‘Yeah.’ Evie pulled the blue folder out of her bag and slid it across the table. Kym opened it and began to spread its contents over the table. She retrieved a spiral-bound notebook from her own bag and opened it, flicking through the pages filled with her handwriting, jagged and dense.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think . . .’ Evie hesitated, glancing over towards Mrs Agar, who had stationed herself at the card catalogue and who gave no impression of going anywhere soon. ‘It’s all a bit – disconnected?’

‘Yeah.’ Kym dropped the book on the table. The trouble was there was no pattern, no shape to it. All her information seemed to be second or third hand, and with too many gaps – there was nothing about the witch marks in the attic, for example, in anything she’d ever read, and nothing about a hidden shoe.

She tried not to think about Ty and the expression on his face when he’d told her about Beth.

As if he felt sorry for her.

It hadn’t been their imagination, the knocking, the pounding at the door, had been real. It had been – it was easier to admit this to herself now – purposeful, threatening.

‘Let’s start again,’ she said. ‘Get everything in chronological order, and then – at least we can see what we’ve got. You can tell me what I’ve missed.’

Evie was looking at her very intently, then she smiled, and shook her head. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Whatever you say.’

*

Kym had tried asking her mum about the house, ages ago. But Kate – never one to pass on the chance to have a go at Gina – had completely missed the point. She had said something about incomers and money, and how anyone could stand to live in a pokey little yard was beyond her anyway. Then she’d more or less clammed up. Kate never set foot in Bishops Yard, not if she could help it, and certainly not since Kym had grown old enough to visit her grandmother unaccompanied.

There was something about the shoe that was nagging at her, something, she thought, to do with a pin. She fussed with the sheets of paper they had set out on the table, rearranging them.

‘Can I help?’ Mrs Agar joined them, looking over their work. ‘Is it Elder House or Bishops Yard you’re particularly interested in?’

Evie glanced at Kym. ‘Both,’ she said, ‘I think.’

‘And I keep thinking there’s something I’ve missed,’ Kym said. ‘He did a sort of a dig, didn’t he? In the yard. Frederick Bishop.’

‘That’s right, we have his finds in the collection.’

‘Did they ever find pins, like the ones in the cabinet, in Bishops Yard?’

‘I expect so, as I said, they were very common, and I think the finds there go back to the first abbey, which would be the correct period.’