He turned quickly and walked away, followed by the dog. At the end of the garden he paused, as if he expected one of them to call him back, but they watched him go in silence.

Marie saw George out through the front door, formally shaking his hand to say goodbye.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to have been the cause of such upset.’

She shook her head to imply that it was not his fault.

‘Will you be staying at Back Rigg?’ she asked.

‘At least until after the funeral.’

George walked briskly along the road away from Keeper’s Cottage. He did not notice that the woman stood in the porch looking after him, as if making up her mind to catch him up. He was preoccupied, troubled. As he walked towards Back Rigg he went over the details of Ursula’s last day and for the first time a seed of suspicion took root. Although he rejected the suspicion as fanciful it would not go away and by the time he arrived at the farm he was wondering how he would tell Molly that he believed Ursula Ottway had been poisoned.

Chapter Seven

It was Sunday lunchtime and Jeremy Grenville and Eve Theobald were in the bar of the Crowford Hotel. Jeremy had phoned her early in the morning to say he wanted to meet her and they had agreed to have a drink. The hotel was a curious place, run by a cheerful Midlands couple who had bought it several years before. Once, perhaps, it had been quite grand. It was on the opposite side of the lake from Back Rigg and there was a terrace with magnificent views. It had been built in the thirties, rather in the style of a provincial cinema with a curved bow front, and even now that the brick had worn and a garden had grown around the house it looked horribly out of place on the hill. The couple had arrived with great pretensions and little taste. It would be, they thought, ‘ classy’. Then they found that the greater part of their income came not from the respectable guests who stayed the night in the large underheated bedrooms but from the locals who drank in the public bar and from the day trippers who wanted fish and chips at lunchtime and cream teas on the terrace in the afternoon. Reluctantly they had adapted to meet these needs and in the summer the dining room had the air of a transport café, with plastic sauce bottles on plastic tablecloths, and the bedrooms were scarcely used.

The public bar was small and quite busy with men drinking pints of beer to wash down their Sunday lunch. Eve and Jeremy sat at a small table near the window.

Eve made the connection between Ursula Ottway’s death and the poisoned buzzard and cats immediately.