Haig stopped his motorbike at the back of the pub's car park and switched off the engine. Beyond three strands of wire slung between lichen-scabbed, concrete posts, rocky ground sloped gently to a sheer drop off the edge of the north coast of Devon. The summer sun was setting behind the pub, sparkling in reflection from the windows of Farne village. Having spent two of his thirty-eight years in the area, Haig could put a name to most of the shops and public buildings of the small town at the middle of the sweep of Farnescombe Bay, but most of the private houses remained mysteries.
  It was nine o'clock on the evening of a hot, August Wednesday. Voices filtered round from the garden at the side of the pub, where holidaymakers were enjoying a view of the long swell in the Bristol Channel, the last of the day's sun and a gently, salty, onshore breeze.
  Haig's motorbike was a 650 cc Norton, which had been converted to a three-wheeler. It had panniers at the back and a tubular framework around the rider, which acted as a roll-cage and a support for a clear plastic shelter for use in bad weather. It was the sort of vehicle usually seen on a cinema or TV screen showing a Seventies Road Movie, being driven by a fat slob of a Hell's Angel wearing an Iron Cross and a German-style steel helmet boldly decorated with swastikas.
  Haig himself was an inch over six feet, weighed twelve stones and kept himself reasonably fit. His denim jeans were well-worn but clean and he was wearing a plain, blue cotton jacket over a maroon sweatshirt. His helmet was pure white, unadorned by advertising slogans. There was nothing of the scruffy Hell's Angel about him, but he was clearly not the sort of person who went around in a suit and tie.
  Haig locked his helmet in one of the panniers and crunched across gravel to the front door of the pub. He gave it a shove and made an entrance. As the door swung closed behind him, he paused, pulled his sunglasses down his nose and peered over them. His eyes travelled to left, to right and back to the bar. Satisfied that the room contained nothing and no one of greater interest than himself, he pushed the polarized sunglasses back up his straight nose. As he approached the bar, he could feel eyes on him. Some of the scattering of holidaymakers inside were wondering who he was. Jeremy Haig was definitely somebody in Farne.
  Two stone cottages at the western tip of Farnescombe Bay had been amalgamated to create the pub. A local lad had run away to sea in the middle of the nineteenth century and returned with a modest fortune. He had invested it in The Seadog's Roost. A thirsty mariner who staggered through the front door was on a true course for the bar.
  The ground floor of the pub contained just two rooms, which were linked by the bar and a sliding door. A heavy-duty carpet of red and black flecks covered the stone floors. The building had been modernized comprehensively, and recently, but the brewery had retained a veneer of the original seafarers' pub. Not a one of the charts and prints on the smoke-creamed white walls was younger than early Victorian.
  Haig fished about in the pockets of his jacket and dumped a double handful of change on the bar. The coins were mainly nickel-silver; post-1948 George VI and early Elizabeth II and the newer decimal issues. Haig separated halfcrowns, sixpences and other redundant coins out of the pile, then he began to sort the rest into £1 units.
  Kitty Bishop, the landlady, placed a beermat in front of him and deposited a half-pint glass of the local bitter on it. She counted out the price of the beer, then exchanged £1 coins for the other piles. Haig's final offering was a heavy-duty plastic bag of pre-1948 nickel-silver British coins, which had a silver content of 50%.
  "Most of it's rubbish," he remarked, "but there's some reasonable ones and one or two quite good ones."
  Mrs. Bishop was in her middle thirties, small and dark like many of the women in the area, and the mother of two girls and a boy. Her nimble fingers sorted the second batch of coins into four groups: Victoria, Edward VII, George V and George VI. Then she subdivided the coins in the groups into good, so-so and indifferent.
  She was a jeweller in a small way, specializing in bracelets and necklaces that featured coins. She was trying to create a fashion for wearing a coin minted in the year of the owner's birth. Teenagers were encouraged to buy them as proof that they were over eighteen and entitled to be served with alcohol. She had not met anyone old enough to pre-date George V's accession, but these coins were popular joke presents for relatives in their sixties and seventies; or much younger.
  Women who were reluctant to admit their age were encouraged to record the year of their marriage or the births of children. The main selling point of the coins that Haig supplied was that they were 50% silver, unlike their cheap, modern counterparts. Such coins could be considered as legitimate an element of a piece of jewellery as nine-carat gold, which contains 62.5% of adulterants.
  Haig and the landlady had agreed a scale of prices based on age, condition and scarcity. Their list allowed them to conduct their business without haggling. They simply divided the coins into clear price categories and multiplied the number by a figure from the list. It was a civilized way of doing business.
  There was a lad in his mid-teens messing about at the back of his motorbike when Haig left the pub. He reached down for a flattish stone and skimmed it ten yards. The youngster let out a yelp and clutched at the crown of his thatch of tangled, sandy hair. For no apparent reason, he looked up at the sky, as if expecting to see an eagle that had bombed him.
  "What's your game?" Haig demanded violently, arriving unnoticed beside him.
  The youth let out a small squeak of surprise.
  "What were you doing to my bike?" snarled Haig.
  "Nothing! Honest!"
  "I know you now." Haig prodded the youth's denim jacket with a rigid index finger. "If anything happens to this bike, you're going to bloody cop it. Got that?"
  "I ain't done nothing, mister."
  "I don't care. Anything happens to my bike and I take it out on you. Got that? Now, scram!"
  The youth ran away, intimidated successfully. Three of his friends had once ignored a warning not to throw stones at Haig's part-time cat. A threat of immediate physical violence had put them to flight. Haig had discovered that there is no reasoning with a certain breed of bored teenager, whose standard reply to a deserved rebuke is abuse. Force, and very particular threats against specific individuals, met with more success, in Haig's experience. So did counter-threats of reporting them to the RSPCA when young thugs threatened, from a safe distance, to shop him to the police for assault.
  Haig reclaimed his crash helmet from the pannier. He released the steering lock and switched on the ignition. He had added an electric starter as an alternative to the kick-starter. The engine purred into life. He took a last look at the view, the tide was in and had almost covered the Farne Rock, then he moved out onto the road.
  Farnescombe Bay was essentially a flooded, elliptical crater that was three-quarters of a mile across at its widest part. The Farne Rock was a lone tooth in the mouth of the bay, a plug of crystalline, volcanic rock that was significantly harder than the neighbouring structures. This hazard to navigation had brought the locals many bonuses over the centuries.
  Erosion over four hundred years had carved away the last of a low hill, which had once sheltered the large village or small town. The same Victorian architect, who had created Haig's home, had drawn up a set of plans for a wall to check the sea's inward march. World War Two was history and the architect had been dead for eighty-two years before the money to built the wall had become available.
  Jeremy Haig was one of the few people in the area who knew the architect's name. His thorough knowledge of the local geography and how Farne had developed through the ages formed an essential part of one of his schemes for providing income.
  The road from the top of the bay descended sixty feet in three-quarters of a mile into Farne village. Haig drove along the main road, past shops, a few boarding houses and the modest community centre. A cinema, a disco-club and two pubs provided the night life. Farne encouraged holiday visitors who wanted a restful time on the beach or in the wild surrounding countryside. Loud, young invaders were not welcome, particularly loud, drunken young invaders.
  Beyond a collection of compact, stone cottages, which were contemporaries of the Seadog's Roost, a minor branch of the road curved to the left. The paved surface ran as far as Haig's destination, where the road became a footpath. A quarter of a mile further on, at the eastern limb of the bay, the path descended steeply, zig-zagging across the cliff face to a stretch of beach to the east of Holland Point.
  Haig let himself through a sturdy, blue gate in his stone boundary wall and unlocked the garage. Mikki's bike was hanging in the rack on the wall. Someone had told her that her tyres would last longer if she kept the weight of the bike off them when it was not in use. Haig parked his motorbike beside the solidly black Transit van. When he had locked the garage, he let himself through the porch and into the building that was known locally as Farne Lighthouse.
  The tower was a folly, built by a fabulously rich Victorian entrepreneur mid-way between Farne village and the eastern lip of Farnescombe Bay. It stood a quarter of a mile from Holland Point, the logical site for a lighthouse, and it had never worn a light. The milky stone rose sixty-five feet into the air, tapering from a thirty-foot base to a flat roof fourteen feet across within a circle of retaining wall two feet high and two feet thick. One hundred and twelve stone steps wound two and three-eighths times round the tower to connect the cellar with seven higher rooms and the roof, which was reached via a waterproof, submarine-type hatch.
  In the cellar were the central heating boilers and an emergency electricity generator. Haig kept his chainsaw there when he was not using it to cut large chunks of driftwood into handy logs. He had vast amounts of firewood stored, and an old bloke from the village was happy to collect and bag the wood ash. He and his customers were convinced that it was good for gardens. Haig was happy to let the old bloke make his bit of money out of the remains of free wood.
  The front door opened beneath the first-floor landing into a general-purpose, combined workroom and laundry room, which contained a bathroom and toilet in the north-eastern quadrant. A dumb waiter connected the first-floor kitchen with the second-floor dining room.
  As the kitchen was large enough to allow three people to eat in comfort, Haig and his companions reserved the dining room for special occasions. A folding partition could be drawn across the dining room to divide off the southern sector as a drawing room.
  Three doors led off the third-floor landing; one to a toilet, one to the master bedroom and the third to the rest of the staircase, acting as a combined draught excluder and fire door. The second bedroom occupied the whole of the fourth floor. Above it, another toilet with external access reduced the spare room to a slightly eccentric shape. The study offered a peaceful refuge to anyone fit enough to climb eighty-four steps and complete almost two revolutions of the tower.
  Three-foot railings topped the two-foot retaining wall to create a feeling of safe enclosure at the flat roof of the 'lighthouse'. There was more than enough room for a dinner party there, or a soiré under the stars if the weather was favourable. The first owner of the tower had been noted for his lavish entertainment, and the mountings for the posts of a block and tackle, used to raise furniture to a glassed enclosure on the roof, were still there and useable over a century after his death. The twin spears of lightning conductors curved outward and away from the railings. Their upward thrust added another nine feet to the height of the tower.
  James Fullerton, the tower's creator, had made his fortune in the late eighteen-forties and early eighteen-fifties. The black sheep of a fairly wealthy Bristol family of merchants had been sent to the United States to prevent his antics from causing further embarrassment to his thoroughly respectable relatives. He had drifted to California in time for the gold rush, where he had applied an individual business sense to the problem of becoming seriously rich.
  Fullerton had reasoned that digging for gold was difficult, heart-breaking and downright dangerous if done successfully. And so, rather than waste his time on prospecting with no guarantee of success, and breaking his back digging, he had decided to let others take the risks.
  Falling back on the training that his father had attempted to give him, Fullerton had bought food and mining equipment cheaply, hired himself three tough bodyguards on a promise of a slice of the profits, and sold his goods to successful miners for as much as the market would stand. He had returned to England in triumph, bringing with him a fortune and the survivor of his team of bodyguards, who had killed the other two when they had tried to make off with the whole of James Fullerton's profits.
  The two confirmed bachelors had led riotous lives until the early years of the Naughty Nineties before dying within a few months of each other. They had been successful in surviving most of James Fullerton's disapproving brothers and sisters and a collection of cousins.
  Younger relatives, who had been looking forward to inheriting Uncle Jack's vast fortune, had been horrified to discover that he had run it down to a few hundred pounds and his eccentric home, which was known in Farne as Fullerton's Folly. They refused to accept that Uncle Jack and Joe Stark, his American bodyguard, had been spending at a rate of £10,000 per annum for the best part of forty years at a time when most people lived on a few shillings a week.
  Even though his doctor had been able to chart Fullerton's failing health, giving him quite accurate estimates of his life expectancy, and the accounts at his bank told a clear story, the relatives continued to believed that they would be able to find discrepancies between withdrawals from the bank and Uncle Jack's expenditure. They had searched long and hard for the 'missing' money, in vain, adding one more tale of hidden treasure to an area overburdened with such stories.
  The tower had entered the twentieth century with central heating, running hot and cold water right up to the servants' quarters on the top two floors, a flush toilet on the ground floor and an efficient, solid-fuel range in the kitchen. Electricity had arrived in the nineteen-twenties. The kitchen had been all-electric when Haig had taken possession of the tower. He could use a conventional fridge-freezer instead of ice and the underground cold-room with its insulating walls of solid rock.
  Both main bedrooms had a private shower and the toilets and the ground-floor bathroom had been refitted recently. The central heating retained its twin boilers, one fired with British Coal's best smokeless solid fuel and the other burning driftwood and the occasional dead tree.
  A garage with stone walls and a concrete storeroom had been added beside the porch in the spring of 1940. The tower's wartime owner, a wealthy London barrister, who had used it as a holiday retreat, had wanted to protect his Rolls-Royce from bomb splinters in the unlikely event of a German air-raid on the Farnescombe Bay area.
  The garage had been built of the same, darker stone as the five-foot wall, which enclosed a garden twenty yards square on the south side of the tower. The Lighthouse, Farne was the most desirable address in the area.

Haig climbed twenty-eight stairs and looked into the dining room. The part-time cat, a huge tabby, was perched in the window alcove opposite the door, lying on his stomach with his white feet tucked away, tail wrapped round his body, looking like a furry ornament or a child's pyjama case.
  Green eyes closed, he was soaking up the last rays of that day's sun with an air of total innocence, which confirmed to Haig that the feathery fern plant at the other end of the bookcase had received a good chewing. Vanessa had named the cat Biffo, but he responded to a voice and its tone rather than the content of the message.
  The occasional guest was not allowed onto the dining table. Haig knew that the cat had hopped onto a chair, walked the length of the large, old table and gathered himself for a spring of two feet up to a sure landing on smooth, polished walnut. According to Biffo's rules, if Haig had not seen him walking on the table or munching plants, then the crimes had not been committed.
  The cat began to purr ambiguously without opening his eyes. He was either pleased by Haig's arrival or mocking him. Haig wondered how he proposed to get down from his perch. As a preliminary, Biffo rose to his white feet and stretched upwards, arching his body into an inverted U. Then he stepped delicately onto the bookcase from the window alcove and walked along to the fern plant.
  He sat down and looked steadily at Haig with big, green eyes, as if surprised to see him. The message was clear. If Haig turned his back, Biffo would start to chew the plant. Haig surrendered to the inevitable and approached the bookcase. He let the cat step off onto his shoulders, then he crouched in a long, even movement. Biffo jumped off onto a chair and down to the carpet. It was not something that Haig had taught the cat to do. Biffo had learned to use a human being as an elevator during his life Before Haig.
  Biffo extended his front legs, dug his claws into the plain-chocolate carpet and stretched backwards, lifting his rump into the air. Haig wondered how he managed to resist the usual urge to plant a toecap on such an inviting target. Unaware of the dark thoughts behind him, or indifferent to them, Biffo stretched forward before making his way to the stairs. Haig listened but failed to catch the plastic slap of the cat-flap.
  As expected, Biffo was sitting beside the fridge, in the area usually occupied by his feeding dish, waiting for opening time. Haig wrote B and the time beside the date on the kitchen calendar to tell the others that he had fed the cat. Biffo was quite capable of begging another meal from someone else, and then leaving most of it. Haig gave him the second half of a tin of cat food with rabbit, then he heated up a mug of coffee. Biffo attacked his dish, purring loudly.
  The large, dark tabby was almost invisible under dim light, despite his four white feet. Haig had almost tripped over him on the stairs several times, saving himself only with a quick grab at the twin rails. Fortunately, Biffo had a well-developed sense of self-preservation. It had let him down only once, at the start of their two years of acquaintance.
  A tearaway with an air rifle had shot the cat in the right hind leg. He had chosen Haig's porch for some anguished mewing. Haig had managed to get him into a carton and take him to a local vet. After cleaning up the wound and giving the cat a thorough physical examination, the vet had decided that he was about five years old, well fed and in good condition. He had been castrated in his younger days, which suggested that he was either a family pet with wanderlust or he had been abandoned and he was looking for a new home.
  After a brief period of convalescence at the tower, his visits had lasted for anything from a couple of days to a week, depending on the weather. Haig assumed that he had at least one other refuge in the area. If there was a period of heavy rain or snow when Biffo was out, Haig knew that he would not see him again until the weather moderated. Otherwise, Biffo slept out the siege in his personal cupboard or on one of his perches, and ventured out only to relive himself in the walled rectangle of garden.
  Biffo the cat was a survivor. He provided companionship and interesting behaviour, and he accepted food, shelter and grooming with his own stiff brush and comb when he was moulting. He had created an environmental niche for himself. When he had finished his food, the successful-survivor cat slid through the cat flap on the ground floor and went out for a look at the evening.
  Mikki was in her fourth-floor bedroom, presumably typing up her lecture notes on Haig's spare portable computer. Haig could hear one of his Ultravox records as he passed her door. She was British-born of naturalized Czech parents, which explained why her first name had two k's. She had an eastern accent, but it would not have sounded out of place on a Norfolk turkey ranch. She had grown up in Thetford.
  Mikki was Vanessa's friend. The girls had drifted into the same orbit of pubs, discos and Flynton Badminton Club. They were both twenty, full of energy at times and seeking some adventurous diversion. Mikki was an orphan by geography. Her parents were divorced. Her mother had remarried and now lived in Luxembourg with an EU bureaucrat.
  Her civil engineer father was working on a contract in Kuwait. Mikki had decided not to give up her place at college to go with him. She had been told that Arabs treat women like third-class citizens and she had been able to dig up plenty of supporting evidence when she had started to look for it.
  There was a small and select training college in Flynton, three miles along the coast to the east. Mikki was studying catering and hotel management. Her ambition was to become an undercover agent for a travel firm or one of the well-known hotel guides. A job with a catering firm or a decent hotel would be second best. As far as Haig could judge, she had enough intelligence and ambition to do well if she found the right opportunities. Her ambition would also create a great deal of heartache if she ran into life's closed doors.
  She had another asset, which she was prepared to exploit if all else failed: her looks. She was rather flat-chested in comparison to Vanessa, and she tended to look like a pretty boy in her usual summer outfit of jeans and a light sports jacket, but she could turn heads when she dressed up like a girl. She had an air of fun-loving innocence and, even though he knew her to be a level-headed if not calculating young woman, she could still trigger Haig's protective instincts.
  Ultravox surrendered to sirens and screeching tyres as Haig started up the final lap from the study to the hatch in the roof. Vanessa was watching an American thriller show, in which thousands of bullets vanished into thin air just short of apparently unmissable human targets. As if to compensate, vehicles were subjected to appalling substitute violence when even bad guys never suffered visible injuries beyond the odd humorous black eye.
  Vanessa was draped on a sun lounger with her feet up, clinking ice cubes in a tall glass and intent on the television. Haig paused for a moment to take in the expanse of bronzed, rounded flesh. Vanessa was wearing her badminton shorts and a tee-shirt screen-printed with a picture of the tower; an ideal outfit for drawing expressions of delight from her admirers.
  An experimenter with the curiosity of a Viktor Frankenstein and the skill of the current experts in microsurgery could make two completely different women out of Mikki and Vanessa, Haig had decided once. One would have the looks and figure of a screen goddess, and the drive to make both the best of her opportunities and a host of enemies. The other would be plainer and easily satisfied. Manessa would be a fantasy creature, an unattainable ideal. Vikki would become someone's wife and just another face in the crowd.
  Haig had met Vanessa for the first time at dawn on the beach at Flynton. He had been living in North Devon for about a year. She was there for the summer, getting away from her family and willing to do a not very demanding job for not much money if the surroundings were pleasant.
  Vanessa had been taking a breath of fresh air after an all-night party. Haig had been out with his metal detector, attempting to draw some benefit from weeks of research in neglected local archives and attempts at analyzing his data on his computer. The metal detector had attracted Vanessa's attention. She had hung about him for a quarter of an hour before losing interest when Haig had found nothing more exciting than a few rusty tins and some modern coins.
  She had paused to say hello in the Seadog's Roost a few days later, when Haig had been delivering a couple of sovereigns to the landlady. A jealous boyfriend had dragged her away before the conversation had developed.
  Their paths had crossed several times during the next couple of months. Vanessa had managed to get herself a holiday job at a large newsagent in Flynton, which kept her fully occupied during the day and sharpened her appetite for all-night parties on Fridays and Saturdays.
  She had joined Haig on the beach a few times and he had let her try out his metal detector. Vanessa had started to believe that he was not just playing around when she had found a gold ring among the usual crop of scrap. Haig had outraged her by insisting that all valuable lost property had to be handed over to the police. The ring had not been claimed, however, and Vanessa had been able to add it to her personal collection of jewellery.
  The end of the summer tourist season had left her with lots of time on her hands and no one to share it. Some of the youngsters on her party circuit had gone away to colleges and universities. Others had gone home or moved on in search of casual jobs elsewhere. Her sometime boyfriend had decided that Vanessa without a decent income was nowhere near as attractive as Vanessa able to pay her own way.
  Showing uncharacteristic initiative, she had caught a bus to Farne during her first week of unemployment and dropped in on Haig. He had mentioned that he lived at Farne Lighthouse. She had been quite surprised to learn that he was serious. A guided tour had taken them up to lunchtime. Then Haig had introduced Vanessa to the shell collection.
  She had been surprised to hear that Haig collected and sold colourful and large shells. Just for something to do, she had volunteered to help with the job of adding a touch of colour to drab shells and a coat of clear varnish to add a gloss to porous surfaces, and the packing. At the end of the second week, she had realized that there was nothing available locally to the job-seeker. Faced with the prospect of having to give up her independence and go back to her parents' home and some pointless, government-sponsored training scheme, she had dropped a few hints to Haig about the cost of bus fares and the time wasted travelling between Flynton and Farne.
  The part-time cat had taken to her at once. Vanessa had suggested that she could do shopping, cooking and cleaning, help with the shells and prospecting with the metal detector, and keeping Haig company at night. Vanessa had found his four-poster bed fascinating.
  Haig had been aware of her physical charms, but only on an intellectual level. He had never let himself be attracted to gaol-bait; to young women just about young enough to be his daughter; to women with a fresh and clear complexion that lacked the miniature furrows that trap unflattering shadows on a mature woman's face. Haig, who had just turned thirty-eight, preferred to chase women in their early to middle thirties; ones who had been around long enough to have come to terms with the limitations of life.
  Vanessa had too many disappointments ahead of her and Haig had no wish to be caught in the backlash of her disillusionment. But he was enough of a slave to his self-imposed divergence from convention to realize that he ought to enjoy a brief fling with a youngster half his age.
  Their relationship was essentially open-ended. One day, Vanessa would go in search of further diversion and Haig would wave goodbye to an episode of an event-filled life. He had realized that he had a lot to offer someone of Vanessa's age; in fact, it was almost a Victorian arrangement without the necessary adjunct of marriage.
  It is a sound genetic survival tactic for a young woman to choose an older man who has made a position for himself in life and proved himself to be a good provider. Haig's tower was a much more interesting dwelling than most houses and he could offer her interesting work. Luckily, they lived in an era when they could spend some time together to their mutual benefit if they chose.
  Vanessa was strictly a night-owl; slow to rise in the morning and able to party all night. The tides ruled Haig's life in fine weather. He preferred to take his metal detector down to the shore at the extremes of the day, choosing the company of a few bait-diggers to that of curious potential competitors. Vanessa made no secret of thinking his lifestyle odd, but it was interesting and she thrived on diversion.
  Haig had got to know Mikki's telephone voice before their first meeting face to face. The girls had met on the summer party circuit and both were members of Flynton Badminton Club. Mikki had been struggling to make ends meet on her grant, reluctant to take out a student loan or approach her father for help, and her bank manager had been making noises about the size of her overdraft.
  Vanessa had dropped hints about an empty bedroom at the tower. Paying bus fares instead of a fortune for student accommodation made sound financial sense. Buying a second-hand bike from a shop in Farne had allowed Mikki to reduce her travel budget. Any saving was welcome on her pittance of a grant, even though her annual income sounded huge compared to Haig's grant at the same age.
  Vanessa had acquired a female companion, with whom she could discuss matters relevant to just-post-teenage women. Haig had found himself starting a new year with even less to do in the way of household chores. The cat had acquired another slave.
  Her programme became credits rolling over frozen smiles. Vanessa stretched out, reaching with a foot for the fourteen-inch portable television. Haig had replaced the original, circular volume control. The new knob had wings and allowed Vanessa to use her toe to turn down the sound during commercials, or the relentless BBC plugs for other programs, if she had forgotten to bring the remote control with her.
  "Biffo's back," Haig said from the rail on the seaward side of the roof. "I gave him the rest of that tin."
  "Is it all right?"
  "Should be. He's only been away a couple of days and it's been in the fridge."
  "I saw him in the village yesterday." Vanessa crunched an ice cube. "He was in a garden eating grass. He came over to say hello when I called him. Then he went off somewhere."
  "You reckon he could live there when he's not here?"
  "No, this woman came out looking like I was going to pinch her plants. So I asked about Biffo. She said she'd seen him around but he doesn't use her place as his other hotel."
  The sun had gone. A great fire on the horizon had been extinguished, leaving purple echoes on the whispy clouds above. Haig finished his coffee and yawned. Low tide would be at three twenty-one the following morning; an hour after daybreak and two hours before dawn. The reddish sky promised good weather for prospectors. Haig refused to call his explorations with a metal detector treasure hunting.
  That particular activity had been given a bad name both by irresponsible people with the price of a detector and very little method and morals, and by academics who refused to believe that anyone outside their circle has the right to research and investigate the nation's history.
  The desktop computer in Haig's study contained extensive information on local tide patterns and the weather. He could produce graphic displays showing the position of high water in the area over the past two hundred years, which had been the most productive in terms of lost property due to an upturn in visitors or refugees.
  None of the local residents had ever owned anything much of value in the way of transportable and losable possessions, and so anything found along the coast that dated back to the eighteenth century or earlier tended to come from shipwrecks. But the local population had been swelled at the turn of the nineteenth century by the gentry of the south coast, who had moved away from an area threatened by an invasion by Napoleon Bonapart's army.
  The refugees had drifted back once they had been convinced that the victory in the battle of Waterloo had removed the threat permanently. The chart of coin dates versus numbers then dipped until the arrival of the railway and the fashion for seaside holidays had begun later in the century.
  Haig had established some empirical rules on the effects of tidal scouring and storm disturbance, and he was becoming more and more confident that they were leading him to the most productive areas of Farnescombe Bay and the local beaches. Being able to follow the movement of small articles dropped within the bay also helped him with his understanding of tidal transport into and out of the bay.
  Haig yawned again.
  "You up early tomorrow?" said Vanessa, reading the signs.
  "You won't forget to take the telly down?"
  "Expecting rain?"
  "The dew might not do it any good."
  "I don't know how you can go to sleep at half-nine."
  "It's a knack; sleeping when it's convenient rather than between fixed times every night."
  "I know, you keep telling me. Soldiers can do it. And sailors. That doesn't mean you're not weird if you can do it."
  "If I'm getting up when you're going to bed, that makes me weird?" laughed Haig. It was an old argument.
  "If I'm still up, I might go with you. To make sure you don't get cut off by the tide again and drown."
  "Gee, thanks!"
  Haig accepted a good-night kiss. Vanessa was turning up the sound with her toe as he started down through the hatch. She was into open-air television in a big way, but if the night-time programmes were rubbish, she had to go down to the drawing room to use the video machine.
  Mikki was in the kitchen, preparing to try out some ideas for supper snacks, when Haig arrived to wash his mug. He warned her to keep an eye open for the cat, who had a habit of going to sleep in cupboards other than the one containing his blanket. It could be very disconcerting to see a door open, apparently of its own accord or, perhaps, opened by a ghost.
  When he had settled down in the four-poster bed in the master bedroom, Haig went into his personal relaxation routine. The process of clearing his mind and losing contact with his body slid him into a deep, dark hole in a very few minutes.