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Alex had made her excuses and left. Before Liz had allowed her to go however, she’d insisted on pressing a couple of foxgloves in plastic pots on her, assuring her that they could go straight in the ground. ‘They won’t mind a bit of frost.’ They were biennials, she said, and these were second year plants so they should flower soon. ‘Right…thanks,’ Alex had said, feigning enthusiasm. She had no idea what Liz was talking about.
    Alex dumped the pots on the ground by the back door and let herself in through the kitchen door. After all Elizabeth’s kindly chatter the house felt bloated with silence, as if it were holding its breath. Nervous suddenly and unsure why, Alex paused a moment, listening, then shrugged it off and went upstairs and ran a hot bath to soak her aching bones and muscles.
    Afterwards, walking back into her bedroom in her dressing gown, she glanced towards the corner of the room and frowned. Crossing to the chest of drawers, she reached out her hand to touch the frame of Simon’s photograph, then checked herself and left her hand hovering there. It had been moved, she was sure of it. It was a good eighteen inches from where she’d left it. She always put it back in the same place…didn’t she? Someone had been in and moved the photograph.
    Then a sound on the landing made her heart hammer and she froze for a moment before forcing herself to creep to the door and look out. The landing was empty. She looked back at the photograph and shook her head. The doors had been locked; there was no sign of forced entry. She must have made a mistake.

Chapter 3
    Mick Fenby knew all the back roads and paths in Kellaford Bridge which meant he could get from one place to another without meeting too many people. And he generally moved around during the quietest times of day: early in the morning, last thing at night and that short still spell in the middle of the day when, except in the height of the season, most people were inside getting their lunch. It was just such a time that he chose to visit the new gallery which had opened on the main road down into the village. The previous business, a pottery which had been there for years, had finally closed its doors the summer before, starved out by the difficult seasonal nature of trade in the remote seaside community. Mick made a point of noticing things like that. It wasn’t just that he looked for places to market his carvings. He made it his business to know who was who in the village, what their names were and what they did. Like a bird which always checks an area out thoroughly before choosing a nesting sight and then keeps an eye out for predators, Mick watched his back. If there was going to be a problem he wanted to know which direction it would be coming from.
    He rarely spoke to anyone, and generally he was ignored - he was the man in the scruffy clothes who smelt of animals and wood smoke and sweat - but that suited him fine. He’d learnt long since that people’s good opinions were brittle, their friendship fickle, their loyalty when things went wrong unreliable. He kept his eyes and ears open though, noticing signs and planning permission notices, overhearing odd bits of gossip in the shop, walking slowly, his dog at his heels, past men standing outside the pub, smoking their fags. People had become so used to ignoring him, they sometimes seemed to forget he existed.
    So he knew that a well-known singer, recently widowed, had come to live in Hillen Hall; that Theo Hellyon had returned from a long spell of itinerant crewing work to live with his odd and condescending mother at the Lodge; and that there was a new harbourmaster in the village, an outsider called Bob Geaton. Bob, it was said, was ex navy and was throwing his weight about a bit, keen to assert himself in the job. Mick had seen him patrolling the harbour or standing outside his office on the quay. He was broadly-built, his grey hair smartly cut and clipped, the increasing fleshiness of