She went to bed with a milky drink and a paperback. Just above her head, the attic seemed to exude mystery and long lists of questions. There was no ghost; nothing fearsome or macabre – just an insistent need to find an explanation for what she had realised immediately, on Sunday morning, was the strangest death she had yet encountered.

215

Chapter Sixteen

And then it was Wednesday, and Dave and Sid showed up bright and early. They were installing worktops and cupboards, drilling through the walls and sorting through the stack of flat-pack boxes out in the back garden. Again, Thea was impressed at the lack of ostentation. When the first batch of appliances was in place, the doors opening and closing smoothly, everything straight and true, it looked like any ordinary kitchen she’d seen. ‘That’s the easy bit,’ said Dave, standing back to admire his work. ‘It gets a lot noisier now.’ He indicated the blank space on the wall. ‘I suggest you leave us to it for a couple of hours, if you’ve got anywhere to go. We’ll be tiling this afternoon, so that’ll be quieter.’

It was ten-thirty, and she had been content to sit with her coffee and the radio, and not make any plans for the day. ‘I suppose I should go to Bibury,’ she said, with scant enthusiasm. ‘I might take my sketchpad and see if I can find an unusual angle for a picture.’

‘Ooh – an artist, are you?’ said Sid.216

‘No, not at all. But I did used to like drawing, when I was about sixteen. It might be a bit embarrassing, though, if the place is very busy.’

‘It’s always busy,’ said Sid.

It was not what she really wanted to do, but however much she urged herself to make something more exciting happen, there didn’t seem to be very much opportunity. Without a companion – in which category she very much included her dog – she could not think of a pretext to go knocking on doors or questioning random people walking across the fields. Making sketches felt like the sort of thing under-occupied elderly ladies did, at least in the eyes of the world. If she wanted to have something to show for her time in Barnsley, she should probably just take a few photos with her phone. But where would be the satisfaction in that? To make her own original drawing would surely be more worthwhile.

But she could not motivate herself right away. She spent half an hour tidying the living room and then skirting the garden looking for a few flowers to bring into the house. There was some crocosmia left, and a bed of neglected hollyhocks that were valiantly flowering regardless of their crooked stems and weedy competition. Thea didn’t have the heart to cut them, but found some white daisies and orange day lilies to make a halfway decent display.

As she carried them back, again navigating around all the building materials, she came face-to-face with Caz Barkley.217