boulder on which he’d sat to catch his breath, he felt stiff from cooling down in the breeze. He knew he’d pay in the morning for the rapidity of the climb. He went to the stone post where the sling was looped, and he began drawing the rope back up the cliff, looping it carefully and just as carefully examining it for frays. Even in this he found he could not concentrate on Santo.

There was a moral question involved in all this, Ben knew, but he found he lacked the courage to ask it.

DAIDRE TRAHAIR HAD BEEN waiting in the public bar of the Salthouse Inn the better part of an hour when Selevan Penrule came through the door. He looked round the room when he saw that his daily drinking companion was not nursing a Guinness in the inglenook, which Selevan and Jago Reeth regularly commandeered for themselves, and he ventured over to join Daidre at her table by the window.

“Thought he’d be here by now,” Selevan said without preamble as he pulled out a chair. “Rang me to say he’d be late, he did. Cops were there talking to him and Lew. Cops’re talking to everyone. Talk to you yet?” He gave a sailor’s salute to Brian, who’d ventured out of the kitchen upon Selevan’s entrance. Brian said, “The regular?” and Selevan said, “Aye,” and then back to Daidre, “Even talked to Tammy, they did, though that was cos the girl had something to tell them and not cos they had questions of her. Well, why should they? She knew the boy, but that was the extent of it. Wished it otherwise, and I don’t mind saying that, but she wasn’t interested. All for the best as things turned out, eh? Bloody hell, though, I wish they’d get to the bottom of this. Feel sorry for the family, I do.”

Daidre would have preferred it if the old man hadn’t decided to join her, but she couldn’t come up with an excuse that would politely communicate her desire to be left in peace. For she’d never come into the Salthouse Inn prior to this for the purpose of having a bit of peace, so why would he assume that now? No one would come to the Salthouse Inn for peace, as the inn was where denizens of the area gathered for gossip and conviviality, not for meditation.

She said, “They want to talk to me,” and she showed him the note she’d found at her cottage. It was written on the back of DI Hannaford’s card. “I’ve spoken to them already,” she said. “The day Santo died. I can’t think why they want to question me again.”

Selevan looked at the card, turning it over in his hands. “Looks serious,” he told her. “With them leaving their cards and the like.”

“I think it’s more that I don’t have a phone. But I’ll speak with them. Of course I will.”

“Mind you get yourself a solicitor. Tammy didn’t, but that’s cos Tammy had something to tell them and not the reverse, like I said. ’S not as if she was hiding something. She had information, so she handed it over.” He cocked his head at her. “You hiding something yourself, my girl?”

Daidre smiled and pocketed the card as the old man returned it to her. “We all have secrets, don’t we. Is that why you’re suggesting a solicitor?”

“Didn’t say that,” Selevan protested. “But you’re a deep one, Dr. Trahair. We’ve known that ’bout you from the first. No girl throws a dart like you without having something tricky in her background, you ask me.”

“I’m afraid that Roller Derby is as dark as my secrets get, Selevan.”

“What’s that, then?”

She tapped his hand with the tips of her fingers. “You’ll have to do your research and find out, my friend.”

Through the windows, then, she saw the Ford as it bumped into the inn’s uneven car park. Lynley got out of it and started to walk in the direction of the inn, but he turned as another car entered the car park behind him, this one a rather decrepit Mini whose driver honked the car’s horn at him as if he were in the way.

“That Jago, then?” Selevan was not in a position to see the car park from where he sat. He said, “Cheers, mate,” to Brian, who brought him his Glenmorangie, and he slurped down his first gulp with satisfaction.

“No,” Daidre said slowly. “It isn’t.” As she watched the car park, she could hear Selevan nattering on about his granddaughter. Tammy had a mind of her own, it seemed, and nothing was going to put her off a course she’d set for herself. “Got to admire the lass for that,” Selevan was saying. “P’rhaps we’re all being too hard on the girl.”