He found a roll of surgical tape in the cabinet over the washbasin and cut off a couple of lengths, using the razor jenny had loaned him, then taped the Browning to the inside of his left leg just above the anklebone, covering it with his sock.

He buttoned his trenchcoat as he went downstairs. Jenny was waiting in the hall dressed in a red plastic mac. She gave him a tight smile as she pulled on her gloves. 'Ready to go, then?'

He opened the front door, but stopped her with a hand on her shoulder as she was about to step outside. 'There isn't anything else, is there? Anything you've forgotten to tell me?'

She flushed and the anger was there in her voice again. 'Would I be likely to do a thing like that?'

'That's all right, then,' He smiled calmly. 'We'd better get going.'

He closed the door and followed her down the steps to the Mini-Cooper parked at the bottom. The marsh at Grimsdyke on the river estuary was a wild, lonely place of sea-creeks and mud flats and great, pale barriers of reeds higher than a man's head. Since the beginning of history men had come here for one purpose or another, Roman, Saxon, Dane, Norman, but now it was a place of ghosts. An alien world inhabited mainly by the birds, curlew and redshank and brent geese coming south from Siberia for the winter on the mud flats.

They passed through the village, a pleasant enough little place. Thirty or forty houses, a garage and pub, and then they were out on the other side. It was raining quite hard, the wind driving it in off the sea and across the marshes in great clouds.

'Half a mile beyond the village on the right.' Jenny glanced at Fallon briefly. 'That's what the man said.'

'This looks like it,' Fallon told her.

She turned the Cooper off the main road and followed a track no wider than a farm cart that was little more than a raised causeway of grass. On either side miles of rough marsh grass and reeds marched into the heavy rain and a thin sea mist was drifting before the wind.

Fallon lowered the window on his side and took a deep breath of the pungent salt air. 'Quite a place.'

'I used to love coming here when I was a kid,' she said. 'It was like nowhere else on earth. A different world after the city.'

The closer they got to the estuary, the more the mist seemed to close in on them and then they topped a rise and saw what was very obviously the mill sticking up above a clump of trees about a hundred yards to the south of them.

Fallon put a hand on her arm and she braked to a halt. 'Now what?'

'We'll walk from here.'

'Is that necessary?'

'If I've learned anything in life it's never to take anything for granted.'

She shrugged, but got out of the car without further argument and Fallon left the track and forced his way through a fir plantation towards the mill, dimly seen through the trees.

He crouched under a bush, pulling Jenny down beside him and examined the place carefully. There was a three-storeyed stone tower, roof open to the sky. At one end there was an extension made of wood which looked like a barn and seemed to be in a better state of repair than the rest of the building. A thin trickle of smoke drifted up from an iron chimney.

At the other side there was an immense water-wheel and it was moving round now with an unearthly creaking and groaning, forced by the rushing waters of the flooded stream.

'No sign of his mini-van,' Fallon said softly.

'He'll have it inside that barn, won't he?' Jenny replied, and then added impatiently, 'For goodness sake, make your mind up. Are we going on or aren't we? I'm getting wet.'

She seemed angry and yet the fingers of her left hand trembled slightly. He said, 'You go. Give me a call if everything is all right.'

She glanced at him with a certain surprise in her eyes, then shrugged, stood up and walked out into the open. He watched her go, all the way to the barn. She turned to look at him once, then opened the big double door and went in.

She reappeared a moment later and called, 'It's all right. Everything's fine. Come on.'

Fallon hesitated for a moment and then shrugged and walked out into the clearing, a slight, fixed smile on his face. When he was four or five yards from the door, Jenny said, 'They're here,' and she went back inside.

He followed her in without hesitation. The place smelled of old hay and mice. There was a decrepit cart in one corner and a large loft ran round three sides of the building with round glassless windows letting in light. A fire was burning in an old iron stove in the corner.

There was no sign of Father da Costa or Anna, not that Fallon had really expected there to be. Only Jenny, standing alone beside a small iron cot bed against the far wall on which a little fair-haired girl was apparently sleeping, covered by a blanket.

'I'm sorry, Martin,' she said, and there was genuine distress in her face now. 'I didn't have any choice.'

'Up here Fallon,' a voice called.

Fallon looked up and saw Donner on the edge of the loft holding an Armalite rifle. Rupert was standing beside him clutching a sawn-off shotgun and Harry, the barman from the Bull and Bell, appeared in the loft at the other side of the building, some sort of revolver in his hand.

Donner raised the Armalite a little. 'They tell me that a bullet from one of these things goes in at the front and out at the back and takes a sizeable piece of you with it on the way, so I'd advise you to stay very still.'

'Oh, I will,' Fallon assured him without irony. And he raised his hands.

Harry came down the ladder from the loft first. He looked terrible. His left eye was completely closed and one side of his face was very badly bruised. He stood a yard or two away, covering Fallon with his revolver while Rupert followed him down the ladder. When they were both in position, Donner lowered the Armalite and joined them.

'Never trust a woman, ducky,' Rupert said with a mocking smile. 'I'd have thought you'd have learnt that. Unreliable bitches, the lot of them. Ruled by the moon. Now me, for instance ...'

Donner kicked him in the leg. 'Shut up and search him. He'll probably have the shooter in his right-hand pocket.'

Rupert found the Ceska at once and the buff envelope containing the money. Donner looked inside and whistled softly. 'How much?' he demanded.

'Two thousand,' Fallon said.

Donner grinned. 'That must be what they meant by an unexpected bonus.'

He put the envelope in his inside pocket and Rupert started to run his hands over Fallon's body. 'Lovely,' he breathed. 'I could really go for you, ducky,' and he patted Fallon's cheek.

Fallon sent him staggering back with a stiff right arm. 'Put a hand on me again, and I'll break your neck.'

Rupert's eyes glittered and he picked up the sawn-off shotgun and thumbed back the hammer. 'My, my, aren't we butch?' he said softly. 'But I can soon fix that.'

Donner kicked him in the backside. 'You bloody stupid little bitch,' he cried. 'What are you trying to do? Ruin everything at this stage?' He shoved him violently away. 'Go on and make some tea. It's all you're fit for.'

Rupert moved over to the stove sullenly, still clutching his shotgun, and Donner took a pair of regulation police hand-cuffs from his pocket. He snapped them around Fallon's wrists, locked them and slipped the key into his breast pocket.

'You can have it the hard way or you can have it easy,' he said. 'It's all one to me. Understand?'

'I always try to,' Fallon said.

'Right, go and sit down by the bird where I can keep an eye on both of you.'

Fallon moved across to the cot and sat down beside it, his back against the wall. He looked at the child. Her eyes were closed, the breathing easy.

'The daughter you told me about?' he said. 'Is she all right?'