“Got an itchy feeling between the shoulder blades?”

“Sorry?”

“They tell me it’s a sign you’re being watched.”

Harding sighed. “Thanks for the advice.”

“Listen, Tim.” She sounded suddenly more serious. “Maybe Barney’s right. Maybe Hayley’s willing to come quietly. That’d be fine as far as it goes. But it doesn’t get us off the hook with Tony Whybrow, does it? What are we going to do about him?”

“I don’t know.”

“No. And neither do I. That’s what should be worrying you.”

Harding felt, if anything, less drowsy after his conversation with Carol than before. He resorted to Euromush television in the hope it might knock him out. But long before the rules of an Italian game show had become clear to him, his phone rang, only for the caller to cancel the moment he answered. The number had been withheld, which was suspicious in itself. A repeat performance a minute or so later convinced him someone was trying to tell him something.

It was the recollection of Carol’s crack about an itchy feeling between the shoulder blades that prompted him to go to the window and check the street outside. He had closed the shutter earlier. A surreptitious peek was hardly possible. There was nothing for it but to open the window and then the shutter to see if there really was anyone keeping watch on his room.

The figure on the opposite pavement was walking away. But Harding’s instinctive impression was that she had been stationary until the instant he opened the shutter. Her face was obscured by the brim of a hat. But he recognized the short, belted mac. She was Hayley’s height and build. In that moment, there was no doubt in his mind. It was her.

He only realized it was raining heavily when he burst out of the hotel. There were several groups of people making their way along the street, clutching umbrellas, and a couple of taxis dropping off passengers. His glimpse of Hayley in the distance, rounding a corner, was scarcely more than a guess. But he raced in pursuit.

There she was again, surely, rounding the next corner into the main shopping street. He was running headlong now, oblivious to the rain and the traffic and the passers-by. But she was running too, a twitch of shadow implying a backward glance. And the lights of Marienplatz U-Bahn station gleamed ahead. Suddenly, she vanished from sight.

Harding’s plunge down the steps to the station was slowed by a collision with a couple coming up. The male half fired some insults after him as he reached the concourse. He did not look back. His eyes scanned the escalators leading down to the platforms. There was no sign of Hayley. She could have taken any one of them. He could hear trains pulling in and out even as he stood there, hesitating. Every line on the system went through Marienplatz, to judge by the number of destinations on offer. He had no idea where Hayley was going. If evading him was her priority, she could have chosen the first train to anywhere, or even exited the station at the other end of the concourse.

He checked all the platforms in the end, futile though he knew the effort would be. The clocks of the city churches were striking midnight as he made his way back to the hotel. It had stopped raining and was growing rapidly colder. He was shivering, though whether the drenching he had received was the cause he could not have said.

By morning Harding had convinced himself he might have been mistaken. Maybe the woman he had seen was not Hayley after all, but someone who merely happened to look like her, someone hurrying through the rain to catch a late train home. Why should she be watching him when they were due to meet soon anyway? And why should she run from him? It made no sense. But what about the phone calls? Who had made them? Who-and why?

He said nothing to Tozer about what had happened. His doubts and suspicions were too vague to put into words and nothing seemed likely to dent the other man’s confidence that their rendezvous with Hayley would bring a resolution of their problems. Harding had more problems than Tozer knew about, of course. A resolution of them all was way out of reach. But Hayley had said she wanted to meet them. And he badly wanted to see her again-to talk to her, to make her understand. The circumstances would not be ideal. They would be about as far as possible from ideal. But they were the only ones on offer.

Nymphenburg. The baroque, white-faced palace flung back the clear winter light at them as they walked towards it. A tunnel led beneath the central block to a formal garden, beyond which the park, patched with old snow and fresh frost, stretched its wooded acres into the distance. The sky was cloudless, every shadow sharply etched.

Halfway along the path leading through the garden to the canal basin, Tozer checked his watch and announced they were early for their appointment with Hayley They diverted to the nearest bench and sat down. Tozer lit a cigarette and gazed back at the palace.

“Know anything about the Bavarian royal family, Tim?” he asked, to Harding’s surprise.

“As much as you, I expect.”

Tozer chuckled. “You underestimate me. Carol and I toured the castles down near the Austrian border the year after we were married. Y’know: the fairytale ones built by Mad King Ludwig. Neuschwanstein and the rest. As King of Bavaria, Ludwig must have whiled away quite a lot of his time here in his day, mustn’t he?”

“So?”

“So, we remember him as mad. Which is how a lot of people remember Hayley. I wondered… if she chose to meet us here… to make some kind of point about that.”

“Are you serious?”

“Not sure. But I’m definitely serious about making this meeting work. For all of us. I’m going to follow Lawton’s lead. Tell Hayley about her sister. What happened to her the day she died. I mean when she really died, not when Hanckel pulled the plug on her four years later. Hayley’s never heard my account of the accident, has she? It’s time she did.”

“Neither have I, come to that.”

“It really was an accident, Tim. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot these past few days. I mean, could Kerry’s gear have been sabotaged? Not by me, obviously. I know I didn’t do it. But by someone else?”

“Well? Could it?”

“Only if you’re willing to rope in some pretty unlikely suspects. I took all our gear over on the helicopter the day before the dive. Kerry was staying with Carol in Hugh Town. Ray Trathen travelled with me. I sent him off to a b. and b. and stayed overnight with the Metherells. We loaded the gear into John’s car and left it there till morning. Then we drove down to the quay first thing and put it aboard the Jonquil. The Martyns were waiting for us. I left John with them and went to fetch the girls. We bumped into Ray Trathen on the way back to the quay Then we set off. It was a perfect morning. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a breath of wind. Like today. Only about twenty degrees warmer.”

“The unlikely suspects, then, are Metherell and the Martyns.”

“John could have crept out to his car during the night and tampered with one of the hoses. But he’d have had no way of knowing which of them Kerry would end up using. Unless I was the target, of course. Or unless he didn’t care which of us he was endangering. It’s a crazy idea anyway. He set the trip up as a favour to me, but he was keen to go out to the site of the wreck because of his book about the Association. He had no reason to want either of us dead. And if he’s innocent, so are the Martyns. They couldn’t have done anything without him noticing. Besides, they’re just Scillonian boatmen who ply for hire. The last thing they’d have wanted was a fatality during a dive from their boat.”

“Alf Martyn said penetrating the wreck on single air supply was foolhardy.”