‘Were you and Anna friends?’

Gail turned away from the stove to face him. ‘Well, we didn’t have a lot in common. Anna was young enough to be my daughter. I was forty when I had Grace. John and I married late. And I’ve lived all my life here, and Anna was English and had moved around. But we got on OK. She was great with the girls and I liked her.’

‘Was she the sort of woman who might have killed herself?’

There was a long pause before Gail answered. ‘I wouldn’t have said so when she arrived in the village last year. She was full of enthusiasm and ideas then. I was pleased that we’d have some-one young and fit to teach the little ones. Freda had been there a long time and she was still teaching in the same way as when she first started in the job. She’d taught lots of the children’s parents.’

‘But later?’

Gail tipped home-made soup into a bowl and set it in front of Perez. ‘Later it all seemed to get too much for Anna. It can’t have been easy dealing with a small child and a full-time job all on her own.’

‘You seem to manage,’ he said.

‘Aye, well, I’m a little bit older and I have lots of friends in the village. Besides, I’m not really on my own. My brother Sandy lives here too.’ Gail looked up from her soup and smiled. ‘But not for much longer, it seems! He’s just got engaged and he’ll be moving into a home of his own.’

‘You’ll miss him,’ Perez said.

Gail grinned again. ‘I will, but he’s marrying a lovely girl and they won’t be living far away. Besides, Grace, my daughter, is great company now.’

There was a knock at the door. ‘That’ll be the feed delivery,’ Gail said. ‘You’ll have to excuse me.’

She went out into the farmyard. Perez wandered around the kitchen. There was a picture of Gail on her wedding day standing next to a giant of a man with a beard. He must be the husband who’d died. They were surrounded in the photo by laughing friends and family.

When Gail returned to the kitchen, it seemed that she’d made up her mind to speak, because she started talking as soon as she came into the room. ‘Did you know that there are lots of rumours about Tom King and Anna?’

‘What sort of rumours?’

‘People are saying that Tom and Anna were lovers. He owns that little house in the village where she lived, after all. And Tom’s wife Sarah took against her as soon as she started at the school. It was as if she wanted to get rid of Anna as soon as she arrived.’

‘Do you know who started the rumours?’ Perez pushed away his soup bowl and put his elbows on the table.

‘Who can tell where gossip begins in a place like Stonebridge? The stories are like weeds, they seem to grow out of nowhere and then they spread, so there’s no way of stopping them.’