A persistent buzzing roused Haig from a dream at two-thirty. He had been involved in some pointless journey, which he had completed once, but which was dragging out endlessly as he tried to repeat it. Vanessa was watching a film on video in the drawing room when he looked in on her. Two cars were chasing each other around a deserted dockyard on the television screen.
  "You're going out now?" said Vanessa.
  "When I've had a cup of coffee and a sandwich."
  "Make me one and I'll come with you."
  "That's big of you," chuckled Haig.
  The waxing Moon was three-quarters full and too high and too far to the south to shine into the kitchen. Stars filled the sky, which was just starting to brighten beyond the window by the cooker. Haig had not bothered to switch on the kitchen light. He could navigate well enough by the light coming in from the stairs.
  Vanessa was wearing jeans and she was zipping a cotton jacket over her tee-shirt when Haig returned to the drawing room with two mugs and a plate. The same cars, or two different ones, were chasing each other down a mountain road, their occupants spraying ineffective lead from sub-machine guns at each short straight between tight turns.
  They drank freshly filtered coffee and ate home-made rolls filled with one of Mikki's egg, bacon and tomato sandwich mixes while watching the film. Vanessa decided that it had reached a natural break when the first round of violence ended with the good-guys making a successful escape after the bad-guys had crashed.
  The steel door in the cool basement was painted cream to match the walls. It had been almost indistinguishable from the painted plasterboard until Mikki had decorated it with a drawing of a hatch with a set of bars and a hopeless face behind them and added a label reading Dungeon in Olde Englishe script.
  Sixty-eight steps in alternate banks of nine and eight led down through the rock of the cliff to a chamber at the back of a natural cave at sea-level. The girls called it Haig's fall-out shelter. Another steel door, painted black with marine anti-corrosion compound, kept curious members of the public out of the tower's lower limit. Vanessa perched on the inflatable dinghy while Haig went back up three flights of stairs to replace a dead light bulb.
  Haig wiped a plastic keycard, which was magnetically coded with information, through a reader to open the outer steel door. White light spilled onto damp seaweed and sand in the cave. Only an exceptional tide reached more than half-way up the ramp, which curved around the wall from the door to the floor of the cave. The place was a refuge for those cut off by the tide, if they were perceptive enough to see that it did not normally fill up with water, and somewhere interesting for rock-hoppers to explore.
  Curious holidaymakers had attempted to batter down the steel door on two occasions during Haig's period of ownership of the tower. They had imagined that they would find themselves in some secret, wartime military installation, which had been abandoned to the elements. They had been outraged when Haig had photographed them and then threatened to report them to the police for causing criminal damaged if they refused to pay for repairs to his paintwork.
  Haig and Vanessa switch off their torches when they reached the mouth of the cave. There was a shelf of rock jutting out from the cliff and extending all along the sweep of the bay, providing a broken highway three to five yards wide. Beyond it, the moonlit beach was a broad, flat expanse with little wavelet ridges in the sand. The air was damp and chilly near the sheltering cliffs.
  The expedition crossed the shelf of rock, testing the non-slip soles of their rubber boots to the limit, and set off along slightly yielding sand. The sea was a quarter of a mile away, at the mouth of the bay. Haig wanted to explore with his metal detector two areas that were uncovered only at the neap tide in calm weather.
  They had established their routine on many earlier expeditions. Haig carried a set of small flags, which he stuck into the sand whenever his metal detector found something. Vanessa did the digging with a trowel, discarding obvious junk and storing everything else in plastic buckets for later examination.
  Keeping a close eye on the time, Haig covered his planned area, then helped out with the last of the digging. Leaving watery footprints in the sand, they walked a further quarter-mile to the Farne Rock. Vanessa took over the metal detector to explore an area to the west of the rugged pillar of dark stone. Haig worked as quickly as possible with the trowel, trying to strike a balance between time and care.
  When the alarm on his watch sounded, Haig called an immediate halt to the expedition. Using the tower as a marker, Vanessa set off for the cave with the metal detector. Haig rushed on with excavating under his last three flags.
  He was ankle deep when he set off after Vanessa with the two buckets. The central part of the bay was very flat and it could fill up with deceptive speed. When there was an on-shore wind, the sea could reach the high-water mark faster than a running man. Haig had not yet got his feet wet, but the rising tide had approached to within an inch and a half of the top of his rubber knee-boots on one occasion.
  "Why don't we get a lift?" said Vanessa when they were half-way up eight flights of stone steps.
  "Keeps you fit," said Haig. "And have you any idea how much it would cost to get a tunnel dug through fifty feet of solid rock?"
  "Mikki reckons about eighteen thousand pounds."
  "What, has she been getting estimates from the local cowboys?"
  "She worked it out."
  "How do you work out something like that?"
  "She didn't say."
  Haig dumped the buckets beside the work table in the tower's ground floor room. Vanessa carried on up to the kitchen. Haig took the batteries out of his metal detector and slotted them into the charger. Vanessa returned with a tray bearing two mugs of coffee, plates with slices of Mikki's healthy, wholefood cake and two forks.
  The buckets contained a quantity of sand as packing. As well as metal objects, the prospectors had collected shells, mostly conches, and some pebbles with veins of quartz, which had caught the beam of Vanessa's torch. Haig transferred sandy objects to a bucket of water, which contained a nylon sieve just below the surface. His assistant moved cleaner items from the sieve to a bath towel, assigning them to corners devoted to shells, coins, interesting objects and unidentifiable bits and pieces or junk.
  "Pieces of eight," remarked Vanessa, looking a lump of aggregated, blackened, irregular metal discs.
  "Could be," agreed Haig. "There, look at those!"
  He was holding three spoons of bright, golden metal, which had a slightly reddish cast. The bowls were crushed, the handles twisted into horseshoe shapes. The tips of the handles were ornamented with the heads of animals of some sort.
  "One each," Vanessa moved them to the towel. "Can you straighten them out? We could have some posh desert spoons then. Or we could use them at breakfast for grapefruits."
  "I think the experts would rather look at them as they are, not after some interfering amateur has straightened them out."
  "You reckon they're from one of your Spanish ships? Note the red tint to the gold, characteristic of the high-copper alloy they nicked from the Aztecs and the Incas."
  "You may pretend to be a modern young person," Haig told her with a smile of amusement, "who doesn't know nowt about owt and couldn't care less, but that streak of intelligence will keep showing through."
  "You making fun of me, pal?" Vanessa said aggressively.
  "I just don't understand why you keep apologizing for knowing things. Especially when learning is the most important thing in Mikki's life."
  "I thought you said it's my protective camouflage? Not wanting to be different from the average young savage by actually knowing something."
  "I shouldn't have though you'd need to bother with camouflage at four in the morning, when all the other savages are in bed."
  "Maybe it's just a habit I'm stuck with. Or maybe I just do it to annoy you."
  "Yes, that sounds more likely," grinned Haig.
  The forks allowed them to eat cake as they worked without having to use sandy fingers. Haig and Vanessa were both yawning by the time they had finished the sorting process. Haig was quite pleased with the night's haul. He had found a dozen identifiable Spanish gold coins and a collection of objects that might prove interesting when the restoration experts at the museum in Barnstaple had removed accretions gathered over several centuries. There was also the usual ration of modern coins and lost property.
  "Are we going back for another look this afternoon?" Vanessa said as they started up the stairs, having left their finds in a drying cabinet.
  "It might be worth having a look along the edge of the bay again," nodded Haig. "We could do with a really good blow to emulsify the sea bed."
  "Then we'll find out if the latest version of your computer program for telling you where stuff will settle really works."
  "I have every confidence it in. Unfortunately, I think the holiday industry is praying for good weather."
  "And you'd like an action replay of the great storm of seventeen oh-three? When half the country got wrecked in a couple of days and the sea gave up a rich harvest of gold and bones? Spanish plunder mixed with splintered thigh-bones and jawless, blank-eyed skulls," Vanessa added with relish.
  "Someone been dipping into the historical section of my library again?" laughed Haig.
  "Some of it's quite interesting," Vanessa said defensively.
  "You'd better watch out. You might wake up one afternoon and find yourself irreversibly civilized."
  "Your definition of civilized doesn't have to be mine, pal."
  "That's something you'll never get a zealous missionary to believe," said Haig.

Mikki was making bread when Haig went down to the kitchen for some breakfast, leaving Vanessa curled up in the four-poster bed with her dreams. The whirring of the Kenwood Chef grew steadily louder as he descended twenty-eight steps and completed a half-circuit of the tower.
  "Afternoon," grinned Mikki. The clock on the cooker was showing 10:32. "I see you two were busy last night." She nodded sideways to the floor in the general direction of the drying cabinet in the room below.
  "The trouble with Nature is that it isn't always as ordered as humans want it to be," Haig said. "Any coffee going?"
  "There might be a mugful left. What time did you get to bed last night?"
  "About four, or so." Haig cut two slices of wholemeal bread and lit the grill. The window adjacent to the cooker showed a bright, sunny day.
  "I suppose that's the big advantage of two-foot-thick walls and solid doors. You don't get woken up by people tramping round in the middle of the night."
  "And by the time you've struggled up all those stairs, you're too exhausted not to sleep?"
  "Something like that."
  "Is that cheese and tomato you're putting into the bread dough?" Haig put on a doubtful frown.
  "Cheese and pimentos. It's a Spanish recipe. Oh, yes. Someone called Pru rang about an hour ago. She said she'd call back around twelve."
  "My sister." Haig answered the unasked question.
  "I thought your sister's called Dorothy?" frowned Mikki.
  "That's the married one with the three kids. All requiring birthday and Christmas presents. But you moved in after the Christmas cards were gone, didn't you? Pru's my twin."
  "You've got a twin sister?"
  "Who do you think's been writing to me from Norway?"
  "How should I know?' Mikki switched off the mixer and lifted out a ball of dough to carry on kneading by hand. "What's she like? An anarchist, like you?"
  "No, she's a lot like you, in many ways. Knows what she wants. Only slowing down a bit, seeing she's my great age."
  "It must be a bit of a pain for her, having a twin brother who doesn't care if people know how old he is."
  "Pru used to drive our parents mad, asking why? why? why? all the time. And if someone said she couldn't do something, she'd go out of her way to try it."
  "So she is another rebel, like you?"
  "Much more blatant. She's devoted her life to proving she can go anywhere and do anything, despite being a weak woman."
  "What's she doing in Norway? Working on an oil-rig?"
  "Nothing so undemanding. She works for a firm that makes wildlife films. She's been up the jungle in South America, Asia, Africa; she's been to both poles at least twice; and every desert you can think of. And a lot you've probably never heard of."
  "Has she been to the Moon yet?"
  "There's not that much wildlife up there. But one of her ambitions is to get a ride on a space shuttle into orbit. I bet phoning me means she's looking for another free summer holiday. It must be my turn."
  "Why, is there a lot of wildlife around here?"
  "No, she forgets all about that when she's on holiday. And she inflicted herself on Dot and her tribe in Edinburgh last year."
  "So you've not seen her since the year before last?"
  "No, I saw her in London in April. And last November."
  "On your expeditions to the British Museum?"
  "That's right. We usually manage a couple or three weekend reunions a year, depending on where she's working and where she's going next." Haig buttered his toast, then spread one slice with orange marmalade and the other with lime marmalade.
  "So you get on okay with her?"
  "Yeah, I suppose we do. We don't have some sort of a mystical, psychic bond between us, the way some twins are supposed to have, but we've always been on the same side. It was always us two against Dot when there was a disagreement about where the family should go on holiday, for instance."
  "And you don't feel have to impress her, the way you would with another woman?"
  "You mean, if I had designs on her body, Dr. Freud?" grinned Haig. "Yeah, I suppose we know what to expect from each other and we can live with it. One thing to remember is she's called Pru, not Prunella, which is what it says on her birth certificate."
  "Prunella!" Mikki bit back an automatic smile.
  "Our Mum thinks it's a great name. But then, she's not stuck with it. Did we get a paper?"
  Mikki gave the dough a final pounding, then began to weigh out loaf-size lumps. "You're going to have to fight the cat for it. He was sleeping on it last time I saw him." The bread tins disappeared into plastic bags. Mikki set the kitchen timer for three-quarters of an hour.
  Haig took his breakfast up to the drawing room. Biffo looked at him, then rolled onto his back, feet in the air, presenting a tawny tummy to be tickled. Haig obliged, then evicted him from the morning newspaper. Biffo climbed onto his lap. The lead story in the paper concerned a shipment of silver bullion, which had disappeared four months earlier.
  The reporter was calling the robbery a carbon copy snatch. Haig wondered when the cliché would be brought up to date. Modern criminals, he believed, were more likely to pull off a photocopy snatch. As he read through exclusive revelations, the faithfulness of the copy began to fade.
  The original of the robbery had involved the theft of silver bullion from the defunct German Democratic Republic. The reporter was assuming that the 248 silver bars that had been stolen in April of that year belonged to the Chinese government because it was the only hypocritical communist regime of any size left and because it made the carbon copy fit. Inconveniently, the inscrutable Orientals were saying nothing.
  There was a rumour circulating in the business community that as many as 150 of the sixty-pound ingots had been recovered by the insurance company. The newspaper was trying to stir up a row about the morality of allowing criminals to ransom stolen property. The usual rent-a-mouths had put in their two penn'orth, but Haig judged that there was very little substance to the story.
  August being the traditionally uneventful, even-sillier-than-usual season, there was nothing much of any significance in the paper. Pages two and three were devoted to an event attended by one of the Royals. A political scandal in Australia filled half of page nine. The rest was just filler bits and pieces, advertisements and sport.
  Haig was folding the paper neatly at the television page for Vanessa's benefit when Mikki arrived with her clipboard. Haig knew from experience that she wanted to talk about one of her projects. The girls tended to defer to Haig's great age and presumed wisdom when they had an idea. They were not his children, so they felt no need to rebel against his authority, and they accepted that he had achieved a certain special position in life, which showed that he knew what he was doing at least part of the time.
  Mikki sat down on the settee with the clipboard on her lap. Biffo climbed over Haig and tried to sprawl on the clipboard. Mikki scratched his chin then moved him back onto Haig.
  "What's the project?" Haig asked, holding the cat's front paws clear of his knees to protect them from indignant claws.
  "A winter herb garden." Mikki circled the title with a large, blue felt-tip pen. She liked to discuss her projects with him, assuming that a successful man had to be an expert on everything. "It's an experiment to see what I can grow with a minimum of protection. The idea is to have a frame going down about a foot into the soil to isolate an area from frost. And a glazed top. For heating, I thought I'd get some rubber tubing and lay it in loops round the clumps of herbs. Then I'd have a reservoir with a small heater and a pump to circulate warm water. Just enough to stop everything in the frame from freezing."
  "Sounds do-able," said Haig. "How big are you thinking of making it?"
  "They sell window glass ninety by forty-five centimetres in the ironmonger's in the village. If I start off with two panes, that'll give me an area about three feet square and I can grow nine herbs."
  "Are there nine different ones?"
  "Including mint. Vanessa says you always moan when the mint dies down and you can't get decent mint sauce to go with your roast lamb."
  "Where are you going to get your frame from? Burgle a window?"
  "The lad at the handyman shop will make it for me."
  "What, if you give him a nice smile and look helpless?"
  "Well, you're always saying we should make the most of our natural talents. He reckons he can get some wood that's pressure-impregnated with a preservative that'll make it last forty years outdoors."
  "So you're planning to be still here when you're sixty?"
  "Someone will be." Mikki shrugged. "What do you think?"
  Haig studied the clipboard. Neat lines joined every item on the plan of the herb garden to its own box, in which was listed the source and the price. "A weatherproof extension cable," he said. "To connect your heater and the pump to a power socket in the garage."
  "Have we got one? Or do I need to buy one?"
  "There might be one in the basement. Or you can fight Van for the one she uses for her telly. And you're going to need one of those special plug adaptors. What's it called? An RCD, a residual current device. So you don't get electrocuted if you cut the cable somehow. What about the actual herbs?"
  "I can get cuttings at the college."
  "Okay. What does the expert think?" Haig held the clipboard in front of the cat's nose.
  Biffo sniffed at it, then performed a horizontal stretch.
  "I think we can take that as a yes," Haig said. "Shove it on the housekeeping account. What about double-glazing?"
  "I'm not sure. I think the ones you've got here are sealed units with the air pumped out of the space between the glass. And it depends if the lad at the handyman shop can manage it. So I can order the bits when I've finished this lot of bread?"
  "Okay. So you'll be out in the garden with a spade for the rest of the day, working up a fine tilth, or whatever?"
  "Not today. The weather report says a belt of rain is coming in from the Atlantic and it'll be here in the early afternoon. So I'll see what it's like tomorrow." Mikki attached her magnetic pen to the clip of the clipboard and stood up.
  Sensing that she was going into the kitchen, where the food was kept, Biffo hopped to the floor, stretched again and followed her. Having resisted, yet again, the temptation to assault an inviting target, Haig continued on down the stairs, past the kitchen, to have a look at the bits and pieces recovered during the night.

The green telephone, the outside line, rang at five past twelve. Haig turned away from packing shells in bubble plastic to answer it. At first, the line sounded packed with cotton wool, then it cleared.
  "That you, Jay?" said a familiar voice. "Guess who?"
  "If you've not reversed the charges, can I take my time?" chuckled Haig. "Where are you now?"
  "A place called Talvic. About a hundred and fifty kilometres east of Tromsø, on the north coast," said Pru, his sister.
  "You're still in Norway, then?"
  "For another week. We finish next Wednesday, the twelfth, if all goes well. I'll be flying to Scotland on Friday. I'll be in Edinburgh with Dot over the weekend. Then I'd like to collapse on you for about a month to recover."
  "You've been working hard?"
  "Like a dog. So it's okay?"
  "Have I got any choice? So when can we expect you?"
  "One of the team will be flying some camera equipment down to Exeter on the Monday. That's the seventeenth. He can drop me off at Barnstaple."
  "Can't he just give you a parachute and chuck you out over Farnescombe Bay at low tide?"
  "I'll give you a ring before I start out to give you an ETA. Is that all right?"
  "Don't forget to turn up with a full ration of duty-free. And don't freeze to death in the meantime."
  "It's not too bad at the moment. Almost summery. See you soon."
  The kitchen was full of a smell of freshly baked bread. Vanessa was yawning over a cup of coffee and half a grapefruit, and looking at the plans for the herb garden. Mikki was explaining the details while messing about with a small electric pump and ten feet of black rubber tubing.
  "Finished it yet?" said Haig.
  "Nearly." Mikki dipped the end of the tube into a bucket of water on the floor, then clicked the switch of a wall socket. The pump chattered for a few moments, then settled down to a deeper, steady throbbing. Water started to drip from the exit pipe into the sink. "You can't use some pumps with air," Mikki continued. "You have to keep them full of liquid. I thought I'd better get a pump that can handle air as well in case I get any leaks."
  "It's going to take you a month to empty that bucket," Vanessa remarked.
  "Oh, it'll go a lot faster than that. It's on the slowest speed setting. Was that your sister on the phone, Jay?"
  "Er, yes." Haig made a quick change of direction. "She'll be here a week on Monday, if all goes to plan."
  "Fancy not knowing he's got two sisters," said Vanessa.
  "I didn't know you've got a brother until he turned up on the doorstep last summer," said Haig. "Looking for free bed and breakfast on his way to Cornwall. And another shakedown on the way home to sunny Newbury."
  "It must be because when you talk about my sister, you know which one you mean but I assumed it was the same one every time," added Mikki. "At least she's given us plenty of notice to get the guest room ready."
  "Rain's on," said Vanessa, looking out over the bay. "You got back from the village just in time, Miks. Are we going to have to wear our wetsuits this afternoon out in the bay?"
  "No, the radar forecast says it'll be over us in a couple of hours," Mikki said confidently.