‘Vicky had been creating a vegetable garden at the back of Dove Cottage a few months after the death and guessed, from the freshly dug earth, that the Tickett brothers had in fact buried the body there, rather than shifting it far away as they had promised. Vicky told Crystal, who owned the cottage, and they realised that it would only be a matter of time before the Church of England sent a new vicar, and it would then be impossible to do anything about it. They dithered about it for months, worried about the state of the corpse and whether it would have rotted too much to be moved. It’s not an easy thing to contemplate. Then it was too late. Rev Matthew Cleaver arrived a week early to take up his post. Fortunately, he showed no interest in the garden, and for a while the Willow women forgot about it. Crystal was seeing more and more of Ozzy Blanchard; their affair had really taken off. She tried to persuade him to leave his wife, but like so many men in that position he wanted to have his cake and eat it.’

‘Typical man,’ Sam said.

‘Ozzy boasted to her that he had some big money coming to him, and eventually asked her to receive it in an account in her name. Crystal admitted she liked the idea of stealing money from the company that had caused them so much trouble. It was in January when Ozzy was finally forced to choose. Arrowsmith had warned him that Aqua Western were suspicious about some of the transactions and put many of the payments on hold, including all of those going to Buckingham Pallets Ltd, the Ticketts’ second company. Arrowsmith could see his plans for getting rich were going to be blocked, so diverted all the legitimate money for phase one of the new sewer scheme from the Ticketts’ main company CJT Contracting (Hants) Ltd, making the payee the similar-sounding CJT Contracting (Surrey) Ltd, which he’d bought out of receivership.’

‘So instead of paying the Ticketts he was paying himself?’

‘Yes. And the Ticketts were not only failing to get the fraudulent cash but had only received a fraction of what they were entitled to for the real work they had done. So we come to January, and Vicky overhearing the Ticketts’ plot to kill Ozzy. She told Crystal the Ticketts had mentioned Ozzy’s home address. She rang Ozzy, who decided to go for it, leave his wife, pick up Crystal and skedaddle with the money they had already accumulated.’

‘But at this point the dead barman was still in the original grave?’