“I don’t understand …” Sarah supposed that she should leave it all to George, but she was too involved to remain silent.

“Why I did it? I regretted it, you know, the moment it was done. I have been a little mad for a long time now. It was so unfair that Agnes should have had so many children while I had none. Mary should have been my child. I would have cared for her properly. She wouldn’t have been a wild, unkind girl if she had been my daughter.”

“You wrote the note pinned to my wedding dress,” Sarah said. “You thought that Jim should have belonged to you, too.”

Melissa seemed angry that she had been interrupted. It was as if she had prepared her speech and Sarah had spoiled he performance. But she answered.

“I wrote the note. They brought the dress up here for me to iron it. They know that I’m good with my hands. It wasn’t a tactful thing to have done. I have no children to dress up on their wedding day. And she should never have named the lad after my husband. I would have used that name if I’d had a son.”

“But you never went out that night,” Sarah said. “You were at home all evening.”

“I went to watch. I wanted to see what you looked like. I wanted to see what was going on. If my son was being married, I should have been there.”

“What happened?” Again it was Sarah who asked the question. George Palmer-Jones watched the conversation between the women in silence. It was impossible to guess what he was thinking.

“Mary was running around the hall in some sort of game. The music was still playing. I was about to go home. There was nothing more to see and I knew that soon it would be the interval and the people would come out.”

“She must have been hiding from Maggie,” Sarah said. “ She was supposed to be helping her.”

“She must have heard my footsteps on the road because she saw me. She called me a witch, a spying old witch. Children can be cruel to people they don’t belong to. She came at me, calling names. I didn’t want to face her, so I ran off up the hill?”

“Up Ellie’s Head?”

“Yes. But she chased after me, calling names all the time. She followed me right to the edge and I pushed her. I thought; now Agnes knows what it is like to lose a child.”

“And Robert? Why did you kill him?” Sarah spoke again, because she wanted to know and because George was remaining resolutely, infuriatingly silent.

“He saw me outside the hall that night and later he guessed. He came to see me.”

At the beginning James had looked bewildered, but confusion was turning to horror. Tears were rolling down his face. He stood up.