She spent a long time exploring this part of the mill and the light was beginning to fade when she nerved herself to move a heap of empty sacks in one corner, prepared to leap away if a rat jumped out. There was no rat but underneath the sacks was an old box with a rusty broken lock. She took a deep breath, her heart beginning to race. It was heavier than it looked and after trying to move it she gave up and simply lifted the lid, still wary of rodent activity close by, and then sighed with disappointment. It seemed to be full of old books and papers but she delved right to the bottom to make sure. Her curiosity piqued as to why the miller would hide the box, she opened one of the volumes and then gasped with shock. It was a picture book, made up of photographs of naked men and women performing various acts. All the books and papers were the same, and one even concentrated on young girls and boys. Sickened, and feeling contaminated by having found them, she closed the lid of the box and put the sacks back on top of it.

By now the light was almost gone and she was exhausted to the very depths of her being. The terrible events of the night before and sorting out the bedrooms and so on had drained her reserves, and after brushing the floor with an empty sack to hide any trace of her footsteps, she made her way back to the house and collapsed on the sofa in the living room, fully dressed and with her shoes still on. Perhaps there was no money? She had cleaned every inch of the house over the last eighteen months, even spring-cleaning the attic to rid it of the numerous mouse nests and other debris, and she was fairly sure that if the miller had had a hidey-hole she would have come across it. By her reckoning he would have thought exactly the same, hence her search of the mill. But she must be wrong. If he did have a hoard of money he had hidden it well, whether here or in the mill, and although someone might find it one day it wouldn’t be her. And no one could need the five pounds or more that she was owed like she did.

It was hard to get comfortable on the sofa – her neck was paining her and her multiple bruises were throbbing and aching – but eventually she must have fallen asleep because when she suddenly came to, it was from a dream. A vivid one. She had been in a small building and there’d been money all around her on the floor, half-crowns and shillings and even sovereigns. And in the dream she had been saying, ‘I knew it, I knew it,’ and she had been filled with an almost ecstatic delight.