They were in the stone-paved room referred to as the old pantry. A narrow conservatory led into the garden, but the room was virtually unused and seemed to have no function except as a repository for unwanted furniture, including a small wooden table and two chairs, a decrepit-looking freezer and an old dresser holding a miscellany of mugs and jugs. They passed through a small kitchen into the sitting room, which was also used for dining. The grate was empty, and a clock on the otherwise bare mantelpiece ticked the present into the past with irritating insistence. The room was comfortless except for a wooden settle with cushions to the right of the fireplace. One wall was covered with bookshelves to the ceiling, but most of the shelves were empty and the remaining volumes fell against each other in disorder. A dozen tightly packed cardboard boxes of books were ranged against the opposite wall where oblongs of unfaded paper showed where pictures had once hung. The whole cottage, although very clean, struck Lettie as almost deliberately cheerless and unwelcoming, as if, after their father’s death, Candace and Marcus had wanted to emphasise that, for them, Stone Cottage could never be a home.

Upstairs Candace, with Lettie following, moved with deliberate strides through the three bedrooms, giving a cursory glance inside the cupboards and wardrobes, then almost slamming them shut as if the search were a tedious routine chore. There was a fleeting but pungent aroma of mothballs, a tweedy country smell of old clothes, and in Candace’s wardrobe Lettie glimpsed the scarlet of a doctor’s gown. The front room had been her father’s. Here everything had been cleared away apart from the narrow bed to the right of the window. This had been stripped bare except for a single sheet stretched taut and pristine over the mattress, the universal domestic acknowledgement of the finality of death. Neither spoke. The search was nearly over. They went downstairs, their feet sounding unnaturally loud on the uncarpeted staircase.

The sitting room had no cupboards and they passed again into the old pantry. Candace, suddenly realising for the first time what Lettie had been feeling throughout, said, “What on earth do we think we’re doing? We’re acting as if searching for a child or a lost animal. Let the police take over if they’re worried.”

Lettie said, “But we’re nearly through and at least we’ve been thorough. He’s not anywhere in either cottage or in the sheds.”

Candace had moved into the large walk-in larder. Her voice was muffled. “It’s time I cleared out this place. While Father was ill, I became obsessive about making marmalade. God knows why. He liked home-made preserves but not that much. I’d forgotten the jars were still here. I’ll get Dean to collect them. He’ll find a use for them if he condescends to take them. My marmalade is hardly up to his standard.”