He looked up just in time to see the man filling the windscreen.

Too late, he realised that somehow, in the few seconds he had taken his eyes off the road, he had allowed the car to drift over to one side. He actually felt the front tyre mount the grassy verge that separated the road from the hedgerow. That was where the man had been walking. He saw a face, staring eyes, a mouth drawing back in what must have been a cry of horror. Desperately, he scrabbled with the steering wheel, trying to veer away. But it was hopeless. He had been travelling at over fifty miles per hour.

The roar of the engine drowned out any sound the man might have made, but the impact of the car hitting him was the most horrible thing Algernon had ever heard. It seemed impossibly loud. He stamped his foot on the brake, noticing that the man had disappeared as if by magic. He had simply gone. As the car squealed to a halt, Algernon tried to persuade himself that he had imagined the whole thing, that it hadn’t been a man but a rabbit or maybe a deer. But he knew what he had seen. He felt sick, the alcohol churning in his stomach.

The car had come to a halt, slanting diagonally into the road. Now he heard the windscreen wipers grinding against the glass and reached down for the switch that turned them off. What next? He grabbed the gear stick and reversed, pulling in next to the hedge. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes, but they weren’t tears for the man he had just injured – or possibly killed. He was thinking of himself, of the fact that he had been drinking and that, following an incident with a police car at Hyde Park Corner, he had been disqualified for driving for one year and shouldn’t have been behind the wheel at all. What would happen to him? If he had killed the man, he might go to jail!

He turned off the engine and opened the car door. The rain swept gleefully towards him, driving into his face. He was still holding the cigarette but suddenly he didn’t want it and threw it into the grass. Where was he? Where was the man he had just hit, and anyway, what had he been doing out on his own, walking along a major road in the middle of nowhere? Another car rushed past.

He had to get this over with. He stepped out of his car and walked a short distance further down the road. He came to the man almost at once. He was wearing a raincoat and lying face down in the grass. He looked completely broken, his legs and arms pointing in different directions as if some monster had grabbed hold of him and tried to pull him apart. He didn’t seem to be breathing and Algernon was quite sure he was dead. Nobody could have survived a collision like that. It was murder, then. In the two seconds that he had looked down at the clock on the dashboard he had killed someone, at the same time destroying his own life.

One car had passed him. It hadn’t stopped.

With the rain coming down so hard, the driver couldn’t have seen him. He certainly wouldn’t have seen the man who’d been hit. Suddenly, Algernon regretted having a French car in England. It was probably the only one in the whole county. He looked behind him. The road was empty. He was on his own.

He made the decision instantly. He turned and hurried back to the car, noticing that there was now a dent in the radiator grille and a smear of bright red blood on the silver Peugeot badge. With a shudder, Algernon took out a handkerchief and wiped it clean. He wanted to throw the handkerchief away but thought better of it. Then he remembered the cigarette. What madness had made him discard it like that? It was too late. It would have been carried away by the wind. He wasn’t going to crawl on his hands and knees looking for it. All that mattered was to get as far from here as possible.

He got back into the car, closed the door and turned the key. The engine coughed but refused to start. He was soaking wet. Water was dripping down his forehead. He slammed his hands against the steering wheel, then tried again. This time the engine fired.

He punched the car into gear and drove away. He didn’t look back. He didn’t stop until he had reached Tawleigh, but he didn’t dare go into his sister’s house, not looking like this, soaking wet and with trembling hands. Instead, he pulled into a quiet lane and sat there for the next twenty minutes, his head in his hands, wondering what he was going to do.

*

While Algernon Marsh was sitting miserably in his car, watching the rain still streaking down the windscreen, his sister was also in something close to a state of shock, staring at a letter that lay on the table in front of her.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I think it’s fairly clear, my dearest,’ her husband said. ‘Your aunt—’

‘Aunt Joyce.’

‘Joyce Campion has made you her sole beneficiary. And sadly, she has recently passed away. The solicitors want to get in touch with you to discuss the inheritance, and it might be considerable. My love, this could be good news – for both of us! I could be married to a multimillionaire!’

‘Oh Len, don’t say that!’

‘Well, it’s possible.’

The letter had arrived in the morning post but they had both been so busy that Samantha had only just opened it. It had come from a firm of solicitors in London – Parker & Bentley – and even the letterhead, with an address in Lincoln’s Inn in raised black letters, had somehow seemed threatening. Samantha had always been nervous of the law. She was nervous of anything she didn’t completely understand.

She had read the single page with its three typed paragraphs. She had read them again. Then she had called for Leonard and asked him to read them too.

Leonard and Samantha Collins were sitting in the kitchen of the five-bedroom house that also contained the doctor’s surgery. It was a handsome, old building in need of a fresh coat of paint. The salt-water spray from the sea had done its worst and the wind had taken a few tiles off the roof. The garden, too, had been damaged by bad weather and marauding children. But it was still a solid family home with a vegetable patch that delivered pounds of raspberries in the summer, an orchard and a tree house. It was situated in Rectory Lane, right next to St Daniel’s, and this was one of the reasons Samantha had chosen it. A committed churchgoer, she never missed a Sunday service and helped the vicar with the flowers, all the major festivals, the various fund-raising efforts, tea for the old age pensioners on Thursdays and even with the allocation of plots in the cemetery (available to anyone who lived in the parish on receipt of a moderate fee).

Samantha divided her time equally between the church and her family, which included two children, Mark and Agnes, aged seven and five. She also looked after her husband’s medical practice, keeping a close eye on his accounts, his patient records, the daily running of his surgery. There were some who found her a rather severe woman, the sort who was never without a scarf and handbag and who always seemed to be in a hurry. And yet she was always polite. She smiled at everyone, even if she preferred not to stop and chat.

Nobody knew more about the people who lived in Tawleigh-on-the-Water than her. From her conversations with the vicar, who considered her his closest confidante, she had learned about their spiritual needs, their concerns, even their sins. From her husband she had got a snapshot – an X-ray, perhaps – of their physical condition and what had caused it. Mr Doyle, the butcher, drank too much and had cirrhosis of the liver. Nancy Mitchell, who worked at the Moonflower and who was not married, was three months pregnant. And even Melissa James, for all her fame, had been prescribed pills for stress and sleeplessness.