It was after three o’clock, which was good news. She had reached the point when she wanted to leave Barnsley and go home as soon as she could. The coming evening felt prickly with unfinished theories, unfulfilled obligations, unpredictable turns of events. She was severely lacking in information or understanding, unable to trust much of what people told her.

She drove back to the Corner House and sat for a minute in the car. Sid and Dave were out of sight at the back, and there was no sign of life anywhere along the village street. How strangely silent these Cotswold villages were. She remembered Frampton Mansell and Daglingworth and how rare it was to see anyone in the lanes, or even in the front gardens. And now her 237attention had been drawn to the fact that some of the houses were permanently unoccupied – not just kept as country retreats for rich City bankers. When a murder took place in their midst, the ripples were almost invisible, too. The residents’ real lives were nearly all conducted somewhere else.

Thea’s sense of history would often contrast these empty scenes with those of a century or two ago. Children would be bowling hoops, horses and dogs on all sides, the washing flapping in the breeze. And here in Barnsley, there’d be the added thrill of sporadic flocks of sheep or herds of cattle being driven from place to place, along the road selected long ago for that very purpose. She sat there imagining the piles of steaming manure left behind, perhaps a few torn ears from scraps between local and drovers’ dogs. Perhaps, too, a few new litters of puppies conceived on the sly, adding useful new blood to the gene pool. If the village served as a resting place, there must have been some kind of compound close to the inn where the animals could be corralled for a few hours. At busy times, there could well be two distinct sets of drovers, needing to keep their beasts separate. Where, Thea wondered, were the first-hand accounts of this utterly forgotten way of life? There must be many people alive who had known drovers – had them for grandparents or elderly neighbours, and surely listened to their stories. Not for the first time, she resolved to see if she could discover more about the details of this specific settlement. Some googling would pass a contented hour or two, if nothing else. And the not-quite-abandoned barn 238continued to intrigue her, at the back of her mind. She could stroll down for another little look at it, perhaps. And she might even do a little search for Gwendoline Phoebe Wheelwright, whose mortal remains were sitting in a dark corner of a dusty old barn.

The googling was dramatically more productive than she’d imagined. Following one link after another, she found herself in an online history for the Wheelwright family where various relatives blogged, drawing the connections between them and asking questions. The very openness of it was refreshing. No secrets here, concluded Thea. If a younger son got sent off to Australia for stealing a hogget, then that appeared to be more of a source of pride than of shame. The focus was on the nineteenth century and earlier, where recriminations and grievances could be assumed to have long ago evaporated. The family had lived in the heart of Barnsley for generations. Pages from the census were reproduced, to show the quantity of children and servants – both at their height in the 1870s. Life was good, as one present-day contributor remarked.