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Fundy.
    “What else has the poor guy to enjoy?” Hurley said in a tone that, for him, was probably a whisper. He then eyed the assembled gathering and I quailed in anticipation of another hand crusher. But when he picked me out he strode over to bestow upon my fingers a quaintly old-fashioned kiss. Definitely a man to be watched in every sense, I thought, smiling back.
    “A real live English author,” he said, giving me a calculating stare. Later I discovered that he looked at everyone like that at the first meeting. There was no real brainwork behind it. It was a bit like the beam from an unmanned lighthouse.
    Wishing that he would let go of my hand and aware of a tiny frown between Emma’s immaculately plucked eyebrows, I said, “Surely there are plenty of writers in Vancouver.”
    Hurley looked at Robin and then back to me again.
    “Am I right?” I asked, taking back my hand.
    “Surely you are ma’am,” he replied, and from his wary manner I knew he thought we had been gossiping about him.
    “I’ve been listening to the radio,” I told him. “People tell me I have a good ear for remembering accents.”
    He gave a satisfied nod. “Then where would you place our Freddie?”
    “He talks like a parrot from a deplorable background,” I said, and everyone laughed.
    “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” mimicked Robin but went quiet when I gave him a look.
    Detecting continuing undercurrents I answered Hurley’s questions about my writing and then, after dinner, he joined Robin and me in one corner of the lounge. Unlike the Nasonworth contingent he was not interested in talking shop and I began to wonder if Emma or her husband had dropped a hint to him that Robin was not the engineer he was pretending to be. In a way Hurley was like a child, eager for knowledge. He laughed easily, which is not to say that he laughed at anything and everything, but he explored for humour and, finding it, injected a little more of his own. No one, I mused wryly, could be more of a contrast to Earl Lawrence. There did not seem to be one iota of spite in him, but something about him did make me wonder if he was putting on an act.
    I went to bed early, thinking about the presence of listening devices in every room and the more I thought about it the angrier I became. On the first night, undressing, I had wondered how sensitive they were and whether one could suffer from indigestion without losing one’s social reputation in New Brunswick. Then other aspects of this quite unwarranted snooping had occurred to me.
    On that night I had switched on the bedside clock radio and found CBC’s classical music station. When the door of my room had opened and closed soundlessly at a little after midnight I had not been alarmed, and had merely turned up the volume slightly. Conversation in the circumstances had been impossible and I had been helpless with laughter initially at my visitor’s contrite expression after the fright I had had. During the first movement of a symphony and after I had forgiven him, he had made love to me with breathtaking urgency. We had not dared speak. So there had been only Beethoven and that sweet, sweet strength.
    *
    I felt the business of the security surveillance within Ravenscliff, while not directly related to my brief, to be sufficiently interesting to be worth investigating. I had already drawn a diagram of the house, both upper and lower floors, marking exactly where everyone slept. It had not seemed necessary to make a separate drawing of the basement, or rumpus room as it was called, and I had merely noted that McAlister and Paul were bunking down in a partitioned corner of it, the one nearest another woodburner. Redding and Lawrence, of course, went back to their hotel and on the Friday afternoon of that and every subsequent week, flew back to Montreal for the weekend. As it happened, after an incident on the first Thursday after I arrived, the invitations to dinner ceased altogether.
    It had become