He ran the names Neil Savage, Gillian Weldon, and Kenneth O’Connor by her but the only one she recognised was O’Connor.

‘I’ve never spoken to him, but I know he lives around the corner from here and according to gossip his partner walked out on him not long ago. Do you think he had something to do with what happened?’

James shrugged. ‘We don’t know. But we do know he had a falling out with Robert Bateman because he lost his job at the farm. He wasn’t at home when we called round today but we’ll try again tomorrow.’

James was going to mention the first bloodbath that took place at Oaktree Farm twenty-four years ago, but Annie beat him to it.

‘The news feeds are making a big thing of it,’ she said. ‘They’ve dug up some old photos of the Roth couple. And the strange thing is I can actually remember how it freaked me out at the time. You see, my parents were friends with the Roths, and I even held their baby, the one who went missing.’

The revelation came as a bolt from the blue. As he listened to Annie, the photos he’d seen online of baby Megan and her parents flashed through his mind.

‘I was twelve or thirteen at the time,’ Annie told him. ‘Mum and I were coming back from the store when we saw Amanda Roth pushing her pram. It was only a couple of weeks after she’d given birth and Mum invited her back for a cup of tea. While she was here, she had to feed the baby and afterwards she asked me if I wanted to hold her. I remember how small she was and how cute. But they didn’t stay for long and we never saw either of them again.’

Annie’s bottom lip quivered as she spoke and her eyes glistened with sadness.

‘The news about the killings broke about a week later,’ she went on. ‘I remember how upset Mum was and how my dad joined in the search for Megan around Oaktree Farm. For a while it was the only thing people talked about. Then came the funerals at the church and I insisted on going along. But the turn-out was poor because by then the suspicion that Simon Roth had killed his wife before killing himself had taken root. And the conclusion the police came to was that one or both of them probably killed their baby and her body was hidden somewhere.’

‘So, the Roths are buried in the village churchyard,’ James said.

Annie nodded. ‘That’s right. Their graves share the same headstone. I recall attending a memorial service there to mark the first anniversary of the killings. Then, years later, my own parents were buried close by.’

James told her about the memorial stone in the cellar at Oaktree Farm.