She took a hearty bite out of her bread and cheese while she waited for him to reply.

‘It’s complicated,’ was the best he could come up with.

Jenny gave a sympathetic sigh. ‘When are relationships ever not? I mean, look at Euan.’

Finch just nodded. He didn’t want to ‘look at Euan’, not again. It was like plugging in a CD, the exact same bile flowing in a monotonous loop. What he really wanted was to ask Jenny something that had been niggling him, but which he had pushed aside in the face of Grace’s anguish. Grace had mentioned – like Jenny previously – that her mum was a friend of James Bregman. But it was Jenny’s sly expression when she herself had done so that came back to him now.

‘So this James Bregman – Michael’s partner,’ he began. ‘You say he’s an old friend of yours?’

Jenny looked a bit sheepish. ‘Well, we used to chat around the village sometimes, when he had a place here. I wouldn’t call him exactly a friend.’

‘But Nell was?’

Jenny hesitated, then gave a bright grin. ‘Oh, you know Nell, Finch. She made friends with everyone.’

He smiled his agreement. ‘I could never keep up.’

‘Your wife had a very big heart,’ Jenny added, her smile sentimental this time.

But there was something behind the smile that Finch found unsettling. He shook himself. He badly needed to get away from Jenny.

‘Listen, I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, rising too quickly and barking his shins painfully on the wooden bench attached to the table, ‘but I think I’ll give the art trail a miss. I know Nell used to love them, but it’s not really my thing.’

As Finch made his excuses to a clearly disappointed Jenny and rode off through the warm summer afternoon towards his house, he came to a decision: I’ve got to get away. Romy would be back in the village soon, maybe even for the weekend, then the next weekend, and the one after. He couldn’t risk running into her. He didn’t know if he could control himself if he saw her again. He might be tempted to forget Grace’s problems ever existed.

No, he would search out an adventure, maybe travel thousands of miles and do something wild that would totally absorb his attention – the Amazon, New Guinea, Alaska, perhaps. He was used to being on the move, good at being set down in foreign parts and adjusting.

Opening his laptop and settling to email some of his contacts scattered around the world, he started with his friend Paz – short for Pascal. Finch had met him in Bosnia, where Paz, employed by La France Diplomatie, had been involved in the United Nations Peacekeeping Force. It had been an instant friendship, the Frenchman’s irreverence a breath of fresh air in such a grim environment. He’ll come up with something, Finch thought.