Deb’s sister Sammy showed up, as did Beth, Amber’s mum. There was so much noise and bustle in the kitchen that I didn’t really get to talk to anyone until after the sealed jars had been left to cool. We were enjoying tea and biscuits in the main hall when Beth finally approached me and said, ‘I want to talk to you about Joyce.’

I smothered a sigh. That’s the problem with small towns; you can never get away. ‘She won’t be coming back as a parent helper,’ I said.

Beth blinked. ‘She won’t?’

‘I asked her not to.’

Beth stared at me, then laughed. ‘Wow. I didn’t know that. Wow.’ She seemed slightly alarmed. ‘What did she do when you told her?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Are you sure?’ She sat down and leaned towards me. ‘There’ll be something. You watch. She once spilled coffee all over my keyboard while I was away from my desk. I could never prove it; people thought I was being paranoid.’ Glancing around, she lowered her voice. ‘Just be careful. She does things. Weird things. You wouldn’t believe some of the things she does.’

I was unnerved. Beth was such a neat, no-nonsense kind of woman, with her steel-rimmed glasses and low-maintenance hairstyle. To hear her muttering like a conspiracy theorist made me wonder if I’d underestimated Joyce. Deb and Howard had already warned me; now Beth was getting in on the act. They made Joyce sound like a cross between the Stasi and Pablo Escobar.

Later that afternoon, when I arrived back home, something happened that rattled me even more. I’d driven past Mitch McCall’s place and noted with relief that Scott Rooney wasn’t sitting outside. But on reaching my own house, I pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine and began to feel uneasy.

It took me a few seconds to work out why.

My house stood on a corner. The wire fence out front had been partially engulfed by a shaggy photinia hedge, which shielded half my front yard from the neighbours across the street. Behind the hedge was a large square of dusty grass, with a chipped birdbath in the middle of it. I’d found this lifeless patch so dispiriting that I’d edged it with planters full of roses, hydrangeas, gerberas and geraniums. Their riotous colour filled me with a sense of achievement whenever I came home.

But this time there were no flowers to greet me. Every single blossom had been snipped off and taken away.

‘Did the neighbours see anyone?’ asked Deb.

‘No.’

‘So it might not have been Joyce.’ As I rolled my eyes, she added, ‘People take flowers, you know. It happened to my dad. Someone stole his zinnias.’

‘I know. I realise that. I can’t prove it was her. But who else would bother?’