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was fortified by rusty iron bars. It looked as if it hadn’t been used for the last fifty years, and so did the stained lavatory, and Georgie gave a gasping shriek when a splosh of water fell on her head straight after she tried the chain.
    She banked up the fire, which was smouldering nicely. If Stephen’s liver had rotted away where were the empty medicine bottles? Someone had cleaned up the cottage, whoever it was had removed them, too.
    The solicitor’s letter had been brief and to the point, and the telephone call she made to the firm had not thrown much light on the subject. It seemed to be a matter of coming to see for herself, and ‘we will be here should you require assistance’. But the letter included the phrase ‘house and contents’, so presumably there were contents once worthy of the name.
    ‘How did you trace me?’ she’d asked Tom Selby.
    ‘From his birth certificate, Mrs Jefferson. That’s all the information we had.’
    ‘It was lucky my parents lived at the same address for so long.’
    ‘Yes, that was helpful. And so was the fact that the present occupants knew where you worked. We traced your present address from that.’
    ‘My mother only died four years ago and that’s when the house was sold. I met the people who bought it, I suppose I must have mentioned my work during the brief conversations we had.’
    ‘Mr Southwell was a sick man for many years.’
    For a second Georgie was thrown, believing he referred to her father. Flustered she replied, ‘We didn’t know him, Mr Selby. He cut himself off from his family years ago. Nobody knew where he went. There was no communication between us.’
    ‘Ah. An obstinate man. I believe he refused all advice in the end and refused to go to hospital. In fact, he declined any help he was offered.’
    So he had died at home. Where? Something made her ask, ‘Who found him?’
    ‘There was an inquest, of course.’ She heard Tom Selby rustling his papers to find the answer to her question. ‘A neighbour,’ he eventually replied. And then he read in his dusty old voice, and Georgie imagined his thin-rimmed spectacles, ‘A Mr Horsefield of Wooton House. It gives no more information than that. He was found soon after his death, Mrs Jefferson, you need not worry on that account, he was not left mouldering for days.’
    And did she sense a tiny barb of accusation? Or was that her guilty conscience speaking? Because her only living relative had been so needy and she hadn’t known, hadn’t bothered to find out? But any guilt Georgie felt was soon replaced by anger, anger at time, at life, at the world, but above all anger towards Stephen, who had gone and died without giving her time to get in touch, or the chance to be near him in his hour of need.
    And what was worse, she might have been able to love him.
    She gazed around while she ate her breakfast, sitting erect at the gateleg table with a pile of damp magazines piled haphazardly before her. All the magazines—she’d taken a look last night—had a passed-on look and the name Horsefield was scribbled on the corner of each: Horse and Hound , The Devonian , The Country Landowner , an impersonal mixture of taste that managed to give nothing away. So Stephen had died somewhere in here, maybe in this very room, not three months since. She could only assume that Mr Horsefield of Wooton House must live in the most imposing of the four Wooton-Coney dwellings, the house with the newly pointed walls and the fresh thatch she had noticed last night opposite the farm.
    Could it be this Mr Horsefield who removed most of Stephen’s belongings? Could he have been a friend of Stephen’s, a fellow boozer, a regular caller? There was some sense of community, then, here in this peculiar valley, in spite of her frosty reception at the farm last night. Silly, but she had half expected a visit from someone because, hell, apart from the smoke from the chimney, her car parked outside on the road, all sorts of