“Here it is,” Finn said after a moment and she turned to see he was holding in his hand a battered-looking hardback with a red leather cover and gold lettering on the spine. He flicked through it. “Hmm, I hope I can find whatever it was that Charlie thought was useful in here. I mean, although I hate to admit it, Gabriel is right that Edmund Sharpe’s writing isn’t a reliable historical record. Charlie wouldn’t have been using it as a primary source. Besides, he referred to photos, which is odd in an antiquarian book.”

“What a shame he didn’t make it clearer,” Lucy said. “Following his notes must be like trying to piece a puzzle together.”

Finn laughed. “Charlie was the least-organized note taker in the world,” he said, “and he would have been the first to admit it. His files are in a hell of a mess. On the day he died, he rang me—” he swallowed hard and his voice was gruffer when he resumed “—and said that he had something really exciting to tell me later, but he hadn’t written down what it was, so I’ll probably never know.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Anyway, we’ll piece it all together in the end one way or another.”

He turned the pages of the book absently and some loose sheets of paper tumbled out of what looked like a pocket at the back. Lucy bent to pick them up.

“Perhaps this is what he wanted you to see,” Lucy said. She unfolded the sheets and spread them on the worktop. “They look like old newspaper cuttings. The date is just after the Second World War.”

Finn came across to look over her shoulder. He smelled of fresh air and something citrusy and clean. “‘The view over the Ridgeway,’” he read aloud. “‘Local flying hero James Abbott turns his hand to aerial photography.’”

The pages were in black-and-white, a white that had faded to an odd sort of sepia brown over the years whilst the print had turned gray. The pictures were smudgy with age but Lucy recognized the Uffington White Horse and the pudding basin roundness of Dragon Hill below it. All the pictures had been taken from the air; one had the wing of a plane in the foreground. She peered more closely. There was a view of the railway line cutting across the Vale, a miniature steam train puffing along. And next to it...

“That’s Knightstone,” Lucy said, pointing. “Look, there’s Gunpowder Cottage and the valley and Clarabelle’s field.”

“It says that James Abbot was an RAF pilot who was active in aerial reconnaissance during the war,” Finn said, scanning the columns of faded print rapidly, “and that he’s now working for the government, mapping postwar Britain from the air. ‘We are not permitted to print the more secret locations featured in James’s work,’ the article says, rather coyly, ‘but are happy to share some of the most picturesque scenes of our local landscape.’”