“My mum was here,” she muttered to herself. Saying it out loud seemed to edge it closer to reality. “My mum. She must have been very different back then.”

Following back some of the more outraged accounts, she found a handful of posts by a woman calling herself whytewitch59 who seemed to be claiming that all sorts of shadowy things went on at Fiddler’s Mill in the ’70s and even the ’80s, although she never quite managed to name them. There was a picture of the woman in the top right-hand corner of her webpage, revealing a ratty face topped with a woolly hat that had to be home made. Heather combed through these accounts, looking for the sorts of details that a story could be built on, but ultimately came away with the impression that the woman had probably been looking for a place to find connections, and instead had done a lot of drugs, only to end up lonelier than before.

Her pictures, though, were something else. Clicking on a “gallery” tab at the top pulled up a long page of photographs and paintings, all of which appeared to be of the countryside and, specifically in some cases, Fiddler’s Mill. Heather recognized the looming eighteenth-century house in some of them, either dominating the frame or appearing as a blocky shape in the distance. All of the photographs were in black and white, lending them a gloomy air, and there was something unnerving about them. Fields of wheat under a blank, blind-looking sky, and close-ups of grass, focused on stones and sticks placed in odd, concentric patterns. There were lots of photographs of trees, too, many of them dark and deeply shadowed, as though taken at the very tail end of the day, as twilight soaked up through the ground, or in the middle of a very dense forest. There was something claustrophobic about those photos, and Heather found herself frowning as she looked at them.

There were paintings, too, in a similarly limited palette of blacks and grays, greens and yellows. Trees like grasping fingers tore at a jaundiced sky, shadowy white figures moved through a field lit from within with green lights. In one of the paintings, Heather recognized the solid shape of Fiddler’s Mill House crouched alone at the top of a hill, and far to the right, emerging from the woods, a figure dressed in a shapeless red garment. This last painting Heather looked at for some time, until the café woman came and took her empty plate away. Her tea had gone cold.

Heather put whytewitch59’s webpage into her favorites, for no other reason than the sense she would want to look at the pictures again. Impulsively, she went to the “contact me” page and sent whytewitch a quick message—“Hi, my name is Heather Evans, how are you? I really love your work and would love to chat about it and your time at Fiddler’s Mill. I’m happy to talk online, or if you’re London based, maybe we could grab a coffee—on me.” She added her email address and clicked submit.