Better, then, to retrace her original steps from Saturday without two police officers watching every move, looking for hidden clues, trying to make sense of what had happened. That would be a lot more focused and therefore easier to justify. Small details might come back to her. And if there was nobody from the police with her, making notes and asking questions, the very solitude might help to nudge her memory. And yet – did she really want to do it all again, for a third time? Wouldn’t it be nothing more than wasted time? She sat in the living room with a cooling mug of coffee and considered her options.

Perhaps she could just regard it as going for another walk. Perhaps she would follow a different route from before, responding to whim and letting her thoughts roam freely. That was, after all, how she had envisaged this week before coming here. It would be a restful interlude, where she could indulge in drawing, reading, thinking, away from insistent children and the nagging demands of domestic routine. Couldn’t some of this yet be salvaged? There were four or five days still to go, in which she might yet make some sketches and read a book. She could go to Bibury and beyond, get to know the Ampneys and the outskirts of Cirencester. The fact of a murder, right under her nose, closer than any she’d been involved in previously, ought not to be allowed to consume every waking moment. It could be pushed to the edges of her attention, leaving space for some of the indulgence she had originally anticipated.164

So she took herself out into the village, with its smattering of houses, pub and hotel, church and village hall. And a mysterious old barn. A place that had offered refreshment and rest to passing drovers and their flocks or herds. There would have been a field close to the inn where the animals could also gather their strength for more miles of walking. There’d be water for them, but perhaps little or no grass, if times were busy and numerous previous travellers had already bitten it down to nothing and then trodden the ground to bare earth or mud. Thea ambled slowly past the various buildings, dreaming of bygone times, listening for echoes of hooves and whistles, barking dogs and even the occasional drover’s song.

She went into the churchyard, as a place where she had enjoyed a brief friendly chat with interesting people, though deserted now, and climbed over into the field with the cowpats and the walnut tree. There was a bird singing sporadically in the tree, and three or four nuts in their green outer cases lying in the grass. She picked them up, thinking Stephanie and Timmy might find them interesting. A plane passed overhead and cars went by on the road fifty yards away, but Thea felt she was alone in the world. It was a feeling she’d had before in the Cotswolds, as if the entire region was nothing more than a film set. The beautiful facades in their edible cream-and-piecrust hues, held nothing but empty space at their rear. Nearly every village she had spent time in had an air of secrecy about it. And here in Barnsley, in something as prosaic as a business park, 165there were apparently even darker secrets than most.