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post she’d left it on the kitchen table for him to read, while she went out into the garden. If he
had
read it, he hadn’t said. Perhaps he was still angry about the way Lizzie had behaved. Perhaps he only contained the fury by shutting down all his emotions.
    He’d packed the food into a wicker basket and covered it with a clean tea towel. Very WI. Annie thought he’d make a much better member of the institute than her. There was a bottle of good red under his arm. Outside in the clear air they heard distant noises, shouted voices from the cars on the track.
    ‘What’s going on?’ Sam sounded mildly curious.
    ‘I don’t know. I saw it from upstairs. Perhaps some TV company filming?’
    ‘Don’t tell Nigel,’ Sam said. ‘He’ll drag us all down to be in it. You know how he loves to be the centre of attention.’ He had the slow, soft accent that belonged to that part of Northumberland; sometimes she thought his voice was unique to the valley, and that he was the only one of them who truly belonged here.
    They paused for a moment outside the farmhouse window and looked inside. Nigel and Lorraine were already playing host, pouring Prosecco into tall fluted glasses. They did love their fizz. The professor, another of the neighbours, was there already. A big presence. Hair still mostly dark, despite his age. Eyes that were almost black. Lorraine had once said, ‘John O’Kane looks like a poet, don’t you think?’ Speaking with something like admiration in her voice. Annie had wondered if there could be an attraction there. Nigel was lovely to Lorraine of course, but certainly not poetic. You certainly couldn’t describe him as soulful.
    As they watched, the professor’s wife Jan appeared in the room. She must have come in through the back door. She was wearing a dress that she might have owned when she was a student: long, with flowery prints in blue and green, frilly at the neck and very Laura Ashley. Now it didn’t suit her. Her hair was wiry and curly and streaked with grey and she looked like an eccentric Edwardian grandmother. John looked at her, not exactly with disdain; more like disappointment. Annie wondered how she would feel if Sam looked at
her
like that.
    Sam had already knocked at the door. He wasn’t comfortable with the Valley Farm residents’ habit of letting themselves into each other’s houses. Nigel Lucas came to answer. He was a short man. Of all of her neighbours, Annie thought he was the hardest to get to know and wasn’t sure how else to describe him. She thought he was ambitious and a social climber, but very kind.
    ‘Come in!’ Below the voices in the room beyond there was music. Jazz. A double bass, insistent like a heartbeat. ‘You know you’d be welcome, even without Sam’s delicious offerings.’ It seemed Nigel couldn’t speak without flattering, and it came to Annie that he was less confident even than Sam. Nigel was desperate to please, but Sam didn’t really care what other people thought.
    As they walked into the living room a phone rang in the distance. Lorraine Lucas went to answer it, shimmying to the music, the silk of her loose trousers catching the candlelight.
    When she returned she stood inside the door. They fell silent and looked at her. She had that kind of presence.
    ‘You’ll never guess.’ Her eyes were huge. ‘That was Susan. She heard it from her father. There’s been a murder in the valley.’

Chapter Six
     
    The three detectives met up late that evening at Vera’s house. It was just across the hill from Gilswick, closer than the police station in Kimmerston, and Joe was summoned to bring pizza and beer on his way home. He caught the takeaway-pizza place just before it was closing and had to pay over the odds for beer in a small convenience store. He was surprised to see that Holly was there, sitting in the chair that he thought of as his own. He couldn’t remember her ever being invited to Vera’s house before and she seemed