‘Nope, treat it as a donation to the animals.’ I left her with all the spare beads, plus lists of jewellery-making suppliers. I loaned her Cordelia’s little pliers, with a warning that I’d want them back. They had sentimental value.

‘Oh, Juno, thank you ever so much!’

‘My pleasure, Pat. Just get cracking! I’ve got something else to bring you next week.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Paul was wrong about the BMW. It wasn’t black, it was blue. I was coming back from Tavistock on the B3357, the road which bisects the moor. Summer had finally started in earnest and I’d given myself a day off for a snoop around Tavistock. It’s a lovely town with an old, stone-built market hall, which yielded some interesting goodies. But I spent more than I intended, so instead of treating myself to lunch in a cafe, I settled for some shop-bought sandwiches and decided to take the scenic route home across the moor and stop for a picnic.

Despite the glorious weather, I seemed to have the moor to myself save for a few black-faced sheep grazing amongst clumps of gorse. I pulled in off the side of the road and parked on the car park, little more than a level area of gravel beyond the grassy verge. There were no other cars there.

Little grew up there above the height of bracken and gorse, and the treeless moorland gave me sweeping views. I stared across the landscape, a stiff breeze flirting with strands of my hair, and breathed in deep. To the north of the road, the rocky outline of Great Mis Tor dominated the skyline. To the south, the land fell away gently, and I gazed across hills that were tinged with bronze, russet and purple, fading to blue in the far distance. I locked the van, walked away from the road over short grass scattered with tiny black piles of sheep droppings and found a sun-warmed rock, where I could park my bum and eat my sandwich. I shed my jacket, folding it under me for a cushion and watched a pair of buzzards circling in the immaculate blue above my head.

Perhaps I have the soul of a cleaning lady after all. A hundred yards or so ahead of me a stunted hawthorn tree, grown hunchback against the prevailing wind, clung with gnarled roots to a low cairn of rock. It would have made a wonderful photograph, a symbol of the struggle of poor living things against the pitiless elements − except that tangled in its branches was a shredded plastic bag.