“Don’t say anything else, Persis,” Gabriel said. “You’ll incriminate yourself—you’ll incriminate all of us!” His jaw jutted and he turned to Finn. “I want a lawyer,” he said.

“Oh go to hell, Gabe,” Persis said, turning on him. “Charlie was a good person. Finn and Lucy are good people. I want them to know the truth. You leave if you want to, and that way you won’t be implicated, but I’m going to tell them.”

Gabriel shrugged angrily and slumped back in his chair. “Suit yourself.”

“Gabriel’s right,” Finn said quietly to Persis. “The police will want to talk to you about this. You should wait.”

Lucy reached for his hand and squeezed it. She knew how much that offer must have cost him. He wanted to know what had happened to Charlie, needed to know for the sake of closure and his own sanity. But he wasn’t going to do it at the cost of Persis’s future. He returned the squeeze and gave her a faint smile.

“Thanks,” Persis said, “but I’m doing this for me as well, you know? The way Aunt M made me feel—sort of torn in my loyalties and all twisted up inside...” She straightened her shoulders, “I’m not that person. I want to set the record straight.” She took a gulp from the mug of tea.

“Okay,” she said. “So for years Aunt M had been searching for treasure on the basis of Granddad’s stories, but she’d found nothing. Then Verity—” she looked at Lucy “—started to talk about a lost Elizabethan garden and her plans for an archaeological dig. Aunt Marilynne was furious. She’d always viewed Gunpowder Cottage as hers, in some odd way; she resented that Verity had bought the place from under her nose and never really got over it.”

“She always did seem rather hostile,” Lucy said, remembering the odd encounter at the museum as well as Marilynne’s bitter words in the stable yard.

Persis nodded. “She was afraid the dig would uncover the treasure—whatever it was—and she would lose her chance. But then I started seeing Charlie and—” Persis blushed. “I thought she’d be angry with me because she always was ridiculously strict about stuff like that, but she seemed totally thrilled. It puzzled me for a while until she started to ask me to pass on all the details of Charlie’s research, where the team planned to dig, what he’d found in the archives...

Then I twigged that basically she wanted Charlie and Finn to do all the work and me to spy on them and tell her where to find the treasure. To be honest I was worried about her. I thought she was deluded. She believed in all sorts of mad stuff, like the Odin legend and so on. It was a bit weird and I didn’t take it seriously.” She rubbed her eyes.

“Anyway, I didn’t really know what to do.” She looked at Finn beseechingly. “I liked Charlie, really liked him, and I didn’t want to do anything to spoil the dig or the work you were doing. But at the same time—” She swallowed hard. “Aunt M had looked after us since we were kids.” She glanced at Gabriel, who was looking sulky. “I sort of felt it wouldn’t hurt to tell her what Charlie was working on, especially since I didn’t really think there was anything in the treasure idea. Not really. So I passed on a few bits and pieces—the newspaper cuttings that showed the marks in the fields, the fact that Charlie thought the bits and pieces in the museum might be a clue to something... That sort of thing. And then Charlie and I went to Chastleton together.”