Then he was gone, pulling the door shut quietly behind him.

‘Can you believe that man?’ Edie said, after a moment of silence. ‘He couldn’t even be bothered to say goodnight.’

Thirty-Seven

Following his conversation with Alan Crosswick, Toby tried to find another investigative track. Surely if Dora McCreedy wasn’t the culprit, the possibility was that it had to do with Rachel herself, given that the article had been deliberately aimed at her, and it was Rachel who’d already been the most affected.

Toby had tried to put the envelope he’d seen in her kitchen drawer out of his mind, but it had inevitably lingered. Now the memory of it returned, along with the name that had been printed onto it. Mrs Rachel Harry. Toby had asked her outright, on that inadvertent first drink they had been tricked into at the Fretted Goose, whether she had such a relationship in her past, and the answer had been a clear no. The letter suggested another story, one that he couldn’t dismiss as irrelevant to what was currently happening in Newton Dunbar without further investigation.

Toby felt deeply uncomfortable with the idea of asking Rachel outright about the letter. He had no right to know more about her life than she was willing to share. He also didn’t want to research her. Even if he didn’t tell her what he was doing, it would be as invasive as asking her openly – worse, in fact, because it gave her no chance to tell him to stop. On the other hand, this was what Toby did – he pieced together stories, fragments that separately made no sense to anyone else but together formed a whole that anyone could understand. If Rachel was being threatened by someone from her past, she surely needed to know about it.

As usual, the only person he really had to talk to was Sylvie, who was, also as usual, dismissive of his concerns.

‘You don’t have to do a deep dive,’ his ex-wife pointed out. ‘At least, not if you don’t want to. Just look into the newspaper archives, see if anything pops up. That’s what you’d do as a first step anyway, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Toby said.

‘There you go then. If there’s nothing there, reassess. But if it’s as simple as typing her name into a search engine and reading a few publicly available articles, it’d be daft not to do that, wouldn’t it?’

That was the thing about Sylvie. She always managed to make complex issues seem ridiculously simple.

‘It just doesn’t feel right,’ Toby told her.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘This is the twenty-first century, Toby. Everyone googles each other, don’t they?’

‘Most people don’t turn that into a search of newspaper archives,’ he pointed out. ‘I don’t think that falls under the header of an okay thing to do.’

‘It probably wouldn’t be, for any normal person,’ Sylvie told him. ‘But you’re not a normal person, you’re a journalist, and if you’re squeamish about crossing lines I’d say you’re probably already screwed on that score.’