he car pulled into a narrow drive, lined with white-painted rocks, that led to the cream-colored spire of South Light.

A lean, weathered man was tending crocuses in the little circular pots before the building. He wore a sailor's cap, creased and worn.

"That's Sam Covet," said Jenny. "A former sailor before he landed this job. A job from which the vicar was trying to get him fired."

"Don't know what I'd have done if the vicar had forced me out," Covet explained later as he swirled some rum into his tea. "Don't have no family."

"Why did he want you out, Sam?" With the crossed cutlasses on the wall overhead and the black patch Sam wore over one eye, Nolan felt, momentarily, as if he had stepped back into Lundy's pirate haunted past.

"Why else?" Sam said with a twist of his lip that was somewhere between a sneer and a snarl. "There's money in it. I'm the last keeper of South Light. When I'm gone the land goes on the market- the Reverend Mr. Longmire, damn his eyes, thought to hurry the process by putting legal charges on me. Said how I was drunk on duty. That from him that drank like a fish!"

Nolan lifted a page on his notepad. "And you say you have a witness for your activities last night."

"I was here tending my work on station. As I am every night. And right sober, too. Just ask Mertie."

"Mertie?"

At the sound of her name, Mertie leapt on her master's lap and began purring softly.

"One thing that will probably come out about Sam," Constable Rock took the curve smoothly as they drove back to Marisco. "He killed a man in a sailor's brawl in Singapore before the war. Claimed self-defense. He was exonerated by his war service though."

"A war hero, was he?"

"Yes, and a commando."

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