Peregrine Cottage is the Combe Island home occupied by Nathan Oliver and Miranda Oliver during Oliver’s quarterly visits, and the last place where he was seen alive before his body was found at the lighthouse. It is at once a private domestic refuge shaped by Oliver’s routines and a key point in the investigation: the cottage’s secluded setting, burned papers, and overlooked traces of activity complicate the reconstruction of his final morning.

Setting and physical character

Peregrine Cottage stands on the island’s eastern side, beyond the harbour and about three hundred yards from Seal Cottage. It lies in a shallow hollow, partly hidden from the path and farther from the cliff edge than the cottages on the western coast. Though it appeared dwarfed from the air by Combe House and even by its neighbour, it proved larger than that first impression suggested. Its stone walls, porch, slate roof, and paired windows—two at ground level and two above—follow the same pattern as the island’s other cottages. Yet its setting and stark conformity give it a more forbidding character: the hollow and distance from the cliff lend it an impression of deliberate isolation.

That impression also describes the household’s privacy. When Adam Dalgliesh and Kate Miskin arrive to interview Miranda, the lower curtains are drawn. Miranda opens the door soon after Kate knocks and gestures them inside. The cottage is not merely a stop on the island’s map; it is a home whose inward-facing routines and separation from other buildings shape what witnesses see, hear, and fail to notice.

A household organized around Oliver

Oliver’s visits to Combe followed a regular pattern, and life at the cottage was arranged around it. He and Miranda generally followed the island’s visitor practice. A light lunch—usually soup, cold meats, and salad—was delivered each morning by Dan Padgett, acting on Miranda’s telephone instructions to Mrs. Burbridge, who passed them on to Mrs. Plunkett. Dinner could be eaten at the cottage or in the main house, but Oliver preferred the cottage, where Miranda cooked for him.

Miranda had lived and travelled with her father for sixteen years, serving as his housekeeper. She had left school at sixteen with little academic distinction, and Oliver treated her as a willing, adequately supported companion rather than someone whose wishes about their life should be consulted. The cottage’s routine expressed that imbalance: Miranda managed meals and domestic tasks while Oliver’s work and preferences set the household’s schedule. On the day before his disappearance, he worked for four hours with Dennis Tremlett, editing a novel from preliminary proofs. He made extensive changes, including alterations to the plot, in a small upright hand; Tremlett copied them onto a second set. After lunch, Miranda washed up and left the containers in the outside porch for collection. Oliver usually slept in the afternoon, with Miranda waking him for tea at half-past three, although that day he chose instead to walk to the harbour to check that a blood sample taken by Joanna Staveley had reached the hospital pathology department.

Oliver’s last night and morning

The events surrounding Oliver’s departure make the cottage a source of both testimony and uncertainty. After an angry encounter with Miranda, Oliver returned quietly at night. He expected the care that had usually greeted his late returns: a light left on and Miranda ready to make him a hot milky drink. This time the sitting room was dark. He nevertheless convinced himself that Miranda would remain with him and that Tremlett would be made to leave. His confidence rested on the security, comfort, and inheritance he believed his daughter could not abandon.

Miranda later said that Oliver returned just after eleven and did not come to say good night. She saw him leave from her window at about twenty past seven the next morning, after coming out of the shower. When she went downstairs, she found that he had made tea and eaten a banana; she assumed he had gone for an early walk and would return for his usual cooked breakfast. In a separate telephone conversation, Joanna Staveley reported that Miranda had heard him leave at about the same time and did not know where he was going. Oliver was expected at the surgery at nine to give another blood sample, but he did not arrive. Tremlett was already at the cottage and said he had not seen Oliver since the previous day.

A further detail remained unexplained at first. Rupert Maycroft noticed ash and blackened remnants in the sitting-room grate, suggesting that papers had been burned before Oliver went out. When questioned, Miranda identified them as proofs of her father’s last book and insisted that Oliver would not have burned them; she proposed that someone had entered the cottage during the night. Tremlett swallowed and looked toward her without answering. The papers’ destruction thus became part of the mystery around the cottage, rather than a settled account of what had happened there.

The cottage as a source of clues

The investigation repeatedly returns to the cottage because several apparently minor details acquire significance when set beside one another. Millie Tranter said she had taken Dr. Speidel’s note to the cottage and placed it in the porch letterbox after failing to find Oliver. She heard Miranda talking with someone in the sitting room but did not give her the note, which was addressed to Oliver. The note requested a meeting at the lighthouse at eight o’clock. Investigators therefore had to consider whether Oliver had received it, who else might have read it, and how it related to his reported departure at about seven-twenty.

Dan Padgett later disclosed that, shortly before eight, he had seen smoke coming from the cottage chimney. He had not mentioned it earlier because he thought it unimportant and feared it would make him look foolish. Set beside the burned proofs and Miranda’s account of the morning, the smoke supplied another piece of evidence about activity at the cottage. It did not, by itself, establish who had lit the fire or what had been burned; its importance lay in the questions it raised about the household’s account and the timing of events.

The cottage also figured in the investigators’ assessment of access and opportunity. Dennis Tremlett was staying there and was considered the suspect most likely to have read Speidel’s note. Kate Miskin considered that he might have seen Oliver leave early and followed him, while recognizing that this was conjecture. By contrast, suspects lodged closer to the western shore could reach the lighthouse more easily by way of the under-cliff. The cottage’s position therefore mattered not only as Oliver’s home but as a point from which investigators measured routes, visibility, and the possible movement of people across the island.

Departure and narrative significance

After Oliver’s death, Peregrine Cottage becomes a place of removal as well as residence. Dennis Tremlett packs the few clothes he brought in a canvas holdall, while Miranda fits Oliver’s books into the small cardboard boxes in which they had arrived. When Tremlett helps take the remaining books from the shelf, Miranda says that they will not return. The cottage’s familiar objects are being sorted for departure, and the home organized around Oliver’s life is becoming unfamiliar through its emptiness.

That ending gives the cottage a meaning beyond its function in the murder puzzle. Oliver had returned to Combe with a sense of coming home, believing that the island’s sea-girt quiet might slow his physical decline and restore his words. Yet Peregrine Cottage was not the childhood home he most urgently wanted: that was Atlantic Cottage, where he had been born and where he believed he would die. Peregrine was the setting of his later, carefully maintained life with Miranda and Tremlett, a life whose routines could not prevent conflict, secrecy, or loss. Its domestic calm supplies the contrast that makes the clues so unsettling: the ordinary evidence of tea, a banana, a letterbox, and a grate becomes inseparable from the unexplained absence of the man who had made the cottage his preferred place to eat and work.