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Does she propose to live there?”
    “I don’t imagine so. I think she bought it as an investment and wants to sell. Even a remote cottage—particularly a remote cottage—has value on this coast. And she has some justice on her side. Blaney did say that his tenancy would be short term. I think she feels a certain resentment that he used his wife’s illness, her death, and now uses the children as an excuse for reneging on his undertaking to leave when she wanted the cottage back.”
    Dalgliesh was interested that Alice Mair apparently knew so much about local affairs. He had thought of her as essentially a private woman who would be very little concerned with her neighbours or their problems. And what about himself? In his deliberations whether to sell or keep on the mill as a holiday home he had seen it as a refuge from London, eccentric and remote, providing a temporary escape from the demands of his job and the pressures of success. But how far, even as an occasional visitor, could he isolate himself from the community, from their private tragedies no less than their dinner parties? It would be simple enough to avoid their hospitality, given sufficient ruthlessness, and he had never lacked that when it came to safeguarding his privacy. But the less tangible demands of neighbourliness might be less easily shrugged away. It was in London that you could live anonymously, could create your own ambience, could deliberately fabricate the persona which you chose to present to the world. In the country you lived as a social being and at the valuation of others. So he had lived in childhood and adolescence in the same country rectory, taking part each Sunday in a familiar liturgy which reflected, interpreted and sanctified the changing seasons of the farming year. It was a world he had relinquished with small regret, and he had not expected to find it again on Larksoken headland. But some of its obligations were here, deep-rooted in this arid and unfertile earth. His aunt had lived as privately as any woman he knew, but even she had visited and tried to help the Blaneys. He thought of the man, bereft and incarcerated in that cluttered cottage behind the great dike of shingle, listening night after night to the never-ceasing moaning of the tide, and brooding on the wrongs, real or imaginary, which could inspire that hate-filled portrait. It could hardly be healthy for him or for his children. Come tothat, Dalgliesh thought grimly, it could hardly be healthy for Hilary Robarts. He asked: “Does he get much official help with the children? It can’t be easy.”
    “As much as he’s prepared to tolerate. The local authority has arranged for the twins to attend some kind of day-care centre. They get collected most days. And Theresa, of course, is at school. She catches the bus at the end of the lane. She and Ryan between them cope with the baby. Meg Dennison—she housekeeps for the Reverend and Mrs. Copley at the Old Rectory—thinks we ought to do more for them, but it’s difficult to see precisely what. I should have thought she’d had her fill of children as an ex-schoolmistress, and I make no pretence at understanding them.” Dalgliesh remembered her whispered confidence to Theresa in the car, the child’s intent face and brief transforming smile, and thought that she understood one child at least far better than she would probably claim.
    But his thoughts returned to the portrait. He said: “It must be uncomfortable, particularly in a small community, to be the object of so much malevolence.”
    She understood at once what he meant. “Hatred rather than malevolence, wouldn’t you say? Uncomfortable and rather frightening. Not that Hilary Robarts is easily frightened. But she’s becoming something of an obsession with Ryan, particularly since his wife’s death. He chooses to believe that Hilary practically badgered her into her grave. It’s understandable, I suppose. Human beings need to find someone to blame both