‘She’s quite famous around here,’ said Clovis. ‘The house-sitter who stumbles over bodies and somehow manages to find the killer, nine times out of ten. Only a few months ago, she fingered the person who—’ He stopped, the details of that recent homicide still rather too sensitive for a careless summary. ‘Well, that’s not relevant now.’

‘And I didn’t,’ protested Thea. ‘It was Caz Barkley who got there first.’

Clovis sighed at the memories he’d evoked. ‘Nasty business all round,’ he said.

‘Okay – so this Chinese woman,’ urged Ben. ‘Do they know who she was? How was she killed exactly? Where were you at the time?’ He was rummaging in his backpack, and to Thea’s wonderment he produced a notebook and pencil. ‘It seems remarkably mysterious,’ he added with relish.281

‘They still don’t have an identity for her. I found her on Saturday afternoon and took her back to the Corner House, where she stayed the night. On Sunday morning, after I’d been out for a little walk, I came back and found her dead. The police weren’t sure whether it was murder or natural causes until they did a post-mortem. Turns out she was strangled. She told me she’d been driven to Barnsley from Manchester, and had to escape from the people who’d brought her there. She was genuinely terrified when I found her.’ She stopped for breath, wondering whether the summary had made any sense.

Ben was busy making notes. ‘Manchester?’ he echoed. ‘Driven from Manchester?’

Clovis answered. ‘Right. Which is another reason for linking it all to the pangolins. They’ve found a hoard of dead ones up there somewhere, according to the news.’

A waitress carrying a laden tray interrupted them, and they settled to their food with everything hanging in the air for a full minute.

Ben repeated Thea’s account back to her, almost verbatim. Then he said, ‘So who was she?’

‘Nobody knows. There don’t seem to be any real clues. They can’t find any record of her at the airport. The only thing they’ve found is that she had a wedding ring round her neck with initials inside. When I found her, she didn’t have anything with her at all. She said she’d left everything in the car. She was hiding under some bushes.’

‘So why Barnsley?’ He tapped his teeth with his pen. ‘Must be something dodgy going on at that business 282park. Uncle Edward worked there at one time – helped get it set up, in fact.’

‘But he’s retired now, isn’t he?’

‘Long since. Spends all his time in his garden these days.’

‘Not doing family history like his brother?’

‘Not as far as I know. That’s all got rather bogged down last I heard, anyway.’

‘You told me you couldn’t be sure the woman wasn’t lying about everything,’ Clovis reminded Thea.

‘I know. There was something very unconvincing about her. I mean – the story is pretty crazy, when you think about it. But she obviously had good reason to be scared, as it turned out. And she said, “We fear those we hurt” as if that explained a lot. It’s pretty obvious that she’d said or done something that really upset somebody.’