The landlady, who told him her name was Elspeth, was nosy. His food came with a string of questions. She was like a hound sniffing for information.

‘Are you here for the fishing?’ she asked. Then, without waiting for a reply, she went on. ‘Of course it’s not really the weather for fishing. So maybe you’re a walker? We get folk staying who have walked Hadrian’s Wall and then come north of the border to see what we have to offer.’

‘I used to know Anna Blackwell,’ Jimmy said. He still hated lying after years as a cop, but it stopped the woman asking her questions. ‘The woman who died. I wanted to see where she lived.’

‘Poor lassie. What a tragedy!’ Elspeth sat at the empty seat at his table and poured herself a cup of tea from his pot. Then she went on to tell him everything she knew about the dead teacher.

‘She looked so young when she turned up in Stonebridge,’ Elspeth said. ‘Hardly more than a child herself. Not old enough to have a child of her own. Of course there was talk. But Maggie the head teacher said she was good at her job, and Freda, who used to teach the little ones, had got so fat that she could hardly get out of her chair. So it was time for someone new!’

Elspeth paused for breath. ‘Some parents didn’t take to Anna. They thought she let the children get away with murder. But the kids in the first class were only wee and they shouldn’t be told to shut up all day. My granddaughter loved her to bits.’

‘Oh?’

That was all it took to set Elspeth off again. ‘Mrs High-and-Mighty Sarah King tried to get Anna sacked. Just because she’s the doctor’s wife she thinks she runs this place. She went to Maggie with a list of parents’ names and told her they all thought Anna wasn’t a fit person to look after the kids.’ The woman looked sad. ‘It was horrid. A kind of witch-hunt. No wonder the poor lassie got ill with stress. She came to this village full of joy and ended up like a hermit locked in her house all day. They had to get in a supply teacher to take her class for a while. Then Freda took the job on again and she’s back there now.’

Jimmy Perez could see why Sarah hadn’t told him about her campaign to get Anna sacked. It had been a nasty thing to do and Sarah must be feeling guilty. No wonder she was coming under fire from the gossips in the village. But he could understand too why everyone assumed Anna had committed suicide.

‘How old was Anna’s little girl?’ He took a last bite of toast.

‘Four. Anna must still have been a teenager when she fell pregnant. The lassie’s name is Lucy. She was in Anna’s class at the school. So she’s lost her mother and her teacher all at once.’