‘You know I’m not.’ Heather leaned on the desk, then thought better of it. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a pain in the arse. Don’t you have a café or something? I’ll buy a coffee, a sandwich, whatever you like. The place where we’re staying is located in some sort of technological black hole, and I desperately need to get something sent off for work. Deadlines, you know how it is.’

The woman narrowed her eyes. ‘How do I know you’re not going to start, I don’t know, mouthing off to our guests about murders, and drugs, and so on?’

Heather held her hands up. ‘I’ve no interest in doing that, I promise. You’ve been really helpful so far – I’ll mention you personally on my Tripadvisor review.’ She looked at the name badge on the woman’s shirt. ‘Melanie.’

‘Fine.’ Melanie turned back to her computer screen. ‘The café is to the right. You get the Wi-Fi password on your receipt when you buy something. So, you will have to buy something.’

In minutes Heather had a cup of coffee and a plate of crushed avocado on toast, her laptop set up at a small table and her browser open. Very quickly she found Fiddler’s Folly on Google Maps, although now it was called the Heron Look and it was owned by the same environmental charity that partly owned the Fiddler’s Mill spa. That was interesting, but as far as Heather could tell the building was still standing empty, and she could find no information about whether it was now used as a hotel, storage, or some sort of headquarters for the charity. Looking a little deeper, she found a number of references to the ‘rumours’ the old man Bert had mentioned, although they were all annoyingly vague. The family that had built it had dwindled and died off, but she got the impression they weren’t thought of with any affection by the locals.

Eventually, she gave up on Fiddler’s Folly – she now knew, at least, where exactly the photo of her mother and Michael Reave had been taken – and began looking up Polaroid websites. Through these, she discovered that it was possible to figure out the rough date when the Polaroid film had been manufactured, if not the date the photo had been taken. A long string of numbers on the back of the photo, very faded and almost impossible to read, revealed that the Polaroid film had been made in April 1982, which certainly fitted with the date scribbled in black ink. According to the website, back then instant film had been very expensive, and many families with Polaroid cameras would save their shots for important occasions. She imagined someone – possibly Michael Reave – buying the film, perhaps smiling over all the ‘special’ moments he would capture with it.