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fortnight Doctor Tharlsen returned to Norway. Mari found a brief email from him waiting for her next morning. For the first time in their correspondence he had permitted himself an exclamation mark. More than one.
    â€œAmazing! The whole of the oath exchange is in Old Story Measure! Terribly garbled, but unmistakable. I realised while on the aeroplane, and worked on it for the rest of the journey. I have the first seventeen lines as certain as they will ever be. I can barely stop to sleep. By Sunday night I may have enough to send you to read at your breakfast on Monday. Perhaps even earlier. Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!”

    At first light next day, Dick slithered out from under the sheet, bent over the bed, and kissed Mari’s ear.
    â€œCatch me some breakfast,” she murmured.
    â€œDon’t count on it,” he said, kissed her again and left to catch the dawn rise. She lay listening to the hiss of the shower, and relishing her own contentment. She could feel it filling the whole valley, brimming along the hilltops, just as the still summer heat seemed to do. Normally she might have lain like that for the hour or more until sunrise before getting up, but today was clearly going to be a scorcher, literally so in her case by the time the sun had any strength in it, so she allowed herself only as long as it took Dick to finish his shower, and then rose and followed him.
    She showered, washing her hair, and dried, then walked naked to the kitchen to make herself some morning tea. She was used to wandering round the house like that. The weather was more than warm enough for it. Even at the weekends there was no likelihood of anyone coming by. The nearest house was two and a half miles down the pot-holed track, with the public road another two beyond that, the entrance clearly marked as private. She brought her cup back to her desk in the living room and switched on her PC to check her email.
    While she waited for the server to connect she watched Dick out of the window. Doctor Tharlsen’s gift covered a bit over half a mile of the near bank, as far as midstream. The bank plunged steeply down at this point, and continued the slope below the waterline, where the main current had carved out a deep channel, through which it ran steadily, with barely a ripple. No salmon would rise in such water. But a rock shelf jutted out from the further shore, creating broken and turbulent shallows, with stiller pools. Part of this reached within Dick’s rights, and the river baillie had told him that good fish had been caught here, and had lent him the dinghy to fish from. Using a rock for an anchor, he could moor in the current, which would then drag the anchor very slowly downstream, so that he could start at the top of the rock shelf and cover the whole length of it and then paddle upstream and begin again. He was now just about to start the process. Mari liked to watch him doing it, because of the characteristically deft fashion in which he accomplished everything on the unsteady little dinghy.
    Now he was out in the middle of the river, shipping his oars, letting the current swing the dinghy down towards the shelf, picking up the anchor rock, balancing himself to slip it over the side . . .
    Because she was watching, Mari saw exactly what happened. From the very first she was in no doubt about it.
    Just he had the rock poised to let go, something reached up out of the water—a four-fingered hand, twice human size, the colour of granite, webbed to the top knuckles—and grasped the gunwale and dragged it violently down into the water. Unprepared, unbalanced by the rock, Dick toppled over. When the splash and pother had cleared he was gone. The empty dinghy bobbled at the end of its rope. His rod was being swept away downstream.
    She ran for the door and headlong down the bank, and dived. No thought had taken place, but something in her had guessed at the speed of the current, so that she hit the water