‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘we should sort through Ursula’s things.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Grenville will want the house back eventually and if Sally only comes up for the funeral she’ll not have time to do it.’

‘You want to search through Ursula’s things,’ Molly said, ‘to find some reason why she died.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s that too.’

He did not know what he was looking for. He knew he would find it impossible to sit still all evening.

The task was less demanding than they had expected. Upstairs one of the bedrooms was quite empty, the floorboards bare, the windows uncurtained. In another tiny room at the back of the house, where Molly had slept as a girl, there was just a bed, with blankets folded under a threadbare candlewick quilt and an empty white wood cupboard. Molly stood by the window and looked out at the hill. She remembered the novelty of her stays at Back Rigg. There had been an informality quite different from the restrictions of her conventional county family. Ursula had encouraged her when she was at school and celebrated with her when she reached university. Her aunt’s outspoken views on politics, farming, the welfare state had made her consider her own opinions. Though they often disagreed violently they shared a commitment to the independence of women and that had brought them together.

Molly drew the thin curtains and followed George into the room where they were sleeping. There the furniture was equally sparse. There was a high solid bed on a dusty square of carpet and a huge mahogany wardrobe. George opened it and found two men’s suits with big lapels and wide trousers.

‘That was Fred’s best suit,’ Molly said. ‘Don’t you remember? He wore it to my father’s funeral.’

They moved on quickly to Ursula’s room. It was untidy, the bed roughly made. A hot-water bottle full of cold water lay on the floor and there were clothes on a bent-wood chair by the window.

‘What was Ursula wearing when you found her?’ George asked.

‘Brown corduroy trousers and a handknitted green jersey.’

‘Would that be the sort of thing she would usually wear?’

‘Yes,’ Molly said. ‘I can’t remember her wearing anything other than trousers on the farm.’

‘I would have thought she might have changed into something more respectable before going to see Marcus Grenville,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ said Molly, ‘that would never have occurred to her.’

George felt in the pockets of a jacket thrown over the back of the chair. They were empty.

‘Shall we make three piles?’ Molly said. ‘One for rubbish, one for Oxfam and one for the stuff Sally might want to keep?’

But George had hoped to achieve something more significant than sorting through jumble.

‘Later,’ he said. ‘Let’s look downstairs and see if there’s anything there first.’