He waited now for Hilda to answer. She finished rubbing the fat into the flour, washed her hands under the tap and wiped them on a towel.

‘Mallow Cottage,’ she said at last. ‘It was never a happy house. Folk never seemed to stay there. They’d move in full of plans to do it up, but they all seemed to sell up before the work was done.’

‘I’d never have had you down as a superstitious type,’ Ashworth said.

‘Nothing to do with superstition!’ She fired the words back at him. ‘Damp and dark and too expensive to renovate – that was it, more like.’

‘But there was a tragedy there,’ Ashworth said. ‘A little boy died.’

‘Aye, Patrick Eliot. That would have been twenty years ago, almost to the day. We all turned out for the funeral. The whole village, though we didn’t know the family really then. And after that Veronica refused to speak about the boy.’ She shrugged. ‘People thought it was odd, but everyone has their own way of coping, I suppose.’ She paused again. ‘There’s another funeral for us to go to now. I saw the vicar in next door.’

‘Who was living at the cottage at the time of the accident?’ Ashworth found he was holding his breath as he waited for the answer.

She was standing at the sink, dribbling water from the cold tap into the bowl, mixing it into the pastry with a knife. She turned to speak to him.

‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘The place was empty. There was a For Sale board outside; I remember it. It was in all the newspaper pictures. That’s why Veronica could take the boys into the garden to poke around in the stream. The White House didn’t have much of a garden then. It was more like a builders’ site. The Eliots had only just moved in.’

When Ashworth went back next door and knocked at the Listers’, that house was empty too. Perhaps the vicar had taken the couple to the chapel of rest, or to the rectory to continue the conversation about hymns and eulogies there. Ashworth phoned Vera to bring her up to date, but he could tell she was preoccupied. She gave him a list of instructions without explaining the reason for them.

The rain stopped by mid-afternoon and people meeting each other in the street laughed at the sandbags and said that the Environment Agency had over-reacted this time. But as it got dark it started raining again, this time a soft drizzle that folk still didn’t take seriously.

Chapter Thirty-Six