“Why is Eliot looking into things, and not Benjie?”

“You must have noticed a change in Benjie, he seems so detached from everything. He works up a little enthusiasm about the new mine, but not much. He pretends to be working when he goes into his study, but if you barged in, you’d see his stamp collection on the table, or his coins.”

We rode in silence for a while, in single file along the lane, coming to the closed Corner Shop by the back way. It looked different when approached from the rear. The building appeared more solitary, set back from the row of houses.

It still seemed difficult to imagine this innocuous setting as the scene of a brutal crime. I put that thought from my mind and attempted to sound matter-of-fact.

“I can see why the shop is convenient for people on this side of the village.”

“Yes. It was always a shop, the last house in a row that was demolished forty years ago. That’s how it came to be called the Corner Shop. The then-owners wanted to keep on renting because they did good trade.”

“It looks odd, standing all alone, cut off from Silver Street.”

Gertrude’s horse whinnied, anxious to move on.

She stroked his neck. “I don’t know whether anyone will want to take it on after what has happened.”

“Would you consider doing what that woman suggested earlier, and having a Co-operative Store?”

“Well it’s our shop, you see. Once you let the cooperatives in, they sell for less and share dividend with their members. They swallow up all the trade. They’re an anathema to owners of small shops.”

The garden behind the shop was beautifully tended. Some crops had been sown, overseen by a scarecrow. Scraps of newspaper had been threaded on string to keep away the birds

“Mrs. Farrar took pride in her garden.”

“I feel terrible about it, Kate. I didn’t like Mrs. Farrar, not that I had much to do with her. She was a busybody. Raynor acts as estate manager. He said she never paid the rent without moaning about how difficult it was to make ends meet, but I wouldn’t have wished that death on anyone.”

“It was a robbery?”

“Yes, though for such a pittance. Thank God they have him behind bars.”

I thought of him, in that cold whitewashed room, and saw him in my mind’s eye. Defeated. Dejected. As if he had given up on himself.

“What do you know about him?” I asked.

“He had the best of care and attention in the home. And a good job at the Finney pit. There’s gratitude for you.”

“If he was in work, he couldn’t have been so hard up that he would kill for a paltry sum, could he?”

“Some people never have enough, Kate.”