The village of Peascombe St Mary was arranged around a series of narrow lanes winding through the fields between the Lincolnshire Wolds and the North Sea coast. It was adjacent to its smaller neighbour, Peascombe St Thomas, a hotchpotch of ploughed fields separating the two. Between them, the villages mustered barely five hundred souls, though they did have the comfort of two churches and the convenience of a railway station at which the occasional train stopped en route to either Mablethorpe or Louth. Although smaller, Peascombe St Thomas did have a pub, the Ship Inn, whose improbably low ceilings, protruding beams and dimly lit interior were proof, as far as the landlord was concerned, of its origins in the fourteenth century.

Peascombe St Mary was just a few miles north of Mablethorpe and a mile inland from the sea, which lay to the east. Apart from the blackout, barbed wire on the beach and a few troops billeted in the village, the war had not made too much of an intrusion. True, a dozen or so villagers had been conscripted, but many more were exempt, as farming was a protected occupation. The nation, after all, did need to eat and the two villages adequately met their obligations in that regard.

Peascombe St Mary was a place where people minded their own business: for reasons locals didn’t bother to dwell on, it was not one of those villages that thrived on gossip. That was regarded as the preserve of folk who lived in Mablethorpe and other metropolitan centres.

That preference for privacy could well have been one of the attractions Peascombe St Mary held for Lillian Abbott, a lady perhaps in her early fifties who’d moved to the village in the early 1930s when she found employment as a schoolteacher in Mablethorpe.

Having lived in the village for just a dozen years, she was still regarded as a newcomer, but she was a newcomer who understood the unspoken rules: she kept to herself, she minded her own business and she never indulged in gossip.

Villagers were aware that she’d been widowed after her husband was killed at Passchendaele in 1917 and had no children. Before moving to the area she’d lived in London for a while, and possibly Birmingham, though people couldn’t be sure, and of course it was not something they’d discuss.

Lillian Abbott lived in a small cottage on Pasture Lane on the eastern edge of the village, close to the coast and with the sound of the sea ever present. To one side of her was an outbuilding belonging to a neighbouring farm, and she was separated from the house on the other side by an unused paddock where six-foot-high weeds shot up through the cinder and provided a welcome curtain to add to her privacy. Behind her cottage were fields, through which a narrow track led to the beach.