“Yes. I never knew sweet, kind Harriet. The Harriet Sippel I knew was spiteful and sanctimonious. She treated the world and nearly everyone in it as an enemy, deserving of her suspicion. Instead of seeing only the good, she saw the threat of evil everywhere, and behaved as if she had been charged with unearthing and defeating it. If there was a newcomer to the village, she would start out with the belief that he or she was bound to be heinous in some respect. She would tell others of her suspicions, as many as would listen, and encourage them to look out for signs. Put a person in front of her and she would search for wickedness in that person. If she found none, she would invent it. Her only pleasure after George died was condemning others as wicked, as if doing so made her a better person somehow. The way her eyes would shine whenever she’d sniffed out some new wrongdoing . . .”

Margaret shuddered. “It was as if, in the absence of her husband, she had found something else that could ignite her passion and so she clung to it. But it was a dark, destructive passion that sprang from hatred, not love. The worst part was that people flocked around her, readily agreeing with all her unpleasant accusations.”

“Why did they?” I asked.

“They didn’t want to be next. They knew Harriet was never without prey. I don’t think she could have survived for as long as a week without a focus for her righteous spite.”

I thought of the bespectacled young man who had said, “No one wants to be next.”

Margaret said: “They were happy to condemn whichever poor soul she had fixed upon if it diverted her attention from them and whatever they might be up to. That was Harriet’s idea of a friend: someone who joined her in vilifying those she deemed to be guilty of a sin, minor or major.”

“You’re describing, if I may say so, the sort of person who is likely to end up getting murdered.”

“Am I? I think people like Harriet Sippel aren’t murdered nearly often enough.” Margaret raised her eyebrows. “I see I’ve shocked you again, Mr. Catchpool. As a vicar’s wife, I shouldn’t say these things, I dare say. I try to be a good Christian, but I have my weaknesses, as we all do. Mine is the inability to forgive the inability to forgive. Does that sound contradictory?”

“It sounds like a tongue-twister. Do you mind if I ask you where you were last Thursday evening?”

Margaret sighed and looked out of the window. “I was where I always am: sitting where you’re sitting now, watching the graveyard.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Would you like me to tell you about Ida Gransbury now?”