“All sorts of things are coming together. Like when you bake a cake and you think you have all the ingredients and you look for sugar. You go to the tin. Open the tin, and tin’t in’t tin, and then you find you’d put sugar in a jar.”

Sykes never had this kind of conversation when he was on the force. “So Harriet’s grandmother –”

“You knew Mrs. Shackleton was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Hood, and that she was born in this here yard.”

“No.”

“Well you know now.”

“I do.”

“You and I need to bring each other up to date on the case, Jim. And it doesn’t suit me to sit in the window of a public house.”

“We can go in the snug at the back, unless you’d like to go to Harriet’s grandmother’s house.”

Mrs. Sugden shook her head. “Best not. She lives on her own and likes to talk. The snug will do nicely.”

They walked back to the pub.

“Will you have a port and lemon?”

“That will be acceptable.”

“Don’t force yourself.”

Over Jim Sykes’s pint of bitter and Mrs. Sugden’s port and lemon, they exchanged information. Mr. Sykes knew the identity of the mysterious man, and his son. Mrs. Sugden claimed to know the name of Mr. Aspinall’s tailor, and that his clothes now dressed a scarecrow in the garden of Mrs. Farrar’s shop.

She was being fanciful, he thought, until she told him about the bullet hole, and Sergeant Dog smelling blood.

“We need to get moving on this.” Sykes looked at his watch. “Where’s she got to?”

Mrs. Sugden saw that he had begun to worry. “You can’t always get away easily after a funeral. She’ll be here if she said she would.”

Sykes knew she was right. Even polite Mrs. Shackleton ought to know there were more important things than offering condolences over slices of pork pie.

There was no point in worrying. “So this scarecrow, do you have any inkling of who dressed it? The rational action would have been to destroy the clothing.”

“Not only do I know who dressed it, but I took her statement. When I made her understand the severity of the situation, she preferred to talk to me than explain to the police.”

As he read the statement given by Miss Valerie Pennington, Sykes got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Mrs. Shackleton might, for once, be out of her depth. She would hate it if he went barging in to the rescue and jeopardised some delicate investigation. But what more could there be to investigate?

Chapter 43

Chapter Forty-Three

After leaving Mrs. Dell’s house, I came to a fork in the road. Turn left for the White Swan and Sykes. Turn right for Thorpefield Manor.

My business there was not over. I turned right.