He lay on the child's bed in the pink-walled bedroom and inventoried his body. He seemed to be bruised just about everywhere, but apparently nothing was broken. He did not feel feverish; his constitution had withstood bronchial infection despite the night on the boat. There was just the weakness. He suspected it was more than exhaustion. He remembered a moment, as he had reached the top of the ramp, when he had thought he was going to die; and he wondered whether he had inflicted on himself some permanent damage with the last mind-bending uphill dash.

He checked his possessions too. The can of photographic negatives was still taped to his chest, the stiletto was strapped to his left arm, and his papers and money were in the jacket pocket of his borrowed pyjamas.

He pushed the blankets aside and swung himself into a sitting position with his feet on the floor. A moment of dizziness came and went. He stood up. It was important not to permit himself the psychological attitudes of an invalid. He put on the dressing gown and went into the bathroom.

When he returned his own clothes were at the foot of the bed, clean and pressed: underwear, overalls, and shirt. Suddenly he remembered getting up sometime during the morning and seeing the woman naked in the bathroom; it had been an odd scene and he was not sure what it meant. She was very beautiful, he recalled. He was sure of that.

He dressed slowly. He would have liked a shave, but he decided to ask his host's permission before borrowing the blade on the bathroom shelf; some men were as possessive of their razors as they were of their wives. However, he did take the liberty of using the child's bakelite comb he found in the top drawer of the chest.

He looked into the mirror without pride. He had no conceit. He knew that some women found him attractive, and others did not; and he assumed this was so for most men. Of course, he had had more women than most men, but he attributed this to his appetite, not to his looks. His reflection told him he was presentable, which was all he needed to know.

He left the bedroom and went slowly down the stairs. Again he felt a wave of weakness; and again he willed himself to overcome it, gripping the bannister rail and placing one foot deliberately before the other until he reached the ground floor.

He paused outside the living room door and, hearing no noise, went on to the kitchen. He knocked and went in. The young couple were at the table, finishing supper.

The woman stood up when he entered. "You got up!" she said. "Are you sure you should?"

Faber permitted himself to be led to a chair. "Thank you," he said. "You really mustn't encourage me to pretend to be ill."

"I don't think you realise what a terrible experience you've been through," she said. "Do you feel like food?"

"I'm imposing on you-"

"Not at all. Don't be silly. I kept some soup hot for you."

Faber said, "You're so kind, and I don't even know your names."

"David and Lucy Rose." She ladled soup into a bowl and placed it on the table in front of him. "Cut some bread, David, would you?"

"I'm Henry Baker." Faber did not know why he had said that, he had no papers in that name. Henry Faber was the man the police were hunting, so he was right to have used his James Baker identity; but somehow he wanted this woman to call him Henry, the nearest English equivalent of his real name, Heinrich.

He took a sip of the soup, and suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He ate it all quickly, then the bread. When he'd finished Lucy laughed. She looked lovely when she laughed; her mouth opened wide, showing lots of even white teeth, and her eyes crinkled merrily at the corners. "More?" she offered.

"Thank you very much."

"I can see it doing you good. The colour is coming back to your cheeks."

Faber realised he felt physically better. He forced himself to eat his second helping more slowly, out of courtesy, but he still relished it.

David said, "How did you happen to be out in this storm?" It was the first time he had spoken.

"Don't badger him, David…"

"It's all right," Faber said quickly. "I was foolish, that's all. This is the first fishing holiday I've been able to have since before the war, and I just refused to let the weather spoil it. Are you a fisherman?"

David shook his head. "Sheep farmer."

"Do you have many employees?"

"Just one, old Tom."

"I suppose there are other sheep farms on the island."

"No. We live at this end, Tom lives at the other end, and in between there's nothing but sheep."

Faber nodded. Good, very good. A woman, a cripple, a child, and an old man… and he was already feeling much stronger. "How do you contact the mainland?" Faber said.

"There's a boat once a fortnight. It's due this Monday but it won't come if the storm keeps up. There's a radio transmitter in Tom's cottage, but we can only use that in emergencies. If I thought people might be searching for you, or if you needed urgent medical help, I should use it. But as things are I don't feel it's necessary. There's little point; nobody can come to fetch you off the island until the storm clears and when that happens the boat will come anyway."

"Of course." Faber's tone concealed his delight. The problem of how to contact the U-boat on Monday had been nagging at the back of his mind. He had seen an ordinary wireless set in the Roses' living room, and he would, if necessary, have been able to rig up a transmitter from that. But the fact that this Tom had a proper radio made everything so much simpler… "What does Tom need a transmitter for?"

"He's a member of the Royal Observer Corps. Aberdeen was bombed in July of 1940. There was no air raid warning. There were fifty casualties. That was when they recruited Tom. It's a good thing his hearing is better than his eyesight."

"I suppose the bombers come from Norway."

"I suppose so." Lucy stood up. "Let's go into the other room."

The two men followed her. Faber felt no weakness, no dizziness. He held the living room door for David, who wheeled himself close to the fire. Lucy offered Faber brandy. He declined. She poured one for her husband and herself.

Faber sat back and allowed himself to study them.

Lucy was really quite striking: she had an oval face, wide-set eyes of an unusual, cat-like amber colour and an abundance of rich, dark-red hair. Under the mannish fisherman's sweater and baggy trousers there was the suggestion of her very good, fullish figure. Dressed up in silk stockings and, say, a cocktail sort of dress, she might be very glamorous. David was also handsome; almost pretty, except for the shadow of a very dark beard. His hair was nearly black and his skin looked Mediterranean. He would have been tall if he had had legs in proportion to his arms. Faber suspected that those arms might be powerful, muscled from years of pushing the wheels of the chair.

An attractive couple; but there was something badly wrong between them. Faber was no expert on marriage, but his training in interrogation techniques had taught him to read the silent language of the body to know, from small gestures, when someone was frightened, confident, hiding something, or lying. Lucy and David rarely looked at one another, and never touched. They spoke to him more than to each other. They circled one another, like turkeys trying to keep in front of them a few square feet of vacant territory. The tension between them was enormous. They were like Churchill and Stalin, obliged temporarily to fight side by side, fiercely suppressing a deeper enmity. Faber wondered what the trauma was that lay at the back of their distance. This cosy little house must be an emotional pressure cooker, despite its rugs and its bright paintwork, its floral armchairs and blazing fires and framed watercolours.

To live alone, with only an old man and a child for company, with this thing between them… it reminded him of a play he had seen in London, by an American called Tennessee something-