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street, he had shown no sign of recognising me and my half-hearted greeting had gone unacknowledged. I wasn’t that keen on trying to renew the acquaintance. And I wasn’t sure what good it would do me to know, anyway. I wasn’t getting involved. I’d made that clear to Catarina.
    ‘But your father was a close friend?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes – very much so – they saw each other quite often at the sailing club.’
    ‘But …’ I tried to remember what Tom had said before. ‘You mentioned something about the families not always seeing eye to eye?’
    Tom looked at me blankly.
    ‘When we were at Greylands,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, that …’ said Tom. ‘But you must know the story – it’s in at least one of the local history books. I was forgetting you’re a newcomer.’
    ‘I’m rarely allowed to forget it,’ I said.
    ‘The Gittingses have owned land in the parish since the seventeenth century at least,’ said Tom. ‘But we’re recent arrivals compared with the Paghams. It’s recorded that Sir Walter de Pagham held three fiefs by knight’s service in Pagham, Earnley and West Wittering during the reign of King John.’
    ‘Fair enough. I’ll have to stick around a bit longer before I qualify as a local. So what was the cause of friction between you? Punch up over a leylandii hedge? Or was it the sheep stealing you mentioned?’
    ‘No, nothing that serious. Just murder.’
    ‘Murder? What, one of your ancestors killed one of his?’
    ‘The other way round, according to the judge. One of his killed one of mine. Actually it was a great-great-great-great-uncle in my case. It’s quite a well-known story in the village, because it occasioned the last public hanging in these parts. I could tell you all about it if you’re interested. There’s a possible miscarriage of justice angle to it. It might make a good plot for your next book – that could be more profitable than acting as Catarina’s gumshoe.’
    ‘Yes, in the sense that Catarina’s offering me no fee of any sort. You don’t want the story for a book of your own?’
    ‘I don’t write crime novels. Anyway, delving in family history like that for fun and profit seems a bit in bad taste. And of course, you may decide there’s not much to it. Lancelot Pagham’s motives were never revealed. If he really was guilty, then it was just a bit of senseless Victorian violence.’
    ‘Most real crime is,’ I said. ‘Senseless violence, I mean. It’s only in books that there is a decently convoluted motive, disputed wills, missing relatives and proper red herrings.’
    ‘You find that a convoluted plot and lots of red herrings are a winning formula?’
    ‘Not so far,’ I said. ‘But I’ll keep trying. I’ll also email Elsie and let her know your manuscript is on its way. She may not represent me any more, but at least she’ll recognise the name.’

CHAPTER FOUR
Elsie
    Dear Mr Smith,
    Thank you for your recent letter enclosing a copy of your manuscript OUT OUT BRIEF CANDLE . I am grateful to you for telling me that you were writing in the style of Hilary Mantel, because I would never have guessed that from the book itself. By the same token, there was no need at all to tell me that it had already been rejected by twenty other agents.
    All great literature raises questions in one’s mind and the question your book raises is what you were doing at school when everyone else was studying English? You must have had an awful lot of fun behind the bike sheds. Even by today’s lamentable standard your grammar and spelling are pretty average. Your plotting makes me wonder if you have actually read a novel, other than your own, from beginning to end.
    You ask if, in the unlikely eventuality of my rejecting it, I could give you some feedback on your book. Perhaps you are already realising that this may not be as good an idea as you thought. But I should be delighted to give you some advice.
    First, before you approach any agent, do take a look at their