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Pitt has, in twenty-two years with the police, never felt comfortable with remorse. His look is a signal for Willis to take up the questioning.
    â€˜How long has Colonel Browne been away, Mr Garrod?’
    â€˜Oh. A fortnight. Thereabouts. They’ve gone for three weeks – to Switzerland.’
    â€˜And is it possible that Miss Browne was told about their holiday?’
    â€˜I don’t think so. She wasn’t told what they did.’
    â€˜Perhaps they go away every year at this time, do they?’
    â€˜Now abouts. Lady Amelia loves the Alps. In summer.’
    *
    And Garrod is right. Amelia Browne does love to gaze, as she gazes now, at the first stars peeping through their light years at her scented body on the hotel balcony and sense the now unseen presence of the mountains shouldering off the sky. She has dined well. At dinner, Duffy made a very un-Duffyish little speech about companionship and love, and his reassuring large presence at her side, coupled with these resonant words, have helped to quell the flutter of anxiety she had earlier struggled with. She has made no attempt, although it occurred to her to do so, to talk to Duffy about Charlotte. In spite of her protected life, Amelia Browne is like a patient birdwatcher of suffering. She detects it where others detect nothing. And in the spreading woods and rambly thickets of her husband’s contented life she has often seen it, the camouflaged frail body of the bird, suffering. It has built nests in the once radiant part of him, in foliage the colour of her daughter’s hair. But he isn’t a wordy man. Duffy and words seem to be locked in a lifelong struggle – an iguana fighting with the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. So he has never been able to say that Charlotte has made him suffer, nor how, nor why. ‘I just don’t think about her, Amelia,’ he once snapped into his glass of port. Then drained the glass like a bitter draught. And Amelia saw it: some cuckoobird quite alien to him, yet lodged there, and in certain seasons repetitively calling.
    Now he lies in the hotel bed, reading a new book about the Falklands War and waiting for Amelia to come in off the balcony. Slightly over-fed, he is content and sleepy. He admires Amelia for admiring the stars. He is indifferent to stars. He is beginning, lazily, to wonder what gulfs of the spirit still separate him from Amelia when the telephone at his elbow jolts him into concerned wakefulness. He picks up the receiver. Amelia’s face appears at the window and stares at him. From far away under the mountains, a dry English voice speaks in a tunnel of silence:
    â€˜Colonel Browne?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Amelia slips into the room. She presses a thin hand to her top lip.
    â€˜Detective Inspector Pitt, CID, here, Sir. I’m calling from Sowby.’
    *
    It is morning. Doyle has slept well. He congratulates himself on his refusal to dream about Margaret. He feels well in his new blood.
    He hears nurses’ voices whispering together over their dispensary trolley. He hears the words police . . . revolutionary . . . press . . . story . . . His scriptwriter’s heart pauses in its pumping to let these words stream through him like plasma. He feigns sleep. The nurses’ hands continue to measure out pills in little beakers. But over this measuring comes the almost inaudible conversation, patchy, like the shading of a face before the features are pencilled in:
    â€˜Someone . . . hospital . . . told the newspapers . . .’
    â€˜Sister Osborne . . . night duty . . .’
    â€˜The same policeman?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜. . . in Alexandra Ward . . .’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Charlotte Browne.’
    Now they are at Doyle’s bed.
    â€˜Mr Doyle . . .’
    He opens his eyes and smiles at the nurses.
    â€˜Sleep well, Mr