‘She won’t even notice you’ve gone,’ said Drew heartlessly.

While the argument was still raging, Gladwin had mentioned that her friend had vetoed the presence of a dog anyway. ‘It’ll get under the builders’ feet, and there’s quite a busy road through the village,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think there’s a proper door at the back. They’ve knocked a wall down, and it’s open to the world.’

Thea had gone to view the property at the beginning of July and hadn’t been back since. ‘There was a perfectly good door when I saw it,’ she grumbled.

13The distance between Barnsley and Bibury was barely more than three miles, which accounted for Drew’s bewilderment over their names. Initially Gladwin had cited Bibury as the location of the property, and somehow nobody had bothered to correct her to name the smaller village, which boasted a pub, a church and a hotel that called itself a spa. In a random piece of research, Thea had learnt that it was on an old drove road, which had been replaced by the B4425 two centuries earlier, shifting the focus to the south, and causing the hotel’s frontage to become its back. There was considerably more history going back to Roman times, which she resolved to investigate during the dull days of house-sitting.

And now it was only one more day until she took up residence there, and she was again reassuring Drew that he’d manage quite well without her. Stephanie was eleven, and Timmy almost nine; they could be left in the house for an hour or so while Drew conducted a burial. Thus far, he only had three funerals in the diary. ‘But there are bound to be at least another three before you come back,’ he said.

‘So? If you’re as worried as all that, you can ask one of their little friends’ mothers to have them.’

It was an unforgivably blithe response, as she well knew. Stephanie had two or three classmates she counted as friends, but they had made no plans to meet during the summer. They were all going to the same secondary school in September, and would undoubtedly regard the presence of Timmy as an intrusion, being a mere ‘Junior’. In any case, he would 14resist all attempts by adults to park him at some girl’s house, even for an hour.

‘I can’t,’ said Drew, listing several of these good reasons.

‘Well, you could hold it over them as a threat if they don’t behave.’

‘You mean if they burn the house down, or one of them falls out of a window and cracks its skull?’

‘Oh, stop it,’ she snapped. ‘You’re only trying to make me feel guilty.’

‘No, no. If I wanted to do that, I’d develop some psychosomatic illness and take to my bed. Then you’d tell me to pull myself together, and go off anyway.’

‘Like Emily’s Bruce used to do,’ said Thea. ‘He was a genius at it, until she realised what was going on. I think Damien can be a bit prone to it as well.’