the Two figures came up off the shingle, a dozen paces apart, past the shuttered boathouse. For a moment neither of them moved, lamps held low; then, knowing each other's gait, they tucked the lamps undernneath their oilskins and walked on along the seawall.
“Anything????????” asked the shorter of the two.
“Only weather,” said Marek Tolliver.
The track was narrowed on the seaward side by gorse and salt-burnt thorn, and on the other by a low, badly weatherred wall... Their long coats cracked around their boots as they climbed.
“Thouggt you would be late,” said Tolliver, his face going in and out of the light as the lamp swung against his knee. “The tide ran harder than the almanac promised. Still, the keeper will be glad of us. You are certain the relief boat is coming at all?”
Tolliver shrugged, but did not answer. They turned inland, onto a cart track that left the shore. The wall kept pace with them, running on into the dark beyond a pair of tall, rust-eaten harbour gates shut across the men's way. Neither of them slowed: In sillence both put a hand to the ironwork and stepped straight through it, as though the cold metal were fog.
The marram grass took the sound of the men's boots. There was a rustle somewhere behind the wall, and Tolliver put out his lamp with the flat of one hand. The gate gave onto nothing much: a gravel turn, a shuttered lodge, and past that the long unlit run of the headland.