Dalgliesh solves the case while ill through a sudden reordering of evidence that shifts the investigation from asking who arrived on Combe Island to asking who had left. Fever-bound and afraid that he might lose the power to speak, he sees how Martha Padgett’s secret, the apparently lost blood sample, and Dan Padgett’s movements connect to Nathan Oliver’s murder. His insight supplies a motive and directs Kate Miskin and Francis Benton-Smith toward physical evidence needed to support it in court.

Illness and the return of the clues

On Tuesday, Dalgliesh’s last fragmented memories were of being carried into a buggy and taken across the island beneath a suddenly scorching sky, then helped into bed by a masked, white-coated figure. Though confused, he kept insisting that he must remain on Combe Island: Emma Lavenham would need to know where he was, and an unfinished matter at the lighthouse also held him there. By Wednesday evening his thoughts had cleared, but his body had weakened. A wrenching cough shortened his breath; as his attacks worsened, Guy Staveley and Jo Staveley placed tubes in his nostrils and gave him oxygen. Jo remained beside him while he rested in the dim sickroom.

The solution came not as a triumphant flash but as separate remembered details clicking together. Dalgliesh recalled Mrs. Plunkett’s account of someone being frightened in a cabin, Raimund Speidel’s precise recollection that Oliver had publicly disclosed his regular visits to Combe in an April 2003 newspaper article, and Millie Tranter’s explanation for why she had not delivered Speidel’s note promptly: the proposed meeting was not until eight the next morning. Millie had admitted reading the note because it was open. Dalgliesh also remembered Dan Padgett seeing smoke from a chimney, Adrian Boyde’s claim that he had seen nobody on his walk, and Oliver’s lone paperback among the popular romantic novels at Puffin Cottage. Each memory had seemed incidental; together, they challenged the investigation’s assumptions.

Reversing the investigation

The team had concentrated on who had come to the island since Oliver’s previous visit, treating a newcomer’s arrival as a possible trigger for murder. Dalgliesh recognized that the more revealing question was who had gone. Martha Padgett, a dying woman carried away from Combe Island in her coffin, had been left out of that account. Her death and the incident in which Dan appeared to lose Oliver’s blood sample were not peripheral events: Dalgliesh saw them as the center of the case.

He reconsidered Dan’s account of the sample going overboard. The apparent loss, he concluded, had been staged: what Dan had let fall into the sea was old shoes, handbags, and library books; the blood sample had never been in the bag. He also reinterpreted the smoke Dan had seen shortly before eight. Dan had seen it from the lighthouse platform, Dalgliesh reasoned, rather than from his cottage window. That placed him at the lighthouse and altered the significance of Adrian Boyde’s report that he had encountered no one on the headland: Boyde had gone to Puffin Cottage to speak with Dan, but Dan was absent.

Martha’s secret and the motive

Dalgliesh connected the murder to a confidence Martha had made before her death. She had told Adrian Boyde, who had cared for her and served as her confessor, that Dan was Nathan Oliver’s son. Bound by the seal of the confessional, Boyde could not disclose what Martha had told him. Dalgliesh inferred that Boyde must have urged her to tell Dan herself, rather than reveal the secret on her behalf.

Martha and Dan had arrived on Combe Island in June 2003, after Oliver’s April newspaper interview had made his regular visits public and broken the Trust’s confidentiality agreement. Dalgliesh considered whether Martha hoped that father and son might meet and that Oliver might acknowledge Dan. He also weighed why Martha had kept silent for so long: Oliver was famous and difficult to hide, but at the time of Dan’s birth DNA testing was not available. Her death may have made the long-postponed disclosure urgent. Oliver’s paperback in Puffin Cottage suggested to Dalgliesh that Martha had kept and reread at least one of his books, though what it meant about their past remained conjectural.

The hair evidence gave Dalgliesh another link between Dan and the concealed parentage. Mrs. Plunkett had described him pulling hair out. Dalgliesh reasoned that he had not cut it because he knew DNA testing required the roots. That knowledge, alongside the blood sample, could provide evidence of a biological connection. He also saw how Dan’s deprived childhood and humiliation might have sharpened resentment toward a mother who had kept the truth from him, although the precise balance of anger, hope, and financial expectation in Dan’s actions remained an inference.

From reconstruction to evidence

Dalgliesh’s reasoning placed Dan’s confrontation with Oliver on the morning of the murder. He considered that Dan might have seen Oliver walking toward the lighthouse, taken the secluded lower-cliff route to meet him, and intended to disclose his parentage and demand acknowledgment or financial provision. The encounter, on this reconstruction, became a quarrel, a fatal grip at Oliver’s neck, and an attempt to disguise homicide as suicide. Earlier medical findings supported murder rather than hanging: Edith Glenister assessed the time of death as between seven-thirty and nine, probably nearer the earlier time, and identified strangulation before the body was hanged. Her later autopsy account described extensive internal damage and a fracture consistent with pressure to the neck. Those findings established the manner of death, but did not alone identify the killer.

Dalgliesh understood that his reconstruction was still vulnerable. Others on the island had reasons to hate Oliver and could have reached the lighthouse unseen. Mrs. Burbridge’s belief that Oliver might have died accidentally during an experiment also gave the defence a possible alternative to murder; disputed interpretations of bruising could complicate a case based chiefly on circumstances. Although the rope had been wiped along its length, that fact did not resolve identity. At five in the morning, fearing that his cough might return or that he might lose the ability to communicate, Dalgliesh insisted on seeing Kate. He told her and Benton that they had to find the blood phial and Martha’s lock of hair: motive and opportunity were not enough without evidence that could withstand a trial.

Kate and Benton found the items concealed beneath butter in a tub at Puffin Cottage. After photographing the container, Kate uncovered two foil-wrapped packages: one held the phial labelled with Oliver’s name and date; the other held hair wrapped in tissue paper. The handwritten label could identify the blood sample even though Dan had apparently discarded the laboratory paperwork. Benton and Kate photographed the evidence, sealed the phial and hair in an exhibit bag, and signed its label. The discovery did not make Dalgliesh’s deductions identical to proof, but it gave the investigators the material evidence his bedside reasoning had recognized as essential.

Significance

The solution turns on a change of investigative direction rather than a wholly new clue. Details already heard—the delayed note, the newspaper disclosure, the smoke, the missing man at Puffin Cottage, and the supposedly lost sample—acquire different meanings when the investigators account for Martha’s departure and the secret she carried. Illness makes Dalgliesh physically dependent and uncertain whether he will be able to speak, yet the quiet interval between coughing attacks becomes the setting in which he reconstructs the case. His urgent call to Kate marks the limit of deduction: he can identify how the clues fit, but the case still needs evidence beyond his interpretation. The hidden phial and hair answer that practical need, linking the family secret that supplies the motive to the investigation’s demand for something testable.