Lucy checked her watch and on impulse rang Finn’s mobile. He had gone up to London to discuss creating a historically themed garden for the next Chelsea Flower Show that morning, but she thought she might catch him between meetings. He answered at once, sounding warm.

“Hi,” Lucy said, feeling ridiculously shy all of a sudden. “How are you getting on?”

“Great,” Finn said. “It’s an exciting project. I’m sorry it had to be today, though. I miss you.”

Now she felt ridiculously happy. “I miss you too,” she said. “I’ve lots to tell you when I see you tonight.”

“I’ll be quite late,” Finn said, “but I’ll text you as soon as I get back and maybe we could have supper together? If you’d like that,” he added.

“I would,” Lucy said. It felt good, she realized, to relax and see what might happen with Finn. Her life had always been so planned, each step regimented to fit with her career. This new sensation of time and space for things to develop, whether it was work, interests or relationships, was exciting. And she liked him. She really liked him. He was straightforward, comfortable in his own skin. She admired that.

The museum was as sepulchrally quiet as on the first occasion she had visited. Fortunately this time Gabriel didn’t seem to be around; an older man was handing out tickets and selling souvenirs from behind the counter. The police had told her that Gabriel had an alibi for the night that Cleo had seen the intruder at the barn, but even so, Lucy didn’t feel comfortable around him, which she acknowledged might purely have been down to guilt on her part for suspecting him.

She walked over to the case that contained the artifacts that had been found by the treasure hunters in Clarabelle’s field back in the 1940s. It was as she remembered it, and as it was outlined in the newspaper cutting: a couple of glass bottles described as originally containing medicinal salts, part of a seventeenth century clay pipe, a few bits of Roman pottery, coins from the middle ages to the eighteenth century, and the battered toy soldier.

There was no sign of a key.

The cold blast of sensation, when it came, was exactly like the previous time. Lucy felt as though someone was watching her, felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck and the chill creep along her skin like frost. The feeling intensified, ice-cold and terrifying, and she turned and blundered out of the museum, past the poster advertising Marilynne’s autumn art show, the counter assistant’s face an astonished blur, and out into the street.

Once outside the feeling receded and she took deep breaths of the clear summer air. She needed to get back and think about all of this; write down all the snippets of information she’d put together from the books, the newspaper cuttings, Maud’s conversation, Finn and Johnny’s work, her own experiences of Catherine... And look for a pattern.