She was right about that. The road curved to the left before it entered the bulk of the village and the garage stood to our left. It was a large building with half a dozen coaches and minibuses parked up on the forecourt. The front bonnet of an agricultural vehicle had been lifted up and a short man in blue overalls was leaning into its guts. Red sparks were dancing around his head. Nearby, a fat man and a thin man in matching shirts and ties were leaning against the front of one of the coaches eating sandwiches from greasy paper bags. They both waved at Flick as we approached.

‘That’s Hopper and Mont,’ said Felicity. ‘Bloke with his head in the tractor is Gordon.’

‘Which is which?’ I hissed.

‘Hopper’s the fat one.’

It took a moment for them to place me. They looked at Flick the way the locals tended to look at one another – as if they were reading words off a card that was slightly too far away for them to see clearly. It took me a while of living there to realize that you weren’t truly local until you had mastered the squint.

‘How’s you, Felicity?’ asked the one called Hopper. He had a plump face with dimples and a fat neck. With his round spectacles and pudding bowl hair he gave the impression of being made up of water lilies. He was sweating lightly, despite the chill.

‘Mustn’t grumble, Hopper,’ said Felicity, and her voice sounded deeper and more heavily accented. ‘Enough rain for you?’

‘Cats and dogs,’ said Mont. He was older, with no teeth at the front and a perfect meringue of white hair on top of his heavily lined face. ‘You hear about Haltwhistle? They’re looking to evacuate and that didn’t even happen during the war.’

‘Something in the stars,’ said Hopper, sagely. ‘Were never rain like this when I were a bairn.’

‘Nah. We had summers too. The ground don’t know whether it’s February or midsummer.’

I stayed silent. Flick had been quite clear about that. She needed a favour from somebody who didn’t give them freely and she didn’t want him thinking that there was anything fishy about her nosing about in the boot of a dead man’s car.

‘You’ll not have met Mrs Hemlock,’ said Felicity, as if she had just remembered me.

Both men gave little nods of greeting. I think one of them began to say something about being sorry for my sadness but lips stuck together as he said it and I got a jumbled sequence of syllables instead.

‘Nice to meet you both,’ I said. ‘They didn’t tell me the weather got like this when we moved in.’