“And Humph’s happy to let you deal with it?”

“Content, certainly.” Strictly speaking, Harding supposed he should have checked on Humphrey’s state of mind since his visit to Heartsease. But, then, why should the man not be content?

“Plain sailing, then?”

“Looks like it.”

“Take the day off from my family, Tim. Relax. Pretend you’re a tourist.”

“Yeah. Good idea.”

Unaccountably, Harding did feel relaxed as he made his way down to the railway station later that morning. Patches of blue were breaking through the grey hummocked clouds. It was almost warm when the wind dropped. He had been to St. Ives with Polly of course. It had been an obvious place to go from Penzance. But he did not feel remotely morbid about returning there. Hayley’s company-and the intriguing question of where and when they had met before-would keep his memories of that day at bay.

She arrived a few minutes after he had bought the tickets, wearing a lightweight parka over a sweater, a loosely pleated skirt and soft pinky-grey boots. She looked as pleased to see him as he felt to see her.

“I can’t describe what a relief it is to be out of the house today, Tim,” she said as they boarded the train. “I know this auction is what Gabriel wanted, but it still seems indecent somehow.”

“It’ll soon be over.”

“Yes. And then Heartsease will be an empty shell. With just me left in it.”

“Any idea yet what you’ll do when it’s sold?”

“No. Like I told you, I don’t want to go back to London. But I may have to.”

“D’you have family there?”

She laughed. “Is this the start of a softly-softly interrogation to find out when we might’ve met?”

He laughed too. “Sort of.”

“Then we’ll have some rules. As far as life stories go, you start.”

Harding’s potted autobiography was over by the time they had reached St. Ives. It would have been over sooner, but for Hayley’s disarming line in probing questions. These were not about the feasibility of some chance meeting they might both have forgotten, which she clearly did not believe had happened, but homed in rather on a subject Harding was far from comfortable with: the emotional journey his life had taken him on.

“Do you blame yourself at all for your wife’s death?” she asked at one point.

“No. Of course not.”

“It’s just that I have the sense…”

“What?”

“Well, that you… feel guilty about it in some way.”

It was true. Though how Hayley had sensed it Harding could not imagine. “When she was dying,” he said in an undertone, “it got to the stage when I just wanted it to be over. For her sake, so I told myself. But it was for my sake as well. I’ve always reproached myself for that. In the end, I was willing her to die, to release me, if you like, to… make it easier for me.”

“That was only natural.”

“Or plain selfish.”

“It’s how you coped, that’s all. And regretting it since… is part of the process.”

“Is it?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Then how come no one else has ever guessed that’s how I felt?”

“Most people don’t have much of an imagination, Tim. And a few, like me”-she smiled-“have too much.”

St. Ives. The wind was stronger than on the south coast, ripping and eddying along the narrow picture-postcard streets. But the cloud was thinner. Sunlight deepened the blue of the sea and gilded the lichened roofs of the town. They walked out from the station to St. Ives Head, where they were battered by the wind, and soon doubled back to the Sloop Inn on the quayside for lunch.

It was there that Hayley finished a brisk summary of her life. Born in Colchester in 1971, the youngest of three daughters of chartered accountants, she was expensively educated, took a degree in music at Durham and pursued her dream of playing the harp for a living until an imprecisely diagnosed wrist disorder intervened. Her long-standing relationship with a concert violinist foundered on his ill-disguised belief that the disorder was psychological in origin. London readily became a hateful place to be for a newly single ex-harpist the wrong side of thirty. She remembered the passage in A la recherche du temps perdu in which Proust conjured up the magical appeal of the rail route from Paris to the far west of Brittany and impulsively took the train from Paddington to the far west of Cornwall.

“A man reading The Cornishman joined the train at St. Erth. He left the classifieds section on the seat when he got off at Penzance. I picked it up. And there was Gabriel’s ad for a live-in housekeeper. Pure chance. Or maybe you’d call it fate. If you believe in fate.”

“I think I might.”

“But have you ever been to Colchester?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Or Durham?”

“Once.”

“When I was a student there in the early nineties?”

“No. Not then.”

“What about the brasserie in the Park Lane Hilton when I was playing the harp? Or when anyone was playing the harp?”

“No.”

“So you see, Tim, if fate has brought us together, it isn’t for a second time.”

“Maybe not. But I can’t-”

He had glanced out through the window they were sitting by as he spoke. Suddenly, his attention was seized by a familiar face among the passers-by on the quay. His gaze was met, coolly and cockily by Darren Spargo.

Harding jumped up and made for the door. The pub was busy a Sunday lunchtime crowd milling at the bar. By the time he had forced his way through and made it outside, Spargo had vanished. Harding looked along the quay and the main shopping street. There was no sign of Spargo. The winding, twining back streets and alleys that led off in all directions offered a wealth of escape routes. Pursuit was not merely futile but impossible.

“Sorry about that,” he said to Hayley as he made a shamefaced return to their table in the Sloop.

“What happened?”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

Harding sighed. “I saw someone who I’m more or less certain stole my mobile yesterday. At the Turk’s Head in Penzance.”

“Really?”

“His name’s Darren Spargo.”

“Darren?”

“You know him?”

“Oh my God.” Hayley’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, Tim. I’m really sorry.”

“Why?”

“Darren’s my problem. But now it looks as if… he might be yours too.”

Hayley had met Darren while shopping at Morrison’s. He had broken off from shelf-filling duties to chat her up and ask her out. She had found him instantly and profoundly resistible and had turned him down. But Darren had not taken no for an answer, then or later. He had become first a nuisance, then a plague on her life, haunting the route she walked into town, materializing in her path when she emerged from a shop and now, it appeared, harassing any man he deemed to be a rival for her affections.

“He must have been at Heartsease yesterday afternoon and seen you come and go from my flat, then followed you to the Turk’s Head.” Via Morrab Gardens, Harding silently calculated. “I can only imagine he stole your phone to see if there were any messages from me on it.”

“He’ll have been disappointed, then.” Or maybe not, Harding reflected grimly. What use might Spargo seek to make of evidence, as he saw it, that Harding was two-timing Hayley?

“Unfortunately, seeing us together today will only make him more suspicious, however little he learnt from your phone.”

“Has he followed you before like this?”

“Not quite like this, no.”

“Have you reported him to the police?”

“No.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You can’t prove he stole your phone.”

“What do you suggest I do, then?”

“The same as me. Ignore him.”

“How long have you been ignoring him?”