Nathan Oliver’s deliberate provision of wine to Adrian Boyde turned a fragile recovery into a relapse, and exposed the human cost of Oliver’s literary curiosity. The episode, recounted by Mrs. Burbridge to Adam Dalgliesh, was not an accidental lapse or an ordinary dinner gone wrong: she believed Oliver knowingly used a recovering alcoholic as material for a novel. Its consequences extended beyond the supper, disrupting Boyde’s attempt at sobriety and leaving the island community with a lasting grievance against Oliver.

Background and Vulnerability

Before coming to Combe Island, Adrian Boyde had collapsed while administering Holy Communion at a church where Mrs. Burbridge’s husband had formerly been vicar. Boyde dropped the chalice and fell down drunk. After a churchwarden learned that Mrs. Burbridge had moved to the island, he wrote to the previous secretary to suggest Boyde for a job there. Boyde was capable of the work: he already knew how to use a computer and was numerate.

At first, the arrangement seemed to offer a genuine chance of recovery. Boyde remained sober on the island for more than a year, and the community hoped he could continue. The relapse therefore struck at something he had worked to achieve, rather than merely revealing a condition that had never been challenged. Mrs. Burbridge’s account stresses both the duration of his sobriety and its precariousness: the progress was real, but it could be undone by a single deliberate exposure to alcohol.

The Supper and Oliver’s Experiment

The turning point came during one of Nathan Oliver’s quarterly visits. Oliver invited Boyde to supper and gave him wine. Mrs. Burbridge was certain that Oliver already knew Boyde was an alcoholic and had planned the encounter. In her account, the wine was not casual hospitality. Oliver was writing a book with a drunkard character and wanted to witness what would happen when an alcoholic was given wine.

The setting mattered to Mrs. Burbridge’s explanation. A drunken collapse could have been witnessed in a London club or on the streets, but that would not have given Oliver the same degree of access and control. She believed he wanted to observe someone actively trying to resist his addiction, in privacy, and to keep the situation available to him at short notice when his novel reached the relevant point. The episode thus joined artistic observation to a carefully arranged human test: Boyde’s vulnerability made him useful to Oliver precisely because his struggle was real.

After the supper, someone—Mrs. Burbridge could not say whether it was Oliver, his copy-editor, or his daughter—must have carried Boyde to his cottage. He took a couple of days to sober up. The islanders did not initially know what had happened; they knew only that he had been drinking, and assumed he might somehow have obtained wine in the house. They could not see how that explanation fitted the circumstances. Mrs. Burbridge later learned the truth from Boyde himself.

Disappearance and Recovery

Two days after the supper, Boyde went with Jago Tamlyn to collect the weekly supplies and then disappeared. Later that month, Mrs. Burbridge found him paralytic on the doorstep of her London flat. She took him in and looked after him for a few weeks before bringing him back to the island. Their life together in London proved impractical: Mrs. Burbridge recognized that the city would be impossible for them, particularly while she herself was not drinking. She found an isolated cottage near Bodmin Moor, available cheaply because the season had not started, and she and Boyde stayed there for six weeks.

This recovery was neither instantaneous nor a simple return to the earlier routine. Boyde needed care, and the move to an isolated cottage reflected the difficulty of sustaining their life together in London. It was during their time together that he told Mrs. Burbridge what Oliver had done. The island’s original uncertainty about how Boyde had obtained the wine was therefore replaced by a personal account from the person who had experienced the relapse.

Revelation and Significance

Mrs. Burbridge’s later testimony gives the episode its moral force. She distinguished Oliver’s many lesser offenses—his bad temper, complaints about Dan Padgett’s inefficiency, late food deliveries, and frustration when the boat was unavailable—from what she regarded as an evil act. In her judgment, the defining wrong was not simply that Oliver disliked people or behaved rudely: he knowingly put Boyde’s recovery at risk so he could observe the consequences for his fiction.

She also insisted that Boyde might have died, and credited Jo Staveley with helping prevent that outcome. Although she said the episode had nothing to do with Oliver’s death, she was equally clear that the island would not forget it. The recollection therefore supplies a history of injury and outrage around Oliver without establishing a connection to the murder under investigation. It shows how a writer’s wish to observe suffering could cross into the deliberate creation of it, leaving the observed person—not the novel—to bear the consequences.