‘Your mum?’ I’d never heard Fiona talk about her mum. She’d mentioned a brother who she liked, and her gran, but kept quiet about the rest of her family.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t ask.’

I decided to take that at face value. ‘Okay. So tell me about the possibilities with Violet.’

‘Right. Someone could have told her that either Daniel or Gary was her biological father and possibly even that he raped her mother. That would have been a nasty shock, given that she worked with them. She could have asked whichever it was to meet her at the abattoir. Then confronted him and it got out of hand.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Although she didn’t know who her father was when she left Tony Nightingale’s farm, assuming he was telling the truth.’

‘We don’t think she phoned anyone between leaving his farm and getting to the abattoir.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But we do know there’s something odd about her biological family – not just because her father’s a rapist but because of what her aunt said. And who told Violet to go to Tony Nightingale’s house? Somebody obviously knew who Rebecca Smith was, or at least that Violet was related to Tony Nightingale.’

‘We’re carrying on with house-to-house on that,’ Fiona said. ‘And contacting everyone Violet phoned, plus doing media appeals, including social media.’

‘Then we’ve got this strange business of her seeing the Pale Child.’

‘Yes. People say the Pale Child appears when the reservoir water level drops so that the remains of the old villages are visible. Like this year.’

‘That’s creepy. It is amazing what’s appeared this year with the drought. I hear mountain rescue have had to hoick an overenthusiastic explorer out of the mud by the old Derwent village.’

‘It’s the lowest it’s ever been,’ Fiona said. ‘People are crawling all over it. And have you seen the drone footage of buried gardens and archaeological sites? You can see the outline of a seventeenth-century garden at Chatsworth – all the paths and borders and stuff. And a grid on the grass at Tissington Hall – nobody knows what it originally was.’

‘I love Tissington. Remind me when I have a day off to go over there and pretend I’m on a bike ride but actually go to the tea room.’ The thought of a cold drink in a tea room was practically making me drool.

‘Sounds good,’ Fiona said. ‘The stuff from Gritton was more mundane, I have to say. Mainly septic tank outflows making the grass greener.’ She stood and walked round to my side of the desk. ‘Do you want to see?’

‘Ooh yes, show me the septic tanks.’

She leaned in and clicked a few keys, bringing up an image of some drone footage. I recognised the abattoir in the centre, and the roads, houses and rocks of Gritton around it. ‘No beautiful hidden gardens?’ I said.