When the tourists had moved on, the only sound in the churchyard was the wind stirring the branches of the trees. Cooper still thought it was strange that the only plague victim buried here was the rector’s wife. The dead bodies were hardly likely to be infectious – they would already have been abandoned by plague-carrying fleas in favour of living hosts. The same sort of thing had gone on everywhere in the Middle Ages, though no amount of corpse-dumping would have saved a doomed town when the plague swept through Europe.

He realized that Fry was looking at him oddly, a faintly derisive smile suggesting that he was behaving in exactly the way she expected. Cooper wondered if this idea was going to work, or whether she would lose patience with him and walk away. The situation seemed so fragile.

‘I don’t understand why Rawson went back to horse dealing when he had his other enterprises,’ he said, desperate to regain her attention.

‘Well, he was getting himself into financial difficulties with the new ventures,’ said Fry. ‘He’d stretched himself too far, that was his problem. The house in Sutton Coldfield was fully mortgaged to raise capital for the meat-distribution business. But with the way the housing market has been, the property was worth less and less, and interest rates were going up. That outbreak of trichinosis would have ruined R & G Enterprises. Their hopes of public acceptance of horse meat would have been wiped out in a stroke.’

‘I can just imagine the headlines,’ said Cooper. ‘So Rawson was going back to his old living?’

‘It had done well for him in the past, and he’d managed to keep just the right side of the law, despite everything. Patrick Rawson was a man confident of his own abilities. And Naomi Widdowson came forward and offered him the perfect deal at exactly the right time. The psychology of it was very clever.’

‘That doesn’t sound like something Naomi would figure out.’

‘No, of course she didn’t.’ Fry sounded exasperated, as if she thought he wasn’t really listening. ‘It was all planned by Deborah Rawson.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Cooper.

They were passing a corner by the Riley Graves, one of Eyam’s macabre little tourist attractions. The majority of plague victims were buried in unknown graves, but here was a memorial to John Hancock, who’d died at the height of the plague. The inscription was just about legible, despite some cracking to the gravestone.

As I doe now, So must thou lye.

Remember, man, That thou shalt die.

‘But why would Rawson’s wife set him up like that?’ said Cooper.

‘She’d convinced herself that her husband was having an affair. She overheard some argument between him and Michael Clay over payments that were going out through one of their business accounts.’

‘Rent for the house? Eden View?’