‘Oh?’ Thea frowned. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to consult the records? Parish registers and so forth?’

‘Normally, yes. But it so happens that our local records have been damaged. We’ve offered to try to fill the gaps, while we’re working on our own project. There’s often a lot of useful information on a headstone.’ He waved at a pair of slightly crooked monuments, lavishly filled with 102lettering. ‘Look at these, for example. The whole family’s listed here. And there are sometimes little hints as to the people’s trade.’ He turned to his left. ‘Over there, you can see where the stone’s got a sort of pie-crust topping. It means the man was a baker.’

‘Gosh,’ said Thea, who had heard of other instances where local records had come to grief through fire or flood or general neglect. ‘Must be fun.’

‘Oh, it is,’ said the man’s partner, who was holding a professional-looking camera. ‘We’re learning such a lot. You think you know your own village families, but it’s been a revelation. Makes us want to delve much deeper and find out how all these people interconnect. It’s mostly nineteenth century, of course, so not terribly far back.’ The woman appeared to be about seventy. On a quick calculation, Thea realised that her grandmother could easily have remembered the 1890s.

‘I’m quite keen on history myself,’ said Thea, thinking of her abortive efforts to form a local group in Broad Campden to investigate some forgotten details of the Arts and Crafts Movement. ‘But how will you know where to stop? I mean – if you only researched the people buried here, it would take years of work. And the buildings … the drove road. I read about the drove road …’ She tailed off, aware that she was attracting an uncomfortable level of scrutiny. ‘I’m just staying here for a bit,’ she added.

‘You’re not the woman in the Corner House, are you?’ asked the person with the fringe. ‘Where somebody died? All those police. What a commotion!’103

‘That’s me,’ Thea admitted. ‘And I suppose it was already a bit disruptive, with the builders and everything.’

‘That poor house won’t know what’s hit it. The old lady who was there before hadn’t touched a single stone for fifty years or more. This new one − what’s her name? − she seems all right in her way. Not that anybody’s seen much of her yet. Comes and goes without any warning. And now there’s you. A relative, are you?’

‘Friend,’ said Thea with a smile. ‘Just keeping an eye on things, making sure the builders do what they’re supposed to.’

‘So who died?’ burst out the older woman. ‘That’s what nobody can understand. Who in the world was she?’ Her expression was a mixture of eager curiosity and apparent concern for Thea herself. ‘It must have been dreadful for you.’

‘Thank you.’ Thea found herself unreasonably grateful for even this crumb of sympathy. ‘The thing is, I’m not supposed to talk about it. It’s all under police investigation, you see.’