‘What can I get you?’ he offered.

‘No need,’ Marge told him. ‘They know what I like and it’ll be here in a moment.’

She was right. Her tea and scone arrived soon after she’d taken her seat.

‘I work here part-time on a voluntary basis, so there are perks. Like these scones.’

She proceeded to butter hers.

‘So have you found Karen yet?’ she said as she sipped her tea.

‘The police know,’ Magnus said, ‘and are seeing if they can locate her.’

‘Her pals at the cafe are also on the job. We didn’t ask for her address, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find it out, probably quicker than the polis.’

She checked Magnus’s reaction to this and, finding it positive, continued. ‘In her state, a couple of uniforms turning up at her door will likely terrify her. It should be one of us, me probably.’ Marge hesitated. ‘Or maybe me and you, Professor?’

‘They’ve agreed that I sit in on any interview,’ Magnus told her.

‘That’s a start, but it doesn’t help if she’s topped herself first.’

‘You think that’s a possibility?’ Magnus said, shocked.

‘It’s always a possibility with folk as traumatized as Karen.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Magnus promised. ‘You mentioned a diary?’

‘The diary’s not the only thing we need to talk about,’ Marge said firmly. ‘There’s something else you’ve got to see.’ She finished her tea. ‘And for that we need to go back to the church hall.’

And so they walked round to the hall, where Marge brought out a big, hand-drawn map of the street Karen had grown up on, together with a chart they’d made up of all folk living nearby at the time of Mary’s disappearance.

‘When she first told us about Mary, she was keen to get the others to ask questions, because it might jog her memory. She said it was like a door had been shut and locked on a room she needed to see. We’ve all been there, Professor, you saw that when you visited us. We need to face up to what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, otherwise it’s like being haunted. Karen was truly haunted. She’d been having nightmares, seeing things, talking to her dead husband. She thought she was going doolally. I told her we were all doolally. So . . . we decided to play it a bit like a mystery game. We would solve it for her. That was even before they found the body.’

She continued, ‘She liked that idea, because she thought she was getting somewhere. But that bloody diary scared her. It was like it was cursed, that’s what she said. She wanted it out of the house.’

‘Did you get to see what was in there?’

Marge shook her head in a determined manner. ‘No. Today when she asked me to keep it, I thought I would take a look. Maybe photograph the pages.’ She looked at Magnus. ‘Was that wrong, Professor? We were all so worried about her.’