Alleyn walked through the graveyard and very soon found a Victorian headstone to ‘Frances Ann Patricia, infant daughter of Alfred Molyneux Piers Period Esquire and Lady Frances Mary Julia, his wife. She is not dead but sleepeth’. Reflecting on the ambiguity of the quotation, Alleyn moved away and had not long to search before he found carved armorial bearings exactly similar to those in Mr Period’s study. These adorned the grave of Lord Percival Francis Pyke who died in 1701 and had conferred sundry and noble benefits upon this parish. The name recurred pretty regularly up and down the graveyard from Jacobean times onward. When he went into the church it was the same story. Armorial fish, brasses and tablets, all confirmed the eminence of innumerable Pykes.

Alleyn was in luck. The baptismal register was not locked away in the vestry but chained to a carved desk, hard by the font. In the chancel a lady wearing an apron and housemaid’s gloves was polishing brasses. Her hat, an elderly toque, had been for greater ease, lifted up on her head, giving her a faint air of recklessness. He approached her.

‘I wonder,’ Alleyn said, ‘if I may look in the baptismal register? I’m doing a bit of extremely amateurish research. I’ll be very careful.’

‘Oh, rather!’ said the lady, jollily. ‘Do. My husband’s over at Ribblethorpe-Parva with the mothers or he’d help like a shot. I don’t know if I –’

‘Thank you so much but it’s really quite a simple job,’ Alleyn said hastily. ‘Just a family thing, you know.’

‘We haven’t been here long: only three months, so we’re not up to the antiquities.’ The rector’s wife, as Alleyn supposed she must be, gave a final buffet with her polisher, tossed her head at her work in a jocular manner, bobbed to the altar and made for the vestry. ‘I’m Mrs Nicholls,’ she said. ‘My husband followed dear old Father Forsdyke. You’ll find all the entries pretty erratic,’ she added over her shoulder. ‘Father Forsdyke was a saint but as vague as could be. Over ninety when he died, rest his soul.’ She disappeared. Somehow, she reminded him of Connie Cartell.

The register was bound in vellum and bore the Royal Arms on its cover. Its pages were divided into columns headed ‘When Baptized: Child’s Christian Name: Parents’ Names: Abode: Quality, Trade or Profession and By Whom Performed’. It had been opened in July 1874.