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By Root 430 0

guile to ensure that her path and her brother's crossed as often as possible, and she was in no doubt now: something was definitely awry. As well as the tiredness, and the blistered hands that still showed no sign of healing, Steve was developing a noticeable pallor. He was losing weight, too. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing; he liked his beer and it wouldn't hurt him to drop few pounds. But this loss was fast. He was starting to look gaunt; 'hag-ridden') the old people of the village would call it. When Nina tried, once, to tackle him about it, Steve only laughed and said she was imagining things; he was fine and stop fussing, she was getting worse than Mum. That comparison was guaranteed to shut Nina up and she didn't try again. But the worry continued to nag.

The second piece of the puzzle was Ruth. She still spent a lot of time hanging around the village, and the beach in particular. Nina often saw her there when she was 'studying at home,' though she took care not to let Ruth see that she saw. Ruth still wore all the wrong kinds of clothes for the beach, and she didn't do any of the usual beachy things like sunbathing or surfing or exploring rock pools. She just stood around staring at the cliffs and the sea, or sometimes wandered a short way along the cliff paths that branched off from the approach road. Occasionally she would venture out on the sand towards the tideline, but she never went close to the water and was very careful to avoid the stream that ran to the sea down one side of the beach. Nina, noticing that, wondered at it. All right, maybe Ruth didn't want to risk ruining her smart shoes. However, Nina was convinced that there was more to her aversion. It was almost as if Ruth were afraid to get her feet wet.

Ruth usually left the beach area at about four-thirty, which was half an hour before Steve finished work and was likely to put in an appearance. It struck Nina that this might not be a coincidence. She didn't know how often Steve and Ruth were meeting, but she had the impression that from Steve's point of view Ruth was proving frustratingly elusive. He was keen on her, no doubt of that; she, though, seemed to be avoiding anything more than an occasional encounter. This suggested to Nina that she had an agenda she didn't want Steve to know about.

Nina had also failed in her attempts to find out whether Ruth was staying in the village, and if so, where. Following her after Charlie Johns' funeral had proved disappointing; Ruth had merely been shopping, and after half of hour of hanging around on street corners Nina had given up. Now, two days later, she was trying again. The foray began well enough: on leaving the beach, Ruth walked past the car park and up the road for a hundred yards or so, before turning off on a footpath that led to a row of holiday chalets and the wilder cliff land beyond. Nina tailed her at a careful distance, but somehow before they had even reached the first chalet, Ruth gave her the slip. Quite how she did it Nina couldn't for the life of her work out, but she did, and when Nina cautiously approached the chalets and looked around, it was obvious that they were all occupied by families with young children, making it highly unlikely that Ruth was staying in any of them. She hadn't the least idea where Ruth could have gone, but whatever the truth of it, Nina was outfoxed.

She returned to the beach, annoyed by her defeat. Then as she passed the lifeboat house she saw a familiar figure in the distance ... and the third piece of the puzzle suddenly slotted into place.

If she was adding up unlikely coincidences, Nina thought, then the fact that the jelly-baby man was on the beach yet again had to be the unlikeliest coincidence of all. As usual he was scrambling around the rocks with his pink fishing net, pretending – Nina didn't believe for one moment that it was anything other than pretence – to fish in the pools. She stopped by the boat house and watched him with narrowed eyes. He definitely wasn't fishing. Look at the way he kept pausing and surreptitiously