‘He wasn’t carrying anything,’ Annie said. ‘I can remember that clearly. But he was pulling a shopping trolley – the kind used by elderly people. He’s not exactly old, though, probably in his fifties. I also noticed he was limping.’

‘So while you were walking away from our house, he was walking towards it? Is that right?’

Annie nodded. ‘But then, he does live down the hill opposite the stables. I’m guessing he was just going home.’

James mulled this over for a few moments, and said, ‘As a matter of interest, do you happen to know when exactly his mum died?’

Annie shrugged. ‘According to Janet, people think it was last Christmas Eve. But they can’t be absolutely sure because her body wasn’t found until New Year’s Day.’

James felt a sudden twist in his gut as he wondered if Keith Patel should become their first suspect.

CHAPTER FIVE

James spent the rest of the evening in work mode. He found it impossible to concentrate on anything other than the parcel.

He asked Annie lots of questions about the people she knew in Kirkby Abbey, and was particularly interested in the ones she’d had contact with since moving here.

Some of those she mentioned James had already been introduced to, including Lorna Manning, the school headmistress.

‘I’m confident that none of them would do such a thing,’ Annie said. ‘Lorna is my friend as well as my boss. You said yourself how nice she is. The same goes for Father Silver, who has a lot on his plate at the moment, what with his illness and the impending closure of his church. They both have their ears to the ground, so I’m sure they would have told me if someone in the village had it in for us.’

Among the other villagers James had met were Charlie and Sonia Jenkins, landlords of The White Hart pub, and Giles Keegan, a former member of the Cumbria Constabulary who used to work in the same office where James was now based.

‘They’ve all been really welcoming,’ Annie said. ‘But you ought to ask Giles what he thinks. I’m sure that not much happens in Kirkby Abbey that he isn’t aware of.’

Among those James hadn’t met was Keith Patel and it was Patel’s name that James scrawled in his notebook, along with the fact that Annie had seen him walking towards their house pulling a shopping trolley shortly before the parcel was left on their doorstep. Was it just a coincidence? Probably. But that did not mean it wasn’t a credible line of inquiry, along with Andrew Sullivan’s possible involvement.

Obviously, Annie knew only a very small number of the seven hundred or so people who resided in Kirkby Abbey, and many of those she’d known when she’d lived here with her parents had since left the village. The shrinking population was the main reason that things had changed and were continuing to change. The only church was due to close for good early in the new year because of a dramatic fall in the number of worshippers, and it was thought unlikely that the campaign to save the primary school would succeed.