She’d had her faults, I knew. But in her better moments, Mrs Barley was warmer, more caring – maternal, even – than Auntie Jane had ever been. And now that she had gone, I would never be able to do everything that I had intended to do, to care for her in her hour of need, after all the help that she had given us. The old lady’s life had been tinged with sadness, something I understood all too well. She had become like family to me: more of a grandmother to Elodie than Jack’s mother. More than my own mother could ever be.

There were so many unanswered questions. I could understand only too well why the three smaller babies had been buried in the way they had. If they had been the result of a late miscarriage, they would never have been allowed a proper funeral in those days. However premature, they would have been no less cherished, their loss equally devastating. Keeping them close to home might have been a huge comfort to a bereaved mother. But it seemed that the mystery surrounding the death of the infant with the fractured skull would remain unsolved. It was all very unsatisfactory and had left a dark cloud hanging over us.

And then it dawned on me that it was no coincidence that they had been buried in the flowerbed. Obviously, no grave marker could be used and their resting places had been marked with a plant to acknowledge their brief existence. Rose, Iris, Violet. And the largest, the boy: Sweet William. It was all so sad.

In spite of everything, Jack and I felt duty-bound to arrange the old lady’s funeral. I remembered her mentioning once that she had arranged for Frank to be ‘taken home’ to be buried. My heart sank as I realised that it would take some research to find out exactly where ‘home’ had been. I felt strongly that she should be laid to rest with her husband, but there was the possibility that we might not be able to locate the grave. In the meantime, if we were unable to find out, we needed to have something in place. I contacted a local funeral company and explained the situation.

It was a busy period and the funeral director explained that we might have to wait nearly three weeks anyway, which hopefully would give us enough time to find out exactly where the Barleys came from. We set the ball rolling by provisionally booking the local church and left everything else to the undertaker. They had branches country-wide and therefore, for an extra fee, were prepared to transport the body if necessary.

With regard to the cottage, things appeared to be complicated, as there was no will in evidence. Mrs Barley had told me that she had no living family, and we knew no more than the fact that she hailed from a small village in Dorset. Apart from Bob, no one that we were aware of had ever visited her in all the time that we had lived in Avoncote, and it begged the question of what would become of her possessions.