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the estate and spend time with Will. He would sit and watch Will work and make his drawings and that. Will didn’t seem to mind. But there are those about who said that Will was training the boy to take his place, as if he were Will’s apprentice, like.”
    â€œHow old is this boy?” Lamb asked.
    Abbott shrugged. “Hard to tell. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Maybe more. He don’t talk. Won’t even so much as look at me. He just wanders over here from the estate and makes his insect drawings. He avoided everybody save Will.”
    â€œDo you know this boy’s name?”
    Abbott shrugged again. “No. Like I said, he don’t talk.”
    â€œWhere were you this afternoon between noon and two?” Lamb asked.
    â€œAbout the farm, working. Cutting hay, mostly.”
    â€œCan anyone vouch for your whereabouts?”
    â€œI saw no one.”
    â€œVery well, then, Mr. Abbott,” Lamb said. “We may have further questions, so I advise you not to leave the area.”
    Abbott did not look up from his tea. “Where would I go in any case?” he said.

FIVE

    LAMB AND WALLACE SAW THEMSELVES OUT. FOR THE FOURTH TIME that evening, the sheep by the gate scattered. Lamb lit a cigarette.
    â€œWhat about the Stukas?” Wallace joked.
    â€œSod the bloody Stukas.”
    As they moved down Manscome Hill in the dark, Lamb gazed over the moonlit meadows. He easily picked out details in the landscape—hillocks, trees, shrubs, a ramshackle shed by a gate, another ghostly flock of sheep grazing on a far hill. Although he’d grown up in south London, the natural beauty and apparent peacefulness of the countryside always had attracted him. As a boy, he’d harbored a notion of the country as “simple,” though since coming to Hampshire more than twenty years earlier he’d learned that the country villages—and country folk—often were nothing of the sort.
    Wallace longed to finish and to get back to Winchester before the pubs closed. “What do you make of this witchcraft business?” he asked Lamb, partly to get his mind off drink.
    â€œI think it’s possible that someone wants us to believe the whole thing’s wrapped up in black magic.”
    â€œWhat about Abbott?”
    â€œHe might easily have done it.”
    â€œHim and the niece, then? The two of them getting up to something and needing the old boy out of the way?”
    â€œIt’s possible.”
    It was past nine when they reached the village. Winston-Sheed had departed with Blackwell’s body, and the people who’d gathered in front of Blackwell’s cottage earlier had gone home—though the three children who’d sprinted past Lamb earlier that evening had returned and were loitering near the house. They appeared poised to run again, but when Lamb called to them they froze.
    The oldest, a boy who had no shoes, appeared to be nine or ten. The other two were girls. Their arms and legs were dark with filth. The youngest looked to be about three. She clutched in her tiny fist a stick with a pointed end. As Lamb squatted to speak to them, they remained rooted, their eyes wary. Lamb wondered what they were up to, out at such a late hour with no one looking after them.
    He smiled. “Here now,” he said. “What are you lot on about at this time of night?”
    None of them spoke.
    â€œI hope it’s nothing I wouldn’t want to know about,” Lamb said.
    The children continued to stare at him for perhaps ten seconds before the boy spoke. “We was waiting for the witch to come home,” he said.
    â€œWell, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” Lamb said. “There are no witches around here and never have been.”
    â€œOld Will’s a witch,” the boy said.
    â€œI’m afraid that’s not true,” Lamb said. “Will was no witch. I’m from the police, you know, and I’ve done an