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happening on that land? Anything at all, it doesn't matter how small.”
       She seemed rather a timid woman. Suspicious too. It was as if she feared he was trying to catch her out in some misdemeanor. “Ought I to remember? What kind of thing do you mean?”
       That, obviously, he couldn't tell her. She was a woman who might easily have ideas put into her head. He looked patiently into the broad pale face, powdered and clumsily blotched with pink. She wasn't carrying excessive weight but seemed tightly corseted and was rather breathless. She laid one heavily ringed hand against her upper chest as if to quieten a threatened gasping. “There were the farmworkers. My husband called them itinerant workers. They come at fruit-picking time in trailers, you know, and one year they camped on Mr. Grimble's field and made an awful mess. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”
       “It might be,” he said cautiously. “Do you remember which year that was?”
       “Maybe ten years. Could have been eleven.”
       That was better. “What time of the year would it have been?”
       She looked at him helplessly. “Well, it was always June or September they came. June for the strawberries, and autumn for the apples and pears.”
       Barry persisted. “Which was it that year? Can you remember?”
       And she did, her already pink face flushing with the effort. “Old Mr. Grimble, Mr. Arthur Grimble, he was dead by then. He'd died in the winter. His son never did a thing to that garden, but all the roses were in bloom just the same. And when the fruit-pickers camped there in their trailers—they used to hang their washing on the trees, that wasn't very nice—where was I? Oh, yes, when they camped there Mr. Grimble, young Mr. Grimble that is, he came and drove them off with sticks. Well, they looked like guns to me, but my husband said they were sticks.”
       “That was before the trench was dug, was it?
       “Yes, it must have been. That's why Mr. Grimble and his friend came over, that's how they knew the workers were there. Mr. Grimble told my husband they meant to survey the land for where the main drains should go and what did they find but all those people camping. I don't mind telling you I never cared much for Mr. Grimble, but when it came to trespassing I was completely on his side.”
       “All that is very helpful, Mrs. Pickford. Perhaps you could tell me if you remember anyone—a man—disappearing around here about that time.” The word alarmed her, he could see, and he modified it. “Well, going away. Someone you know who went away and you didn't see them again.”
       “Oh, no. I'd have said. When you asked me if I remembered anything unusual happening I'd have said. That would be very un-usual, wouldn't it?”
       The Hunters next door looked old enough to be Brenda Pickford's parents, and she, as Barry said to himself, was no spring chicken. The front door was opened to him by a carer. He found the ancient pair sitting opposite each other before a fireplace, in which there was a vase of dried flowers instead of a fire. Barry thought there was something pathetic about their placing themselves in that particular spot, out of habit presumably, because all their lives until recently it had been normal practice to sit in front of an open fire. Pathetic perhaps but not tragic, for the room was insufferably hot by his standards, yet both of them, shrunken and wasted, were wrapped in layers of cardigans, scarves, and shawls, the old man as much as his wife. Audrey Hunter's eyes were shut and Barry would have thought her asleep but for the hand in her lap that moved and trembled, describing figures of eight on the blanket that covered her knees. Her husband's eyes were a watery sky blue, artless, innocent, and uncomprehending.
       “He's ninety-six and she's ninety-three,” said the woman. “You needn't look like that. They're deaf, they can't hear you.” She bellowed into Mr. Hunter's