Vic Liddle left the Lodge soon after and went back to Keeper’s Cottage for breakfast. The conversation with Craven had left him dissatisfied and unhappy. He felt suddenly that he was quite alone. Even Marie had become moody. She seemed not to care that things looked so bad for him. He thought vaguely that it was probably her age. He had heard that the change of life affected women in strange ways. His mother had complained of hot flushes and palpitations it seemed for years. His father had been a martyr to them. All the same, he thought, Marie could have picked a better time to go moody on him.

Outside the kitchen there was the smell of bacon. The ambulance had not arrived to take Cassie back to school and he waited at the back door, wondering if he could find an excuse to go away. He hated the fraught ten minutes of leave-taking, Cassie distressed and shaking as if she were being sent from home for the first time, Marie fighting back tears. Something always seemed to get left behind and there was the farce of chasing up the garden path before the ambulance drove away. It wasn’t a dignified way to carry on. But Marie saw him and called him in to breakfast.

‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘It’ll be burnt to nothing.’

‘I’ve been at the Lodge,’ he said, ‘talking to Craven.’

‘What did he have to say for himself?’ She cracked an egg into a frying pan. He watched suspiciously as it spread and sizzled.

‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.

‘From Mrs Ottway. Like I always did. I’ll have to find somewhere else to buy eggs now.’

He took the shell from the table and studied it carefully, then sat back, satisfied that it had not been tampered with. Cassie, all ready in her coat and hat, watched him.

‘Well,’ Marie said again. ‘What did Craven have to say for himself?’

‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘He claimed to have nothing to do with the poison on the hill.’

‘Did you believe him?’

‘I don’t know. He’s a strange man. But, as he says, what reason could he have?’

She set the plate in front of him and he started to eat. Cassie began to whimper and he turned angrily and glared at her.

‘What’s the matter with her this morning?’

‘You know what’s the matter with her,’ Marie said angrily. ‘She’s always upset when she has to go back.’

She crouched beside the girl’s chair and hugged her, stroking her hair. ‘That’s all right, love,’ she said. ‘ That’s all right.’

‘You shouldn’t spoil her,’ he said savagely. ‘ You only make things worse. You’ve made her dependent on you.’