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Old man with a pitchfork in his neck, then?”
    â€œThat and a bit more,” Lamb said.
    â€œAnd there’s a possible witchcraft angle of some kind?”
    â€œWell, there’s some talk that the dead man was known in the village to be a witch or warlock or something of the kind.”
    â€œWhat’s the bloody difference?” Harding asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” Lamb said. “It might turn out to be nothing.”
    â€œA ruse, then? Well, let’s not let it distract us overly much. In the meantime, the three of you can get to work on it together from the start line.”
    Lamb thought of asking Harding if Rivers wouldn’t be more useful clearing up Walters’s backlog. But that would sound puny and calculating. He didn’t want to work with Rivers and doubted that Rivers wanted to work with him. His last impression of Harry Rivers had been of how thoroughly Rivers had loathed him, though he knew Rivers’s hate to have been misplaced, a kind of war casualty rooted in genuine grief, and guilt. For that reason, Lamb hadn’t entirely begrudged Rivers his antipathy. But when the war had finished, Lamb had been glad to rid himself of it and of Harry Rivers. He’d joined the Hampshire police, married Marjorie, and got on with his life.
    â€œVery well, then, I’ll leave the three of you to it,” Harding said. “We’ll meet tomorrow at the nick, eight A.M. You can fill me in then.” He rose slightly on his toes. “Rivers has taken rooms for the moment in Winchester. I’m expecting that one of you can give him a lift back.”
    â€œI can give DI Rivers a lift,” Lamb said. He glanced at Rivers, who seemed not to react to his offer, which would sequester them alone in a car for the half-hour drive back to Winchester.
    â€œSplendid,” Harding said. He climbed into the back seat of the saloon and left.
    Lamb turned toward the door of Will Blackwell’s cottage with Wallace and Harry Rivers in tow. He rummaged in his pocket for the butterscotch tin.

    Earlier, Harris had given Wallace a brief history of the relationship Will Blackwell had shared with his niece, Lydia, and Wallace had delivered the same history to Lamb as they’d descended Manscome Hill. Lydia had come to live with her uncle thirty years earlier, atthe age of eight, after her mother, who was Will’s sister, had died. She worked as a seamstress for a small factory in a village north of Southampton that made woolen coats and had done so for as long as anyone could remember. She seemed to have no men in her life beside her uncle and, like her uncle, generally kept to herself.
    Before they entered the cottage, Wallace delivered to Rivers a brief summary of Abbott’s and Lydia Blackwell’s story of finding Blackwell’s body, along with the fact that Abbott denied sharing any close relationship to Lydia. Rivers found the story dubious.
    The detectives removed their hats as they entered Will Blackwell’s cottage. The cottage’s ground floor consisted of a small rectangular space that was divided into a mudroom, kitchen, and sitting room. Cut-up dark woolen blankets shrouded the windows. Lydia sat in a green upholstered chair, near a cold fireplace, in the sitting room. She clutched a robin’s-egg-blue handkerchief embroidered with yellow lace.
    Lamb noticed in the kitchen a round table surrounded by four wooden chairs. “Fetch us some chairs, please, Constable,” he said to Harris.
    While Harris got the chairs, Lamb approached Lydia. Her face was flushed and her fingers skeletal, the skin stretched tight over them. One of the pins she used to keep up her brown hair had come loose so that a strand slightly obscured her right eye. Lamb wondered what sort of relationship she’d had with her uncle—an old bachelor sharing a cottage in a remote village with a younger female relative.
    Harris placed three chairs from the kitchen