Now it was late afternoon and the headland lay enriched by the mellow afternoon light, the sea a wide expanse of wrinkled blue with a painter's stroke of purple laid on the horizon. The colours and shapes were intensified by the sun's last strong rays so that the ruins of the abbey looked unreal, a golden fantasy against the blue of the sea, and the dry grass gleamed as richly as a lush water meadow. There was a window at each of the compass points, and, binoculars in hand, he made his slow perambulation. To the west his eyes could travel along the narrow road between the reed beds and the dykes to the flint-walled and Dutch-gabled cottages and the pantiled roofs of Lyd-sett village and the round tower of St Andrew's Church. To the north the view was dominated by the huge bulk of the power station, the low-roofed administration block with, behind it, the reactor building and the great steel, aluminium-clad building of the turbine house. Four hundred metres out to sea were the rigs and platforms of the intake structures through which the cooling sea water passed to the pump house and the circulating water pumps. He moved again to the eastern window and looked out over the cottages of the headland. Far to the south he could just glimpse the roof of Scudder's Cottage. Directly to his left the flint walls of Martyr's Cottage glistened like marbles in the afternoon sun and less than half a mile to the north, set back among the Californian pines which fringed that part of the coast, was the dull square cottage rented by Hilary Robarts, a neatly proportional suburban villa incongruously set down on this bleak headland and facing inland as if resolutely ignoring the sea. Further inland, and only just visible from the southern window was the Old Rectory, set like a Victorian dolls' house in its large, overgrown garden which, at this distance, looked as neatly green and formal as a municipal park.

The telephone rang. The strident peal was unwelcome. It was to get away from such intrusions that he had come to Larksoken. But the call was not unexpected. It was Terry Rickards saying that he would like to drop in for a chat with Mr Dalgliesh if it wouldn't be too much bother and would nine be convenient? Dalgliesh was unable to think of a single excuse why it shouldn't be. Ten minutes later he left the tower, locking the door after him. This precaution was a small act of piety. His aunt had always kept the door locked, fearing that children might venture into the mill and hurt themselves by tumbling down the ladders. Leaving the tower to its darkness and its solitude, he went into Mill Cottage to unpack and get his supper.

The huge sitting room with its York stone floor, rugs and open fireplace was a comfortable and nostalgic mixture of the old and the new. Most of the furniture was familiar to him from boyhood visits to his grandparents, inherited by his aunt as the last of her generation. Only the music centre and the television set were comparatively new. Music had been important to her and the shelves held a catholic collection of records with which he could refresh or console himself during the two weeks' holiday. And next door, the kitchen contained nothing superfluous but everything necessary to a woman who enjoyed food but preferred to cook it with a minimum of fuss. He put a couple of lamb chops under the grill, made a green salad and prepared to enjoy a few hours of solitude before the intrusion of Rickards and his preoccupations.

It still surprised him a little that his aunt had finally bought a television set. Had she been seduced into conformity by the excellence of the natural history programmes and then, like other late converts he had known, sat captive to virtually every offering as if making up for lost time? That at least seemed unlikely. He switched on to see if the set was still working. A jerking pop star was wielding his guitar as the credits rolled, his parodic sexual gyrations so grotesque that it was difficult to see that even the besotted young could find them erotic. Switching off, Dalgliesh looked up at the oil portrait of his maternal great-grandfather, the Victorian bishop, robed but unmitred, his arms in their billowing lawn sleeves confidently resting on the arms of the chair. He had an impulse to say, 'This is the music of 1988; these are our heroes; that building on the headland is our architecture and I dare not stop my car to help children home because they've been taught with good reason that a strange man might abduct and rape them.' He could have added, 'And out there somewhere is a mass murderer who enjoys strangling women and stuffing their mouths with their hair.' But that aberration, at least, was independent of changing fashions and his great-grandfather would have had his scrupulous but uncompromising answer to it. And with reason. After all, hadn't he been consecrated bishop in 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper? And probably he would have found the Whistler more understandable than the pop star whose gyrations would surely have convinced him that man was in the grip of his final, manic St Vitus's dance.

Rickards came promptly on time. It was precisely nine when Dalgliesh heard his car and, opening the door on the darkness of the night, saw his tall figure striding towards him. Dalgliesh hadn't seen him for more than ten years when he had been a newly appointed inspector in the Metropolitan CID and was surprised to see how little he had changed; time, marriage, removal from London, promotion, had left no apparent mark on him. His rangy, graceless figure, over six feet high, still looked as incongruous in a formal suit as it always had. The rugged, weatherbeaten face, with its look of dependable fortitude, would have looked more appropriate above a seaman's guernsey, preferably with RNLI woven across the chest. In profile his face, with the long, slightly hooked nose and jutting eyebrows, was impressive. In full face the nose was revealed as a little too wide and flattened at the base and the dark eyes, which when he was animated took on a fierce, almost manic gleam, in repose were pools of puzzled endurance. Dalgliesh thought of him as a type of police officer less common than formerly but still not rare; the conscientious and incorruptible detective of limited imagination and somewhat greater intelligence who had never supposed that the evil of the world should be condoned because it was frequently inexplicable and its perpetrators unfortunate.

He gazed round the sitting room at the long wall of books, the crackling wood fire, the oil of the Victorian prelate above the mantelshelf as if deliberately impressing each item on his mind, then sank into his chair and stretched out his long legs with a small grunt of satisfaction. Dalgliesh remembered that he had always drunk beer; now he accepted whisky but said he could do with coffee first. One habit at least had changed. He said: 'I'm sorry that you won't be meeting Susie, my wife, while you're here, Mr Dalgliesh. She's having our first baby in a couple of weeks and she's gone to stay with her mother in York. Ma-in-law didn't like the idea of her being in Norfolk with the Whistler on the prowl, not with me working the hours I do.'

It was said with a kind of embarrassed formality as if he, not Dalgliesh, were the host and he was apologizing for the unexpected absence of the hostess. He added: 'I suppose it's natural for an only daughter to want to be with her mother at a time like this, particularly with a first baby.'

Dalgliesh's wife hadn't wanted to be with her mother, she had wanted to be with him, had wanted it with such intensity that he had wondered afterwards whether she might have felt a premonition. He could remember that, although he could no longer recall her face. His memory of her, which for years, a traitor to grief and to their love, he had resolutely tried to suppress because the pain had seemed unbearable, had gradually been replaced by a boyish, romantic dream of gentleness and beauty now fixed for ever beyond the depredation of time. His newborn son's face he could still recall vividly and sometimes did in his dreams, that white unsullied look of sweet knowledgeable contentment, as if, in a brief moment of life, he had seen and known all there was to know, seen it and rejected it. He told himself that he was the last man who could reasonably be expected to advise or reassure on the problems of pregnancy and he sensed that Rickards's unhappiness at his wife's absence went deeper than missing her company. He made the usual inquiries about her health and escaped into the kitchen to make the coffee.