‘Here,’ I said, at last, and I pulled the burnt paper from my apron. It was folded across the middle and some of the words were illegible but there was no mistaking Fairfax’s handwriting or the smell of burning that marbled the air as Cordelia unfolded it.

‘Can I?’ asked John, and he pulled himself out of his chair and sat down beside Cordelia, squashing the newspapers. Their knees touched. Their shoulders touched. I swear it were all I could do not to stick a knife between them and pull them apart like frozen sausages.

John’s lips moved as he read. Cordelia’s didn’t. She finished first. They looked at me together.

‘We should just tell Chivers,’ I said, in a last desperate attempt to jump off whatever road we were on.

‘We will,’ said Cordelia. ‘But not until we have something to tell him. Felicity, there’s something here. Some secrets that need to be dug up. Fairfax is dead and I know it’s to do with what we glimpsed when the tree came down. It has something to do with the war. With this Frenchman. A boy on a car bonnet. We need to know more. Can you look through his boxes? Get us into the church again? And John, you need to find out who’s paying for the restoration work …’

I turned my back on them but couldn’t help staring; staring through my own silly reflection as my husband and my new friend talked about how to find whichever one of my friends or family had put a well-dressed Frenchman in a tomb and closed the door.

CORDELIA

The words on the burnt paper stayed with me all night. I left Felicity’s just before nine p.m. and resisted John’s persistent offer to walk me home. I wanted to think. Wanted to feel rain on my face and cold air on my cheeks and see if the hunter’s moon would be red or blue. I never found out. The sky was too clogged with grey to offer a view of any lunar spectacle and in truth, the rain and the cold produced little in the way of sensory pleasure. I just ended up sniffly and damp. Two cars passed me on the way back up the hill. Neither one slowed down. The village seemed even quieter than usual as I trudged past the old vicarage, already beginning to go to seed, and past the Bridge Inn. The place was silent. No clinking glasses, no muffled songs or mumbled back-and-forth. Left, past the garage with its fleet of buses standing idle at the kerbside; their paintwork gleaming with a gloss of raindrops. Round past the church. The new church. Pretty little place built on a slope: a curve of old graves around the entrance and long, straggly grass and weeds. Newer headstones further away from the door – smaller, whiter, sadder. Children. Babies from the hospital on the hill.