The morning post brought three items Eleanor Vesper expected and one she did not.
The expected: a water bill, a pamphlet from the parish about harvest suppers, and a thin envelope from her solicitor confirming the cottage transfer. The unexpected: a manila envelope, square, heavy, postmarked Crane Cove, with no return address other than the stamp and a smudge of something brown across one corner. The paper had been folded once, hard, as though someone had pressed it into a coat pocket before walking to the post office.
Eleanor set her kettle on the stove, set the three familiar items in their usual place by the receipt book, and turned the manila envelope over in her hands. The address written across its face was hers in full, with the addition of the words The Salt Cottage, Aldworth Road, in a careful hand she did not recognise. No sender. No letter inside that she could feel. Just the flat, warm weight of something pressed between card and paper.
She slit it open with the small knife she kept by the kettle.
Inside lay a photograph and a folded slip of cream paper. The photograph was old, the colours bled toward amber, the corners foxed with age. It showed a woman standing at the edge of a wide flat marsh, the sky behind her piled high with cloud, the reeds at her ankles bent under a wind that the rest of her body did not seem to feel. She wore a dark coat buttoned at the throat. Her hair was pinned back. Her face was turned half toward the camera and half toward something out of frame, something low and distant on the marsh. She looked, Eleanor thought, as if she had been interrupted.
Eleanor did not recognise her.
She turned the photograph over. On the back, in pencil, faint but legible, a single word and a number: Hester, 1961.
The slip of cream paper carried one line, the same careful hand as the envelope, the ink a darker brown than she had expected:
She was never lost. Ask about the salt-house.
Eleanor read the line twice. She set the photograph on the kitchen table, where the small clock beside the cruet showed half past nine and the morning pressed grey against the window. The kettle began its thin whistle, and she let it finish before she moved.
She knew two things about Crane Cove. The first was that her late husband, during one of the rare evenings he talked about his family at all, had mentioned a great-aunt who had lived near the sea and died unmarried. He had said it the way one mentions weather, a small fact lodged at the back of something larger he did not care to explain. The second was that in the file of letters and documents she had been sorting since his death, there had been one thin note addressed to a Mrs Crane of Crane Cove, written some weeks before Eleanor's marriage, never opened, returned undelivered. She had assumed at the time that Crane Cove was a street. It was not.
The photograph sat on the table with the patience of an object that has waited.
Eleanor made her tea, sat, and drank it while she considered what to do next. She was a methodical woman. She had been an archivist before her husband's death; the discipline of ordering other people's papers had become, in the months since, the only framework she had for her own grief. So she did what she would have done with any unfamiliar document. She noted what she knew, and what she did not.
Known: a name on the back of the photograph. Hester. A year, 1961. A place, Crane Cove. A phrase: the salt-house.
Not known: who had sent the envelope. Why. Who the woman in the photograph was. Why someone thought Eleanor, of all the people in the world, should be told that a woman long dead had never been lost.
She turned again to the brown smudge on the envelope. It had the look of dried mud, or of something that had been pressed against a weathered surface. She lifted it to her nose without thinking. The smell was faint, organic, faintly metallic. Marsh.
The clock in the hall struck ten. Eleanor finished her tea, rinsed the cup, and set it upside down on the rack. She fetched her coat from the peg, the photograph in its envelope folded into the left side, the cream slip into the right. She locked the cottage door behind her, turned the key twice in the old Yale lock, and walked down the lane toward the bus stop at the foot of the hill.
The bus to Crane Cove ran twice a day. If she caught the ten-fifteen, she would be there before lunch. If she missed it, the next was not until four, and the light would be failing.
She caught it.
The bus was a single-decker, half-empty, smelling of diesel and damp wool. The other passengers were women of an age with herself, returning from market, baskets at their feet, and a boy in school uniform asleep against the window. Eleanor took a seat near the front and watched the lanes unspool behind the glass. She knew this road from the visits she had paid, years ago now, to her husband's family in the next county. The land here had the drained, orderly quality of land that had been fought for. Dykes ran straight as rulers. Hawthorn hedges stood thick at the field edges. The sky pressed low.
After half an hour the bus turned toward the sea, and the land opened out. Flat. Grey-brown. The marshes. She had seen them before and forgotten them, the way one forgets weather. Now they came back to her in pieces, the glitter of standing water in the dykes, the pale lace of dead reed, the small dark shapes of sheep on distant banks. And beyond them, when the road lifted at a bridge, the first sight of Crane Cove itself: a huddle of houses, a church tower, the thin verticals of boat masts, and at the edge of it all, on a low rise above the harbour, the dark hulk of a building on stilts.
The salt-house. She knew it before she was told. The shape of it, raised above the marsh on its black wooden pillars, was not a shape one forgot.
The bus let her off at the post office.
The post office of Crane Cove was also the general store, also the place where one left keys for the holiday cottages, also, according to the painted sign above the door, the office of the local paper. A bell rang when she stepped inside. The floor was brown lino. A woman behind the counter looked up.
"Morning," the woman said. "Help you?"
"Information, if I may."
The woman was perhaps sixty, short, square, with the kind of face that had spent fifty years squinting into sea light. She wore a green pinny over a grey cardigan. Her hands were red and rough. She set down a mug of tea.
"About?"
"A photograph." Eleanor set the envelope on the counter, took out the photograph, and laid it flat between them. "A woman, taken here, in 1961."
The woman looked at it. Her face did not change, but her hands, which had been reaching for the mug, stopped.
"Hester," the woman said, after a moment. "That's her name on the back."
"Yes."
"She's not local. Or she was, and then she wasn't."
Eleanor waited.
"Most people here don't have photographs that old. Most of what we have is in the church chest, and half of that was lost in the flood of '73." The woman lifted her chin toward the window, as if the flood were still in view. "Who's asking?"
"My name is Eleanor Vesper. I received the photograph this morning, in the post. It came from this village."
"Posted here?"
"Postmarked here."
The woman was silent a moment. Then she drew the photograph toward her and studied it, as one might study a card in a game. She turned it over. She looked at the front again. She looked at Eleanor.
"You'll want to talk to Jonah Breck," she said. "He was a boy then, but he was the one who found the body."
Eleanor felt the floor steady under her feet, the way a boat steadies when the wake passes.
"Found the body," she repeated.
The woman nodded, once. "Of the woman in the photograph. They said she'd drowned. They said she'd fallen from the salt-house. They said a lot of things. Jonah was the one who found her in the reeds at low water, and he has never, in fifty-odd years, said a word about it to anyone except the constable at the time, and the constable is long gone."
"Where would I find Mr Breck?"
"He'll be down at the quay. He keeps a boat called the Esther, after his mother. He sails most mornings, weather permitting. He won't have sailed today, the wind's wrong. He'll be mending nets on the bench by the winch house."
Eleanor thanked her. The woman nodded and picked up her mug again, and as Eleanor turned to the door, she spoke once more.
"Mrs Vesper."
"Yes."
"The salt-house is private property. It's been empty since the family sold off the works. There's a sign on the gate."
"I see."
"And there's a woman in the village who will tell you the photograph is a fake, and that you should put it back in the envelope and forget it. Her name is Della Linley. She's the estate agent for the family who bought the place. She means well, but she's paid to mean well in a particular direction. Bear that in mind."
"I will."
"And be careful with Jonah. He's not what he seems."
The bell rang behind her as she stepped out into the wind.
The quay was a short walk down a cobbled lane that smelled, even in October, of tar and fish. The harbour was small, half-tide, the boats leaning against their moorings with the patience of animals at rest. A few gulls stood on the floating pontoon. At the far end, on a wooden bench beneath a tin roof that had once been painted blue, a man sat with a net across his knees.
He was perhaps seventy, broad, weather-darkened, wearing a thick jumper and a wool cap pulled low. His hands moved with the small quick gestures of long practice, drawing a needle through twine. He did not look up when Eleanor approached, but he stopped working.
"Mrs Vesper," he said. "From the post office. She phoned ahead."
Eleanor sat down on the bench at a careful distance.
"She is efficient."
"She is that." He resumed his work for a moment, then set the needle down and looked at her. His eyes were small, pale, very direct. "You have come about the photograph."
"Yes."
"Then I will tell you what I told the constable, in '61. I was twelve. I was out with the dog before school. The tide had been out all night. There was a woman in the reeds at the south edge of the marsh, on the bank below the salt-house. She was on her back. Her coat was buttoned. Her eyes were open. Her hair had come loose. The dog would not go near her. I ran back to the village. I told my mother. She told the constable. The constable came. He took her away in a cart."
He stopped. The wind moved a strand of net across his knee.
"In the photograph," he said, "she is standing. Alive. Looking toward the salt-house. That was taken some weeks before she died. Whoever sent it to you knew that. Whoever sent it to you knew her name."
"Hester," Eleanor said.
"Hester May Crane." He looked at her. "That name was not in the paper at the time. It was not in the inquest record. I know it because my mother knew her, and because my mother, on her deathbed, made me promise I would never forget it."
The wind freshened. A gull cried. The boats shifted on their moorings.
"Was she," Eleanor said carefully, "a relative of mine?"
The old man considered her. His hands were still.
"The Cranes were a family," he said. "They ran the salt-works for four generations. There were brothers and cousins and daughters, and the daughters married out, and some of the daughters came back. Hester May Crane was one who came back. She came back in the spring of '61. She stayed in the salt-house. She was seen in the village. She was polite to no one. Then, in the autumn, she was found in the reeds, and the family closed the salt-works, and within a year the house on the hill was empty, and within ten years it had been sold to the people who own it now, and that is all I know."
Eleanor let the silence sit a moment. Then she asked the question she had come to ask.
"Who sent it to me, Mr Breck?"
"I don't know," he said. "But I can tell you this. Whoever sent it knows the inquest did not find what it should have found. Whoever sent it knows the salt-house has a door at the back that no one uses. Whoever sent it knows that the woman in the photograph did not fall."
He picked up his needle.
"And whoever sent it," he said, "wants you to ask, before anyone else asks for you."
Eleanor sat very still on the bench. The harbour moved around her. Somewhere at the edge of the marsh, the salt-house stood in its dark stilts, waiting.
She folded the photograph back into the envelope, stood, and thanked the old man.
"Mrs Vesper."
She turned.
"Don't go to the salt-house alone."
"I'll bear that in mind."
He nodded, once, and returned to his net.
Eleanor walked back up the cobbled lane toward the post office, where the wind off the marsh was already thickening, and where, in ten minutes, she would meet Della Linley for the first time.
The post office was a narrow building wedged between a chandler's shop and a public house called The Three Salties, its whitewashed front stained the colour of weak tea by a century of coastal weather. A bell above the door gave a thin clang as Eleanor pushed inside, and the woman behind the counter looked up with the careful expression of someone who had been expecting company and was not pleased to receive it.
"Mrs Vesper." Della Linley set down the tea towel she had been folding. She was perhaps fifty, perhaps older, with iron-grey hair pulled back severely and hands that looked as though they had spent a lifetime wringing wet rope. Her eyes were pale blue and missed nothing. "You're earlier than I thought."
"I'm afraid I've come to bother you, Mrs Linley."
"You've come to ask about the envelope." It was not a question. Della came around the end of the counter and pulled a stool out for Eleanor, then perched on the other one herself. The shop smelled of paraffin and old paper. "Sit down before you fall down. You look like you've been out in it."
Eleanor sat. She set the envelope on the counter between them, but did not open it.
"It was in my letterbox this morning," she said. "No stamp. No postmark. Hand-delivered, I should think, in the small hours."
"That figures." Della folded her arms. "We don't get much through the door here after dark. The postman comes at half past seven and he doesn't walk on the marsh road after dusk, not since the Hollis boy took his bicycle into the ditch in October and came out talking about a woman in white standing on the seawall."
Eleanor said nothing. She watched Della's face.
"I know what you're thinking," Della said. "That I'm going to be difficult about it. I'm not. I'm going to be useful about it, because that letter is not the first strange thing to come through this office in the last six months, and I'd like to know who is sending them."
Eleanor felt the small cold shock of recognition. "There have been others?"
"Three. All to the same address. All hand-delivered in the early morning. All with no name on the outside, only the address, written in pencil, in a hand my husband recognised." Della's voice had gone flatter, more careful. "My husband worked the post office for thirty years before I took it over. He knew the handwritings of this village the way a doctor knows faces. He said the writing on those envelopes was not the writing of anyone living here."
"And where were the others sent?"
"To a man who keeps a boat at Saltman's Yard. Edgar Vell. He used to run trawlers out of Lowestoft before he came down here. He came down here in '59, bought a cottage on the Bramble Lane, and set himself up as a sort of unofficial pilot for the pleasure boats in summer. People here don't much care for him. He asks too many questions and he drinks too much of what he shouldn't. But he's a good man with a vessel in shallow water, and he has friends in Lowestoft who still owe him favours."
"And the letters?" Eleanor asked.
"The first one came in February. Edgar opened it at his kitchen table, and whatever was in it, he put it back in the envelope and walked down to the salt-house that same afternoon. He did not go in. He stood on the bank and looked at it for a long time, and then he came home and poured himself a very large whisky and did not speak to his wife for two days."
Eleanor's fingers were still on the counter. "And the second letter?"
"April. Same handwriting. Same address. Same shape of envelope. Edgar was seen at the post office the next morning, asking the postmaster whether anyone had been seen on the marsh road in the small hours. He was told no. He was also told, by my husband, that the postmaster had not seen anyone either, and that if Edgar wanted to make a complaint he should make it in writing, in daylight, and sober."
Della's mouth twitched. "Edgar did not make the complaint. He went home. In May, he went to Lowestoft for three days. He came back with a man none of us had ever seen before, and the two of them spent a whole afternoon walking the seawall above the old channel, pointing at things and writing in a notebook. The man from Lowestoft left on the evening train. Edgar has not been seen at the salt-house since."
"And the third letter?" Eleanor asked quietly.
"June. This June. A fortnight ago. The third envelope, and this time the handwriting on the outside was shakier than before, as if the person writing it was not well. Edgar opened it on his boat. He sat there for nearly an hour. Then he folded it up, put it in his pocket, and rowed ashore and walked into the village and came into this shop and bought a penny stamp and a postcard and wrote a name on the postcard and posted it to an address in Aldeburgh."
Della paused.
"The name on the postcard was yours."
Eleanor did not move. The paraffin smell in the shop seemed to thicken. Somewhere outside, a gull screamed, and the wind rattled the window.
"Then," Della went on, "three days later, you received an envelope in your letterbox. No name. Your address, in pencil, in the same hand. Only this time, the hand was steady again."
Eleanor opened the envelope. She drew out the photograph. She set it on the counter between them.
Della looked at it for a long time. Her face did not change, but her hands, folded in her lap, tightened.
"Where did you get that?" Della asked, and her voice was not the voice of a woman asking a question for the first time. It was the voice of a woman confirming something she had feared for a long while.
"It was inside the envelope," Eleanor said. "Along with the letter."
"I know the woman in the photograph," Della said. "Her name was Hester May Crane. She was the daughter of the man who built the salt-house. She came back to the village in the spring of 1961, after a long absence somewhere up the coast. She stayed in the salt-house. She was seen walking on the seawall at strange hours. She spoke to no one and was spoken to by no one. In the autumn of that year, she was found in the reeds at the foot of the marsh, and the inquest at the King's Head returned a verdict of accidental death, and the family closed the works and the house on the hill was sold within the year."
"Mr Breck told me much the same," Eleanor said carefully.
"Jonah would," Della said. "He was the one who found her."
The words fell into the room like a stone into still water.
"Jonah found her?" Eleanor repeated.
"He was out with his nets before first light, the morning of the seventh of October, 1961. He was working the channel that runs along the eastern edge of the marsh, the one that comes in past the back of the salt-house. He saw something in the reeds. He rowed over. He found her, face down, half in the water, half in the mud. He carried her ashore himself. He gave evidence at the inquest. He has not spoken of it since, to anyone, except once, to me, in 1973, when he was very ill with the fever and did not know quite what he was saying. He said she had not fallen. He said someone had put her there. He said the salt-house door was open when he found her, and there were footprints in the silt at the back of the building that did not belong to her."
Eleanor's hand had come to rest on the photograph, as if to cover it.
"And you," she said, "have kept this to yourself for fifteen years."
"I have kept it to myself," Della said, "because Jonah asked me to. He begged me to, in the way that men beg when they are frightened. He said that if it ever came out, he would be the one they came for. He said that whoever had put Hester May Crane in the reeds was still here, and that they had long arms, and that he could not protect anyone if people knew what he had seen."
"And now," Eleanor said, "someone has sent me the photograph, and someone has sent Edgar Vell three envelopes full of questions, and someone is writing in a hand that grows shakier and then steadier, and your husband is dead and the postmaster is dead and Jonah Breck is sitting in a harbour mending a net and pretending he is not afraid."
Della looked at her for a long moment.
"Yes," she said at last. "That is more or less the size of it."
The bell above the door clanged. They both turned. The wind had swung the door open, and through it came the smell of brine and the distant sound of a boat engine on the river.
A man stood in the doorway, hat in hand. He was perhaps sixty, lean and brown, with the careful walk of someone who had spent a lifetime on moving decks. He was not from the village. His clothes were town clothes, though they had been lived in. He looked at Eleanor first, then at Della, and then at the photograph on the counter.
"Good morning," he said. "I'm looking for Mrs Vesper."
Eleanor stood up.
"I am Mrs Vesper."
"My name is Edgar Vell," he said. "I believe we have a mutual correspondent."
Edgar Vell set his hat on the counter and looked at Eleanor with the steady, tired gaze of a man who had been searching for a long time and had finally found something that resembled an answer.
"I received a letter," he said. "Postmarked Crane Cove. No return address. It asked me a series of questions about a death that occurred in this village in the summer of 1962. A death that was never properly investigated. A death that I was told, very firmly, never to speak of again."
He reached into his coat and produced a folded paper, which he laid on the counter beside Della's photograph. The handwriting was the same. The same careful upright script. The same ink that had faded in patches and then been touched up with a fresher nib.
"I came here to find out who had sent it," Edgar Vell said. "And I found you."
Eleanor picked up the letter. The questions were identical to those he had described to Della. She read them aloud, her voice flat and precise.
Was the body recovered from the river on the night of the seventeenth of June? Were the personal effects returned to the family, or were they retained as evidence? Did you see the man who came down to the water's edge at approximately half past nine? What did he carry? Who was he? Why did you not say so at the time?
She set the letter down. Della was watching her, and Edgar Vell was watching Della, and the wind was pressing against the panes.
"You did not come here because of my letter," Eleanor said to Edgar Vell. "You came because someone told you that I had written to you. Someone who knew that I would write."
Edgar Vell considered this.
"I came because I am old," he said, "and because I have carried the weight of what I saw for fifty years, and because when I received the letter I felt, for the first time, that I might be allowed to set it down. The fact that you had written to me as well, that was a coincidence. Or it was not. I have not yet decided."
He looked at Della.
"You are the postmaster's wife," he said. It was not a question.
"I am."
"Then you will know whether any letters have been delivered to the inn at Crane Cove in the past week. Addressed to a Mrs Eleanor Vesper. Postmarked London."
Della was quiet for a moment. Then she went to the shelf behind the counter and came back with a small bundle of letters tied with string. She set them on the counter and pushed them across. Eleanor untied the string. There were three letters, all postmarked Crane Cove, all addressed to her in the same careful hand.
The first had been sent a week ago. The second four days ago. The third that morning.
Eleanor opened the first.
It contained a single sheet of paper. The handwriting was the upright, careful script. The ink was old.
Mrs Vesper, You do not know me. I knew your cousin Hester May Crane, though I did not know her well. She was kind to me once, when kindness was the last thing I deserved. I have written to Edgar Vell because he was there, and he saw, and he has been silent for too long. I have written to you because you have come to Crane Cove, and because you are the sort of person who does not stop asking questions when you are told to stop. I am not able to tell you who I am. I am not able to tell you where I am. I can only tell you that Hester May Crane did not fall. Hester May Crane was put into the water by someone who lived in this village, and that someone is still here, and that someone knows that you are asking questions, and that someone will try to make you stop. Please be careful. Please do not trust the postmaster. Please do not trust Jonah Breck.
Eleanor read the letter twice. Then she folded it and put it in her pocket.
"I think," she said, "that we should sit down."
They sat. Della brought tea. Edgar Vell produced a small notebook from his coat and laid it on the table, open to a page dense with his own handwriting. He had been making notes for fifty years. The entries were dated, in some cases down to the hour. He had recorded what he had seen on the night of the seventeenth of June 1962, and he had recorded the questions he had been asked by the man who had come to see him the next morning, and he had recorded his answers, and he had recorded the silence that had followed.
"I was a junior reporter then," he said. "I was twenty-three. I had come down from London to cover a flower show. I stayed an extra day because I wanted to walk on the marshes. I was walking along the river path at half past nine in the evening when I heard the splash. I did not see the body fall. I saw, in the light of the moon, a man standing at the water's edge. He was holding something over the rail. I could not see his face. I could see the shape of his shoulders. I could see that he was wearing a coat. I could see that he was breathing very hard."
He paused.
"I did not report what I had seen," he said. "I was told, the next morning, by a man who introduced himself as a friend of the family, that the death had been an accident. He was very polite. He was very clear. He told me that if I spoke of what I had seen, I would be making a grave error of judgement. He told me that the village would be grateful if I remained silent. He told me that the family would be devastated if the truth came out. He used the word devastated three times."
"And you kept silent," Eleanor said.
"I kept silent," Edgar Vell said. "For fifty years. I have regretted it every day."
Della set down the teapot.
"The postmaster," she said. "My husband. He died three days ago. He was killed because he knew something. He was killed because someone feared that he would speak. He was killed because he had been approached, a week before his death, by a man who wanted to know what Hester May Crane had left in her cottage, and what letters she had kept, and whether any of those letters had survived."
She looked at Eleanor.
"You asked me, when you came in, whether I had found anything in the post office. I told you that I had not. That was not entirely true. I had found a letter, addressed to me, in my husband's desk. It was postmarked London. It was written in a hand I did not recognise. It told me that my husband had been seen, on the night of the sixteenth of June, standing at the water's edge, and that if he did not deliver certain letters to certain people, the consequences would be severe."
She paused.
"He did not deliver them," she said. "He was frightened, and he did not deliver them, and three days later he was dead."
Eleanor sat very still for a long moment. The wind pressed against the windows. The light in the shop had gone grey.
"You said, in your letter," Eleanor said to Edgar Vell, "that you had been approached by a man the morning after Hester May Crane's death. Do you remember what he looked like?"
Edgar Vell shook his head.
"I never saw his face. He wore a hat. He had a scarf around his throat. He spoke like a gentleman."
"And the man Della describes, the one who approached her husband. Was he local?"
Della shook her head.
"He was not. He had the look of a town man. He had the careful walk of someone who was not used to mud."
Eleanor looked at the letters on the table. The handwriting. The careful upright script. The ink that had faded and then been touched up. The questions, identical in Edgar Vell's bundle and in Della's bundle and in her own.
"Same questions," she said. "Same hand. Same sender. Someone, somewhere, has been writing these letters for years. Someone who knew what Edgar Vell saw. Someone who knew that the postmaster was involved. Someone who knew that I would come to Crane Cove."
She looked up.
"And someone who knows, now, that the three of us are sitting in this room."
Della stood up. She went to the window and looked out at the street. The wind was high. The gulls were crying. The tide was coming in.
"I think," Della said, "that we should not stay here."
Eleanor nodded.
"Where is Jonah Breck?"
"He is at the harbour. He has been there all morning. He is mending a net."
"Then we will go to the harbour," Eleanor said. "And we will take Mr Vell with us."
Edgar Vell gathered his notebook and put it back in his coat. Della locked the till and put the key in her pocket. Eleanor gathered the letters and put them in her bag.
They stepped out into the wind.
The street was empty. The tide was lapping at the edge of the road. The gulls were wheeling above the rooftops. The light was the thin, grey light of an autumn afternoon.
They walked in silence towards the harbour. The path took them down past the church and along the river wall. The water was high. It was beginning to spill over the wall in places, spreading in thin sheets across the stones.
Jonah Breck was sitting on a coil of rope at the end of the quay. He was mending a net. He looked up as they approached. His face did not change.
"Mrs Vesper," he said.
"Jonah," Eleanor said.
He looked at Edgar Vell.
"I know who you are," he said to Edgar Vell. "I have seen your byline. I have read your pieces. You wrote about the inquest in 1962. You wrote that the death was accidental. You wrote that there was no evidence of foul play."
Edgar Vell nodded.
"I wrote what I was told to write," he said.
Jonah Breck set down his net.
"I saw you," he said. "On the night of the seventeenth of June. I saw you on the river path. I saw you stop. I saw you look towards the water. I saw you turn and walk away."
Edgar Vell was very still.
"I did not know you saw me."
"I saw you," Jonah Breck said. "And I have wondered, for fifty years, why you did not speak."
Edgar Vell did not answer.
Jonah looked at Della. "And I saw your husband," he said. "Three nights before he died. He came down to the harbour. He was frightened. He told me that he had been approached by a man who wanted him to deliver letters. He told me that the man had threatened him. He told me that he did not know what to do."
He paused.
"I told him to go to the police," Jonah Breck said. "I told him that the man could not be allowed to threaten postmasters. I told him that he had a duty."
"And what did he say?" Eleanor asked.
"He said that he was afraid," Jonah Breck said. "He said that the man had told him that the letters were about Hester May Crane, and that if they were delivered, the truth would come out, and that the truth would destroy someone in the village, and that someone would not allow the truth to come out."
He looked at Eleanor.
"He said that he had seen the letters. He said that they were questions. He said that they asked about the night of the seventeenth of June. He said that the questions had been written by a man who had been there."
Eleanor felt the wind on her face. She felt the cold of the stone under her feet. She felt the weight of the letters in her bag.
"Who," she said, "wrote the letters?"
Jonah Breck was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat and produced a small, leather-bound notebook. It was old. It was stained with salt. He opened it to the first page.
"This," he said, "is the notebook of Hester May Crane."
He held it out to Eleanor. She took it. The leather was soft under her fingers. The pages were dense with Hester May Crane's careful, upright hand.
"She kept a diary," Jonah Breck said. "She kept it in a hollow under the floorboards of her cottage. She kept it because she knew, before she died, that someone in the village wanted her dead. She knew because she had seen something, on the night of the sixteenth of June, that she should not have seen. She had seen a man, at the water's edge, waiting. She had seen him lift something over the rail. She had seen him turn, and she had seen his face."
He paused.
"She wrote it down," he said. "She wrote the name. She wrote the date. She wrote what she had seen. She sealed the notebook in an oilskin pouch and she hid it under the floorboards, and she went to the cottage of Della Linley's husband, and she gave him the key to the hiding place, and she told him that if anything happened to her, he was to deliver the notebook to the police."
He paused again.
"He did not deliver it," Jonah Breck said. "He was too frightened. He kept it for fifty years. He kept it in a drawer in the post office. He kept it until three days before he died, when a man came to the post office and asked for it, and he refused to hand it over, and three days later he was dead."
Eleanor opened the notebook. The pages were yellowed. The ink had faded in places and been touched up in others. She turned to the last entry.
It was dated the sixteenth of June 1962.
It read:
I have seen him. I cannot write his name, even here. But I have seen his face, and I have seen what he has done, and I know that he will come for me next. I am leaving this notebook with the postmaster. I am trusting him to do what is right. I am trusting God to protect me, if there is a God, and if there is not, I am trusting the truth.
Eleanor closed the notebook.
"We must go to the cottage," she said.
Jonah Breck stood up.
"I will take you," he said. "I know the way. I have known it for fifty years."
They walked out along the quay. The tide was high now. The water was lapping at the edges of the boats. The gulls were crying. The light was going.
They came to the cottage as the first stars were coming out. The door was ajar. The smell of salt and damp came out to meet them.
Eleanor stepped inside. She found the loose board. She found the hollow beneath it. She found the oilskin pouch. She opened it. Inside were letters. Dozens of letters. All written in the same careful hand. All addressed to the same people.
She read the first.
It was addressed to Edgar Vell.
It asked the questions. The same questions.
She looked up at Jonah Breck.
"You knew," she said.
"I knew," he said. "I have known for fifty years. I have kept the secret, because I was afraid, and because I was told that if I spoke, I would be the next to die."
He paused.
"But I am old now," he said. "And I am tired of being afraid. And I think that Hester May Crane deserves, at last, to rest."
Eleanor folded the letters. She put them in her bag. She looked at the loose board, and the hollow beneath it, and the empty oilskin pouch.