Such ferocious thoughts persisted through the next half hour or so. She had been sporadically enraged by elephant and rhino poachers, big-game hunters, with plenty of emotion to spare for tigers 100and orangutans. Her first husband Carl had been a committed environmentalist and much of his concern had transferred itself to Thea, even five years after his death. She found herself wanting to rush off and join Gladwin in her hunt for the cruel characters who’d brought their trade all the way to Britain.

The association with Grace was inevitable for several reasons. The Chinese connection, mainly, of course. But the proximity in time between the Cheltenham discovery and Grace’s death might also be significant. Had the woman been deceived into transporting pangolin scales, perhaps? And when she realised what was happening, she had threatened to expose the gang, and thereby got herself killed? It all seemed to fit very neatly. It made Grace into a good guy, rather than a willing participant in a gruesome trade.

Too much thinking, Thea decided. The only antidote was to get outside, and instinctively she looked round for the dog, intending to announce ‘Walkies!’ Yet again the absence made itself felt with a sharp pang. She would make a point of asking Drew for assurances that the spaniel wasn’t pining as much as her mistress was when she phoned him that evening. An evening that still seemed a long way in the future, with the rest of the morning and a whole afternoon still to fill.

With little conscious thought, she turned right outside the house, heading towards the centre of the village as she had the previous morning. The trees were gently dripping on her as she passed the church and noticed again a small group of people amongst the gravestones. They could 101almost be the very same people as had been there the day before. Were they ghosts, then, or very realistic statues? Intrigued, she went through the wooden gate, next to an unusual stone arrangement that appeared to be designed to prevent sheep entering the churchyard. The people ignored her, as she strolled nonchalantly towards them, pausing to read headstones as she went.

Quite soon she realised that they were doing the same thing, with cameras and notepads, making the point that there was some serious researching going on. Family history, then, Thea concluded. Gleaning dates and names and sometimes other details from the lichened stone. There was a woman with a very straight-edged dark-brown fringe just above her eyes, and a man with a pronounced limp. They were working in pairs, moving from one grave to the next at a regular pace. The very intentness caught Thea’s interest. There were muttered exchanges and a lot of note-taking.

‘Excuse me – I’ve got to ask what you’re doing,’ Thea said, as she came closer. ‘Are you recording every grave? Aren’t they already in the church archives?’

The man with the bad leg paused in his note-taking and nodded at her. ‘We’re researching family history.’