Adrian Boyde’s murder

Adrian Boyde’s murder is discovered in Combe Island Chapel, where his battered body has been covered with a green embroidered cope. The killing turns Dalgliesh’s investigation into a second murder case and confronts him with the possibility that his own earlier watchfulness might have mattered.

Discovery and the chapel scene

After finding Boyde’s bed made at Chapel Cottage, Dalgliesh crosses to the chapel and discovers him lying on the stone floor, a foot from the improvised altar. The cope covers almost all of him; one stiff white hand protrudes from its edge, and dark blood shows through the green silk. Nearby, a folding chair has been opened to support a long cardboard box, its tissue paper spilling out. The scene’s carefully placed objects make the chapel a crime scene as well as the setting for a disturbing tableau.

Confirming the killing and reconstructing the night

Dalgliesh treats the discovery as a murder, not an accident or suicide, and reports it to Rupert Maycroft by telephone. He tells him that Adrian Boyde has been murdered in the chapel and requires everyone on the island to be brought together. The investigation has changed scale: the death is no longer an isolated earlier crime but a second killing demanding an immediate response.

On returning to the chapel in search gloves, Dalgliesh finds no identifiable footprints on the sandy turf. His examination beneath the cope reveals that Boyde’s face has been brutally smashed: the nose is broken into splinters of bone, and both eyes are obscured or destroyed by the swollen, congealed blood. The stiffness of the fingers and neck, together with established rigor mortis, indicates that Boyde died the previous night. Dalgliesh cannot determine how the killer reached him: the assailant might have been waiting inside, watching from outside in the darkness, or following him from Combe House across the scrubland.

Kate Miskin likewise reads the facial injuries as evidence of violence beyond simply bringing Boyde down. She considers whether Calcraft first felled him with a stone or another object and then continued the assault, driven by hatred or a complete loss of control. The distinction remains uncertain, but the possibility that the face was battered in a frenzy gives the killing a different character from a straightforward blow intended only to incapacitate.

The scene also leaves Dalgliesh with a personal sense of failure. He thinks that if he had stayed outside Seal Cottage a few minutes longer the night before, watching for Boyde’s return, he might have seen a second figure emerge from the darkness. While he was conferring with Kate Miskin and Francis Benton-Smith, the killer may already have been acting. Standing beside Boyde’s body, he feels grief sharpened by the knowledge that there had been no evidence suggesting another person was in danger and no grounds to detain a suspect on vague suspicion; that explanation does not lessen his burden.

The cope as evidence

Kate Miskin has to steady her voice before assessing the attack. The smashed face and congealed blood suggest to her that Boyde may first have been felled with a stone or another object, then struck again in an assault driven by hatred or a sudden loss of control. She recognizes the possibility of a frenzy in which a killer, horrified by the deed, lashes out as though destroying the victim’s face could erase it. Her response is not only professional: alongside revulsion and anger, she feels pity, an emotion she finds harder to bear.

Francis Benton-Smith notices that the cope itself may help reconstruct what happened. Boyde was unlikely to have been wearing it when he fell, since it would probably have been beneath him; the killer may instead have taken it from the cardboard box. Tissue paper remains in the chapel, but there is no string, an unexplained detail that leaves open whether the box was already open when the killer entered.

A vigil in the chapel

The discovery becomes, for Dalgliesh, more than a procedural turning point. Motionless beside Adrian Boyde, he listens beyond the waves’ rhythmic crash against the granite, letting the sea’s perpetual sound settle into a lament for suffering that cannot be healed. A witness might have mistaken his bowed stillness for reverence; the impression is not wholly wrong, though his vigil holds sorrow as well as respect. The murder leaves him with a burden he cannot undo or explain away, only accept and carry forward.