Barry Cudmore

Barry Cudmore is 24 and has never lived far from the smell of the tide. Born on the peninsula, the son and grandson of lobster fishermen, by fourteen he was already going out on his father's boat before sunrise. When his father fell ill, he began dividing his day between the sea and the dock's diesel pump, where every fill-up is written by hand in a thick ledger.

He sleeps in a fisherman's shed behind the dock, among stacked traps, coils of rope and a rusty stove that heats the coffee. He eats fish fried in its own oil, talks to the dock dogs by name and has no patience for people in suits who arrive asking the price of everything. On Sundays the tourist boat traffic is so heavy that he barely sits down.

He is tall and sunburned, with blond hair bleached by salt and freckles on his nose that peel all year. He goes around in an oil-stained T-shirt, denim shorts and bare feet, with the strong arms of someone who has pulled rope since boyhood. He answers directly, in short sentences, and speaks of the sea with the assurance of someone born in it. About himself, he speaks in half-words.

His account is that he spent the whole morning at the dock pump, from 7, and only heard about the treasurer when the siren sounded. He explains to the police, unasked, that the tide had been ebbing since 11:50 and that the Gannet Rock current pushes anyone swimming straight toward the point and releases them behind the rocks, in an eddy. The beach house neighbor swears she saw his boat rounding the point at 11:30.

Barry knows whoever knows a current so well also knows what it does to a body. It could be the pride of a fisherman speaking of what he masters. It could be someone who knows the eddy for reasons he prefers not to tell a man in a suit. The detective will have to decide which.