Mig said, “Putting aside any dispute as to final ownership of the journal, what it establishes beyond all doubt is that my family has as real and personal an interest in Father Simeon as yours.”

“Beyond all doubt?” said Dunstan, raising his eyebrows. “I think we might need expert advice on that.”

“Seek it by all means. But I need neither written words nor expert opinion to tell me that my ancestor once hid in that chamber. Nor I suspect do you.”

“What do you mean by that?” demanded Gerry indignantly. “You’ve no right to judge others by your own shifty standards.”

The nun made a wry face as if to apologize for a teenager’s outburst.

Mig regarded Gerry thoughtfully. Unless he was a very good actor, he clearly knew nothing about Simeon’s encounter with Miguel. Unlike Dunstan, who he guessed had already known a great deal even before he saw the transcript.

As for Sister Angelica, how much does she know? he wondered.

In fact, what was there to know?

It was pretty clear that the secret of the Stranger’s hidden chamber hadn’t been known by anyone in the family, or surely it would have been explored years ago. Probably it was passed on by word of mouth alone during those dangerous years. It hadn’t been till much later, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century perhaps, that such a revelation would have ceased to have its attendant dangers. But by then the fragile word-of-mouth chain could so easily have been broken by early death, or the onset of senile memory loss and, once broken, there was no way of repairing it.

But even given the care Alice Woollass had taken in the way she recorded events in her journal, a subtle-minded scholar with more time to scan the document than a single morning might have been able to guess at much.

And indeed, given that the same scholar had had all the time in the world to study the journal, who knows what portions of it may have been removed before anyone else was allowed near it? He recalled his sense of breaks and jumps in the narrative.

Dunstan said, “You say the original is in code? Not a very complex code if you managed to break it so quickly.”

“I had help,” said Madero.

“Indeed? Would that perhaps have been from the young Australian woman who seems to have been causing a stir in the village? I gather she has some expertise in the field of ciphering.”

Frek really did keep him informed, thought Madero. Perhaps this was her way of compensating for the huge disappointment she must have caused Dunstan by bringing the Woollass line to a full stop.

“Yes, it was Sam,” he said.

“An interesting woman by the sound of it. I should like to meet her.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. She decided there was nothing for her here and moved on this morning,” said Mig.

He was beginning to feel maneuvered away from the main theme of this encounter. He looked for a way to get things back on course, but he was preempted by Gerry, who clearly agreed with him that things were being allowed to drift.

“I’ve got better things to do than sit around listening to idle chitchat,” he declared impatiently. “If you’ve got anything to say about our family, Madero, why don’t you spit it out? Otherwise, just hand over our property, which you illegally removed from the chamber, and we can bring this meeting to an end!”

His voice rose as he spoke, drawing attention from the rest of the room. Not, Mig suspected, that attention hadn’t already been focused on the nook, but hidden beneath a surface of normal barroom sociability. Now heads were unambiguously turning their way.

Across his mind ran the silly irrelevance that this was the point at which a good movie director would factor in a dramatic interruption.

And once more it was as if he’d put a megaphone to his lips and cried, Action!

The door burst open and into the bar erupted a small slight figure like a creature escaped from fairyland under the hill. Its eyes looked huge in a death-pale face and its skull was spattered with tufts of bright red hair between which patches of white skin gleamed like traces of snow in a poppy field. For a moment no one recognized her, not even Mig.

Then she opened her mouth and her identity was unmistakable.

“Now listen in, you lying Pommy bastards!” she cried. “Two nights ago I stood here and asked if anyone knew anything about my gran, Sam Flood. You all said no, the name meant nothing to you. I knew you were lying then, but I was still stupid enough to be persuaded your Sam Flood had nothing to do with me. All of you bastards knew different. Now I know different too. My gran came from here, and she left here in 1961, and all she took with her was a piece of paper with Sam sodding Flood’s name and address on it. No, I’m forgetting – not quite all. There’s something else I know which some of you had to know too. She was twelve years old when she left and she took a little bit of Illthwaite with her. She was pregnant. So come on, you bastards. Which of you’s my grandfather so I can say a proper hello? Or is he in hell where he belongs? Was screwing my gran the reason your precious perfect bloody curate topped himself? Well, was it?”

Silence.

Mig Madero tried to take in everything.

Thor Winander slumped on his bar stool and seemed to put on ten years. Next to him Frek Woollass was unmoved except perhaps by her usual secret amusement. The Gowder twins looked at each other as if seeing each other for the first time. Pete Swinebank closed his eyes while his lips moved. In prayer? Noddy Melton’s sharp gaze darted hither and thither around the room. Edie Appledore stood frozen for a moment then turned and vanished from behind the bar.

Closer to, Dunstan’s eyebrows arched in mild surprise, then he slowly turned his head to give himself a view of this interesting newcomer. Sister Angelica’s lean good-natured face registered shock and compassion, while Gerry looked like a spacewalker whose safety line has just broken and who finds himself falling away from the security of his ship into the unfathomable depths of deep space.

But it was back to Sam Flood that Mig felt his gaze irresistibly drawn.

The little Australian stood with her back to the bar, those huge eyes glaring defiantly, but now it was defiance shading into despair as the rage which had carried her this far began to drain away and with it her strength. She tried not to let it show, leaning against the bar for support. But Mig saw it and began to rise, wincing as his left knee gave notice that the exertions of the morning still had to be paid for.

Even without the knee, he probably wouldn’t have been as quick as Sister Angelica, who was moving swiftly forward, her face creased with sympathy.

“Let’s find you somewhere to sit down and talk this over, dear,” she said, reaching out toward Sam.

The response was shocking.

“Don’t you dare touch me, you fucking cow!” said Sam in a voice so low and vibrant with hate that it sounded as if it came from another world.

It stopped Angelica in her tracks. Then before she could make the possibly fatal decision to move forward again, Edie Appledore came into the bar, pushed past the nun, put an arm round Sam’s shoulders and, without speaking a word, led her unresistingly out of the room.

As the door closed behind them, talk resumed in the bar, hesitant at first, a word here, a phrase there, but quickly building up to a buzz. There were some who didn’t talk. The Gowders had vanished almost immediately, leaving undrunk beer in their glasses. And the vicar had slipped out in the wake of Sam and Mrs. Appledore.

Sister Angelica, visibly shaken, returned to the table where Gerry Woollass was draining his brandy glass with a greed suggesting that if it had been full to the brim he would still have emptied it.