Sitting at my desk, I felt a chill in the pit of my stomach. I remembered the postcards that had been sitting on the desk in Derek Abbott’s living room. He had written his suicide note on the back of one of them, but then he must have decided to write a second card to me. He knew I was planning several books about Hawthorne. Even as he had left this world, he had wanted to leave some small measure of pain behind.

Reeth.

I have already mentioned the evening at the Station Inn in the Yorkshire village of Ribblehead, when Hawthorne and I were investigating the murder of Richard Pryce. We had travelled there to find out more about a potholing accident that had taken place a few years before and we were having dinner together when a man had come up to us and introduced himself as Mike Carlyle. He had addressed Hawthorne as ‘Billy’ – which wasn’t his name, but was, now I thought about it, the name of his son. And what had the man said? I opened the notebook that I always kept on my desk and found the page.

‘You weren’t in Reeth?’

‘No,’ Hawthorne had replied. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just up from London. I’ve never been to anywhere called Reeth.’

At the time, I’d assumed that Mike Carlyle had mistaken Hawthorne for someone else and had put the whole thing out of my mind.

But now this.

Ask Hawthorne about Reeth.

It was clear to me that Hawthorne hadn’t pushed Derek Abbott down a flight of stairs because he disliked what he represented. The two men had known each other before. I remembered what had happened in Abbott’s house just before we left. Abbott had recognised him. I had seen it for myself, the moment when he had realised that he and Hawthorne had a shared history that went all the way back to Reeth. How extraordinary that in the last moments of his life, just before he left to throw himself off Gannet Rock, he should have decided to take this one, final shot at revenge.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know any more, but I couldn’t stop myself. I clicked on my laptop and went to yorkshirevillages.org.