She’d already handed in her notice with Bradfield Metropolitan Police when Michael and Lucy had been murdered. She’d been about to take up a new post as a Detective Chief Inspector with West Mercia. She’d burned her bridges there and she didn’t care. She’d also been planning to take a deep breath and share the sprawling Edwardian house in Worcester that Tony had unexpectedly inherited. But that dream was over too, her personal life as much a victim of a brutal killer as her professional life.

Homeless and jobless, Carol had returned to her parents’ house. Home, according to popular mythology, was where they were supposed to take you in when all else failed. It seemed her judgement had missed the mark there too. Her parents hadn’t turned her away, that much was true. Nor had they openly blamed her brother’s death on her choices. But her father’s silent misery and her mother’s sharpness had been perpetual reproaches. She’d stuck it out for a couple of weeks, then she’d repacked her bags and left.

All she’d left behind was her beloved cat Nelson. Tony had once joked that her relationship with the black cat was the only functional one in her life. The trouble was, that was too close to the bone to be funny. But Nelson was old now. Too old to be stuffed in a cat carrier and traipsed round the country from pillar to post. And her mother was better able to be kind to the cat than she was to Carol. So Nelson stayed and she went.

She still owned a flat in London but it had been so long since she’d lived there, it no longer felt like home. Besides, the difference between her mortgage payments and the rent from her long-term tenant was all she had to live on until the lawyers were done picking over the remnants of Michael’s life. Which left her with a single option.

According to Michael’s will, in the absence of Lucy, Carol inherited his estate. The barn was in his sole name; their house in France had belonged to Lucy. So once probate had been granted, the barn would be hers, blood and ghosts and all. Most people would have hired industrial cleaners, redecorated what couldn’t be cleaned, and sold the place to some off-comer ignorant of the barn’s recent history.

Carol Jordan wasn’t most people. Fractured and fragile as she was, she held fast to the determination that had dragged her through disasters before. And so she’d made a plan. This was her attempt at carrying it out.