I noticed her flour-dusted fingers reach for the edge of her front door and she clung to it for a few seconds. Her cheeks paled. She wobbled and held the door tighter.

“Mrs Cruickshank? Are you alright?”

She took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m fine. Don’t you worry about me.”

“You don’t look fine…”

She reset her thoughts. The fleeting softness in her expression had vanished, as though it had never been there. “I’ve told you more than enough, Ms Baxter. You seem to know it all already. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get on.”

And with that, she vanished back behind her front door in a flurry of flour and amber apron.

Chapter Seven

I strolled back to my car at the picnic area, giving Merry Wood appreciative but puzzled glances as I passed by.

What had Lily Cruickshank meant about people behaving oddly when their heart was broken? Not to mention that there had been nobody living there for fifty years? What had happened in that house? Had there been some sort of family altercation or falling-out that had festered over the years? Or perhaps a crime had been committed there…?

I stopped and drew myself up. Now I really was allowing my imagination to go into overdrive.

Yet from the way Mrs Cruickshank had been speaking and the preoccupied expression on her face, it was clear something had happened, especially when the house had just been left like that. It was obvious Lily Cruickshank knew far more than she was prepared to say about this Talbot family.

I drove back to my parents’ house to collet Harley, my thoughts bombing around my head. It would be worth checking out Lily Cruickshank to see if I could find out anything about her background. Perhaps that might give me the vital starting point I needed.

Once I had fed Harley and thrown on my old jeans and slouchy white knitted jumper, I rustled up a chicken salad for myself and got to work on searching for any information I could find on Lily Cruickshank.

I started to trawl through the internet, finding one grainy photograph of a Mrs Lily Cruickshank pictured locally. That must be her.

It appeared in The Silver Ness News on July 3rd 1972 and showed a cluster of dignitaries outside a bakery on Silver Ness High Street.

I leant in closer, savouring a mouthful of crunchy green salad laced with olive oil. There was a caption underneath the photo, which said:

Mrs Lily Cruickshank (centre) who is opening her new bakery, Lily’s Loaves, on July 6th.