It often occurred to Meredith that Minstead House, somehow more so than anywhere else, was made up of millions of tiny items, not just the quotidian bricks and tiles, but great mounds of minuscule, random things, like novelty pencil-tops and ornamental gravel. She imagined the sum of its parts deconstructed into haystacks sitting on the drive where the house had once sat: separate piles of gilt picture frames, blocks of parquet flooring, individual pats of butter from the restaurant, computer keyboards from the offices, lily pads from the lake, like some kind of giant build-your-own-stately-home kit that would take two hundred years to construct.

If she was able to take the whole house apart and put it back together, would Ralph be there again, sitting in his office, tucking a cigarette behind his ear to smoke as soon as he got out the door?

No he wouldn’t. He was dead.

As Meredith rounded the corner behind the house, she braced herself for a phalanx of flashing lights, police vehicles, ambulances and CSI in paper suits – although of course George would’ve mentioned it had they actually arrived.

She dropped Dexter back with Ceri then went back downstairs, out across the courtyard to the stable block that housed the shop, with her cubbyhole of an office at the back. Swiping herself in, she checked that nothing was broken or moved.

All was normal – she had cleared up the broken china and shelf the previous day after the policeman left, and Ralph had fixed the shelf himself. She shut the door of her cubbyhole office and made herself a coffee with soya milk, which immediately curdled into cheesy clots.

As she stirred it, she thought back to what Pete had suggested the previous night. Could Ralph really have been strangled? His face had been purple, but the light in the ice house had been almost nonexistent. She had been so busy trying to restart his heart that she hadn’t really been looking that closely at the exact hue of his skin. He’d have had marks on his neck if someone had throttled him – but, again, she hadn’t been looking for them.

Her mobile buzzed on her desk, and when she saw who it was, her heart plummeted.

‘Hi Paula,’ she said, trying to keep the shake out of her voice as she answered. ‘What’s up?’

10

Meredith

Paula didn’t sound overly worried – not then, as she was telling Meredith that Ralph hadn’t come home the previous night. Meredith had a sudden urge to yell at her that she bloody well should be worried.

‘Has he ever done it before?’ she asked instead, fiddling with a loose thread on her top.

‘No, never. And his phone’s switched off.’

Meredith gave the thread a yank.