Zac guided me to the Cross of Sacrifice, and I knelt to place the small cross at its base, among the others, before I rose and stepped backwards.

‘What was his rank?’ Zac asked.

‘Squadron Leader.’ He was a commissioned officer, but he wasn’t born into it. He grew up on my grandparents’ dairy farm. ‘He was young when he died. Thirty-three. They both were. Did I tell you he flew search and rescue helicopters?’

‘You did. You should be very proud.’

As I honoured my military father and civilian mother, I thought of my grandmother, and what she constantly said about my parents’ deaths. She, of course, had a conspiracy theory, and believed that the car accident that killed them wasn’t an accident at all but made to look like one because my father knew something he shouldn’t. Whenever she dropped her dark hints I tried to quiz her, only for her to clam up. Sometimes, I thought my obsession with joining the Security Service was driven by my wish to get access to whatever hidden information there might be about this. I remembered Maxine’s seemingly innocuous questions about their deaths during that awful interview.

Zac put an arm around me, and we slowly walked the few metres to join Peggy and James. Peggy said, ‘So you’re living above the plague pit, Zac?’

He looked bewildered, which was not a look Zac often wore.

‘Didn’t Holly tell you?’ Peggy said.

‘No.’ He managed a joke. ‘I ought to ask for a discount on the rent.’ He turned to me, as if for help. ‘Holly?’

‘It’s just a story,’ I said.

‘You know it isn’t,’ Peggy said.

‘Are you going to tell me?’ Zac’s eyes were glittering at mine.

‘Hmm. I’m thinking I have to say yes to that.’ So I began. ‘In the mid-fifteenth century, five hundred people from the town were lost to the plague. The burial records for that period don’t survive, and the plague victims aren’t in the graveyard.’ A paper poppy petal, torn away from the body of the flower, floated above us, lifted by the wind. ‘So here is the question. Where were the poor souls put?’

‘Souls?’ Zac raised an eyebrow.

‘The thinking is that the bodies were loaded onto carts and taken along the coffin path. Then they were dumped into a pit. This was three kilometres along the coast, but slightly inland.’

‘Where you are.’ Peggy was fingering the cross that dangled from a silvery chain around her neck. ‘To rid the town of contagion.’ She glanced up at the smoky-blue sky, as if for heavenly support. ‘The pit is on the land behind your farmhouse. Your back garden, as a matter of fact. Nobody wants to live there. It’s supposed to be unlucky.’