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him.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘That isn’t all,’ Constable Book said slowly. ‘There’s something very funny going on.’
    ‘Come and tell me about it, then!’
    ‘I’m not sure it wouldn’t be better if I hung around’ – with dogged persistence. ‘You know I’ve lived here seven years. That’s enough to get the feel of a place, isn’t it?’
    ‘I would say so … Come to the point!’
    Bridling: ‘Sarge, people keep stopping me and telling me the weirdest stories!’
    ‘I know, I know’ – with a sigh. ‘They’ve been ringing here all morning.’
    ‘Did they say what Mary Flaken did?’
    ‘I don’t think so … No, we don’t have that name in the log. What happened?’
    ‘Seems she got up, same as normal, found she’d run out of eggs and popped down the road to buy some for breakfast. But when she came back she didn’t go home. She went next door to Bill and Hannah Blocket’s –’
    ‘Where exactly do you mean?’
    ‘They live across the river, on the new estate.’
    ‘I wonder when they’re going to stop calling it that. It was there before my time, or yours … Sorry, go on.’
    ‘Well, she tried to open the back door. It was locked. She banged away till Hannah came to answer. Then she went spare! Marched in, yelling that Bill was her husband, not Hannah’s, and wound up throwing the eggs all over the kitchen! They got her back home in the end, but I swear wehaven’t heard the last of that one – not by a long chalk!’
    There was a pause. Eventually the sergeant said heavily, ‘Sounds as though you’re right, Joe. Something very odd indeed is going on.’

4
    At Weyharrow the valley of the Chap broadened out; its water purled on pebbles. Two miles higher it tumbled over rocks; that was at Trimborne. Allegedly the name meant ‘where the river is made neat’, and certainly its stone-sided mill-race must be ancient, for the mill was named and priced in Domesday Book. To the Norman Odo, first lord of this once-enormous manor, Trimborne doubtless seemed far more precious than Weyharrow and its ford.
    But the days when the mill had been a constant source of income, because the owners of the nearby farms were compelled to bring their grain for grinding and pay taxes for the privilege, were far in the past. Not in living memory had that or any other yearly rent from Trimborne brought much profit to those who nominally held the land.
    With the arrival of Helvambrit Pharmaceuticals matters had admittedly taken a turn for the better. The company, a Swiss-based international conglomerate, had been among the first to decide that dingy urban sites assorted poorly with its claims to be promoting public health; moreover, bad though unemployment was in cities, in the countryside it was often relatively worse, implying that plenty of cheap labour was to hand. Add in a touch of conservation, by restoring the facade of a historic mill – that had in fact not been a corn mill for over a century, but by turns a snuff mill and a gunpowder mill and even an engineering works – and hey presto! A major public-relations coup! If heavy lorries had to lumber up the narrow lanes nearby, forcing tractors to back out of the way and walkers to seek shelter in the hedgerow, that was a petty price to pay.
    Petty price
…
    Indeed Helvambrit had paid one! Pacing the library of Weyharrow Court, Basil Goodsir brooded on the fact. How could he have been duped into letting his father Marmaduke sell the Trimborne mill instead of leasing it? The old fool must have been both greedy and short-sighted! Why, they’d certainly have paid by way of annual rent ten, even fifteen per cent of the price they’d paid for the freehold, so the mill could have been furnishing a steady return – to be continued for the foreseeable future.
    Of course, when the matter first arose, his son Cedric had just been sent to boarding school, and he and Helen had been faced with all the attendant expenses … Even so, it had been unfair of Marmaduke