Dalgliesh Infers Padgett’s Motive While Ill

Adam Dalgliesh’s sickroom deduction reframes the investigation into Nathan Oliver’s murder: the crucial question is not who arrived on Combe Island, but who had left. By linking Martha Padgett’s death, Dan Padgett’s apparently lost blood sample, and details of the lighthouse and Puffin Cottage, Dalgliesh reconstructs a possible motive and confrontation. The answer arrives while he is feverish and physically weakened, but it does not yet amount to a court-ready case; the missing blood and hair remain essential.

Illness and the Return of Clues

By Wednesday evening, Dalgliesh’s mind is clear even as his body deteriorates. A severe cough has made breathing difficult, and Guy Staveley and Jo Staveley have had to put oxygen tubes in his nostrils. In the lull between bouts of pain, the dark sickroom and its pale windowpanes bring back the room where he had looked down at Oliver’s body. His recollection of the murder scene opens onto a series of earlier remarks and observations that he had not yet fitted together.

The clues return in fragments rather than as a fresh discovery: Mrs. Plunkett’s recollection of someone being frightened in a cabin; Dr. Speidel’s knowledge that Oliver visited the island quarterly, publicized in an April 2003 newspaper interview; and Millie Tranter’s account of her meeting with Oliver. Dalgliesh also recalls his own remark about a dead woman, Padgett seeing smoke from a chimney, and Oliver’s paperback among the popular romantic fiction in Puffin Cottage. These separate details acquire significance through their arrangement. The metaphor of puzzle pieces clicking into a globe captures the change: the information was already present, but the case had been viewed from the wrong direction.

Reversing the Investigation

The investigators had been asking who had come to Combe Island since Oliver’s previous visit and whose arrival might have triggered the murder. Dalgliesh reverses the question. Someone had left: Martha Padgett, the helpless, dying woman carried away from the island in her coffin. Her death, previously treated as irrelevant, and the supposed loss of a blood sample now become central to the explanation.

The sample, Dalgliesh realizes, was not accidentally lost overboard because it had never been in the bag. What Dan Padgett let fall into the sea was a collection of old shoes, handbags, and library books. The detail changes the meaning of the incident: what looked like a mishap may have concealed the absence of the evidence the police needed. Dalgliesh also revises the significance of Padgett’s account of smoke shortly before eight. Padgett may indeed have seen smoke, but from the lighthouse platform rather than from his window. His statement could be partly true while still withholding where he had been.

The Saturday-morning walk over the headland provides another omission. Adrian Boyde’s pain-filled eyes return to Dalgliesh as he remembers that Boyde had called at Puffin Cottage to speak with Padgett, who was not there. That absence matters because Boyde had told the police that he saw no one on his walk. Dalgliesh now sees that there was someone Boyde should have encountered: Padgett, absent from the cottage at a potentially significant moment.

Martha Padgett’s Secret and the Proposed Motive

Dalgliesh’s reconstruction makes the motive recent without making the history behind it recent. Before her death, Martha Padgett confided to Adrian Boyde that Dan Padgett was Nathan Oliver’s son. Boyde had helped care for her and was regarded by her and Mrs. Burbridge as a priest to whom she could speak under the seal of the confessional. That obligation could explain why he did not simply tell the police what Martha had revealed.

Dalgliesh reasons that Boyde may have persuaded Martha that Dan had a right to know, while also recognizing that Boyde himself could not disclose her confession. On this account, Martha had to tell her son that the man he hated was his father. Her wish to bring Dan to Combe Island in June 2003 may have been bound up with a hope that he and Oliver would meet and that Oliver might acknowledge him. Oliver’s widely circulated April interview, in which he disclosed his regular visits and broke the Trust’s confidentiality agreement, made such a meeting newly possible. The interview thus becomes a possible catalyst: not a direct cause by itself, but an event that could set older, concealed facts in motion.

Dalgliesh considers why Martha had kept silent for so long. Oliver was famous, and his whereabouts could not easily be hidden; when Dan was born, DNA testing was not available. Dalgliesh speculates that Oliver may have denied paternity on the ground that Martha could not prove it, and that later knowledge of DNA testing, alongside her awareness that she was dying, may have altered her sense of what could still be done. Oliver’s single book among Martha’s belongings prompts another possibility: it may have been the one in which he described a seduction, perhaps even a rape. The thought remains a question, not an established finding, and the book’s presence does not prove what happened between them.

Boyde, the Confrontation, and What Remains Unproved

Boyde’s silence becomes a second part of the deduction, but Dalgliesh does not treat its explanation as certain. Boyde may have suspected Padgett after the murder and recognized the significance of finding Puffin Cottage empty. Bound by the confession, he could not reveal what Martha had told him. Dalgliesh wonders whether Boyde instead tried to persuade Padgett to confess, whether he visited Puffin Cottage on Monday night for one last attempt, and whether he understood that doing so might get him killed. He also considers whether Boyde returned to the chapel rather than his cottage because he sensed someone following him. These are plausible questions raised by the evidence, not facts Dalgliesh can conclusively establish in the sickroom.

Other details sharpen the suspicion. Mrs. Plunkett had described Padgett pulling out hair and noticing that his expression did not look loving. Dalgliesh connects the fact that Padgett did not cut the hair to the need for roots in DNA testing. He also allows for resentment toward Martha, whose silence may have left Dan with a childhood of misery and humiliation. Taken together with Padgett’s possible sighting of Oliver walking purposefully toward the lighthouse, the evidence suggests an impulsive opportunity to confront his father, demand acknowledgment, and seek financial provision. Dalgliesh imagines the confrontation, the quarrel, the fatal lunge at Oliver’s neck, and Padgett’s attempt to make the killing look like suicide; the scene is his reconstruction, not an eyewitness account.

Even with motive and opportunity aligned, Dalgliesh knows that the case remains circumstantial. Padgett had reason to hate Oliver, but others on the island did too, and Padgett was not the only person who could reach the lighthouse unseen. The phial of blood and the lock of Martha Padgett’s hair therefore become indispensable: without them, the explanation might never withstand a trial. A further complication is Mrs. Burbridge’s belief that Oliver died accidentally during an experiment. Edith Glenister’s opinion that the bruises on Oliver’s throat could not have been self-inflicted would carry weight, but Dalgliesh recognizes that the interpretation of bruises after death could be contested by defence pathologists. His insight solves the pattern in his mind; it does not remove the need to prove it.

The urgency of the deduction is physical as well as investigative. At five in the morning, fearing that his cough may return, his condition may worsen, or he may lose the power to speak or remember, Dalgliesh insists on seeing Kate Miskin. He knows that she and Francis Benton-Smith must find the blood and hair. The scene ends not with the case secured, but with the detective pressing to pass on an explanation whose most important evidentiary test remains ahead.