Lastly, Dolly’s eyes fell on the very pretty woman sitting to her left. Dolly recognized her face, but she couldn’t remember what Connie Stevens had been in for, although she did recall that she had always been in tears, claiming to be totally innocent. Connie was very curvaceous, her bleached blonde hair reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe, and she had perfected the movie star’s sultry pout. Dolly guessed prostitution.

As Gloria finished her dirty joke, everyone laughed a little too loudly. In the silence that followed, Ester raised her glass to their guest of honor and the others followed, looking at her expectantly. Dolly looked round the table and smiled. She had no idea what they wanted, but she could wait. She was used to waiting.

Chapter 1

Present day

Rose Cottage had been empty for eight months. It was a neat, two-story white stone building with thick, black wooden lintels above the central front door and each of the five small windows—three up, two down. On the more sheltered west side of the front wall, the ivy had completely taken over and was lifting the slates from the roof, but on the exposed east side, the stonework was bare and had been flattened by centuries of strong winter winds swirling down from the hills. From some angles the cottage looked as though it was leaning to the left.

As the cottage was rural, with stables and a hay barn, the land surrounding it had been fairly unkempt even before it was left empty, but a small area directly outside the front door had been landscaped into narrow, winding footpaths circling rose beds. The wild roses, left to their own devices, were still fighting against the changing seasons, but today they looked particularly beautiful. In fact, they were the only real reminder of how lovely the cottage had once been.

Inside, the furniture had been moved into the center of the room, just in front of the hearth. A heavy wooden chest of drawers and two bookshelves surrounded a two-seater horsehair sofa, which had four side tables piled high on top of it. Some of the books from the bookshelves had been forced into the gaps of this makeshift bonfire, and the rest had been thrown into the hearth on top of a huge stack of paper.

Suddenly, the small downstairs windows to the left and right of the front door exploded under the immense pressure from the heat inside, sending glass and wood showering into the rose beds. Flames quickly took hold of the wooden lintels and, within seconds, smoke had blackened the white stone wall.

The small room was soon consumed by flames, which rose to the ceiling beams and traveled to the wooden staircase and up the stairs. They eventually pushed their way out between the slates from the wooden ceiling beams beneath, and it wasn’t long before a spark leapt across to the hay barn, still full of bales of hay for horses long gone. The barn went up like a Roman candle and, from that point onward, there was no stopping the fire.