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breaks from the kind fluids of the womb and is dried and wrapped, tottering out his futile years on two dry legs. But the pain of those thousands of days of standing upright! The longings to lie down and be rocked by love or purpose or adulation! Earth. The wrong element. An evolutionary mistake. The root cause of all oppression and the abandonment of children in cupboard rooms smelling of damp laundry mangles and mothballs. WE ARE NOT PEOPLE OF DUST! He mouths this to the clear sky and the wind. A seagull shrieks. He sits up in the wonderful sea and it shows him the beach, grey-yellow, the white houses, the cliffs like crumbly coconut-ice. The people are not even blobs or dots. The people are not there.
    So he lies back, comforted. Then he rolls over, holds the fathoms in his arms like a lover and each second the body he rides hurls him forward with its own changing shape. So begins the love affair of Jim Reese with the sea. As the sun sinks and the colours of the sun spread through the water, it grows more intense and harder to relinquish. From the stern of her husband’s yacht, Jessica-Lee Lasky, holding an imaginary cocktail glass in her left hand, sees it for one piercing second: the flesh and dark head of Jim Reese embedded in the body of the ocean. She calls to Owen Lasky: ‘Owen! I saw a man!’ And Owen traipses to the jolting aft section of his boat and stares with his wife at the empty water. They stare and stare. Jessica-Lee Lasky forgets cocktails and starts to feel afraid. Owen pats her shoulder and says in his bank manager’s voice: ‘You must have imagined him, dear.’ But no, Jessica-Lee feels certain that she saw him, this person holding fast to the water itself as if to a raft, and asks her husband to turn the boat round.
    *
    Detective Inspector Pitt and WPC Verna Willis have carried Garrod to a bedroom which he, yet not they, recognises as Colonel Browne’s own bedroom. In this lofty bed, the old man is becoming for the second time in his life the returning war hero, the lad who showed courage and initiative, the lad who came through . . .
    â€˜Sailcord,’ he says in a disdainful, tired voice, ‘she tied me with sailcord. There’s give in sailcord, you see, Sir.’
    The ambulance has been called. WPC Willis, who did a year’s nursing training before she joined the force, has taken Garrod’s pulse and listened to his heart and both these manifestations of life are fluttery and feeble. She looks concerned as Pitt ploughs on with his questions.
    â€˜Did you recognise the woman?’
    â€˜No, Sir.’
    â€˜We have reason to believe the woman was Colonel Browne’s daughter.’
    â€˜I never met the daughter. I came to this house in ’76. She was on the television that year or the next. Some demonstration. She had red hair. But I never met her.’
    â€˜But this woman was about her age, was she?’
    â€˜I don’t know, Inspector. Her face was covered. And the hair.’
    â€˜How had she got into the house?’
    â€˜Well. She walked in. There wasn’t any noise.’
    â€˜So she had a key to the front door?’
    â€˜I reckon.’
    â€˜The door wasn’t bolted?’
    Garrod winces. Now the returning war hero remembers the unfastened safety catch on the rifle, the puncture in the spare tyre of the jeep . . . The circling bird begins its far off turning and Garrod is silent.
    â€˜Mr Garrod? Was the front door not bolted?’
    Garrod’s head lolls. He whispers: ‘Dunno how she could have known . . .’
    â€˜Known?’
    â€˜I’ve been ill, Sir. Laid up.’
    â€˜And you believe the woman knew this?’
    â€˜Or I would have remembered the door . . .’
    â€˜The bolt?’
    â€˜Yes. I would have remembered the bolt.’
    Detective Inspector Pitt looks at WPC Willis, who has turned on a little green-shaded lamp in the darkening bedroom.