‘I’m not aware of any spouse, Mrs Mason. To the best of my knowledge, Miss Barley never married. She and her brother kept themselves to themselves when they lived here in the village, from what I’m told. Their parents passed when both of them were still quite young – I suppose it had brought the siblings very close. I did meet Frank Barley – just the once. Miss Barley and her brother attended their aunt’s funeral, a few years before Mr Barley’s decease. The aunt had a son, I recall – not quite right, by all accounts. I think he had some sort of mental issues. Finished up in a psychiatric hospital. An awful shame.’ There was a pause. ‘I delivered the aunt’s memorial service; and the service after poor Mr Barley … erm … passed away. He’d seemed a quiet chap; rather serious, I remember thinking. He must have been a very intelligent man. His sister was telling me that he won a place at Oxford to read Mathematics, but turned it down for some reason. Such a waste. Deeply religious, and a keen gardener too, I learned. A man after my own heart. Miss Barley herself found him in their summer house, apparently. Terrible shock for her. A tragic business – he’d hanged himself, you know. I recall the undertaker remarking that he’d had an extra toe on each foot. Strange, the little things one remembers …’

*

I disconnected the call. I had a horrible, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Our unexpected bequest now felt even more like a curse than a gift. All I could think at that moment was that we would have to sell Mrs Barley’s house immediately – maybe even sell our own beloved Wisteria Cottage; get as far away as possible from the sleepy backwater of Avoncote and its sinister connotations forever. I wasn’t sure I could stand living there any longer. From infanticide to incest – and now the terrible tragedy of a suicide, all right on our own doorstep.

All this time I had naively assumed that Frank Barley’s had been a natural death. It felt as though we had become unwittingly embroiled in the making of some horror movie, one that I wanted no part in.

Still reeling from the shock of what I had learned, I went upstairs and took out the letter that I had found under the old woman’s drawer. I needed to read it now, to find out if there was anything else Mrs Barley had omitted. I felt sure that its contents would offer further clarity. I sat on the bed, reading and rereading the words on those pages, realising that all the clues had been staring me in the face and I had missed them.

Jack appeared in the bedroom doorway, jiggling Elodie on his shoulder.

‘There you are. I wondered what you were up to. What’s wrong?’