Annie inhaled the sweet scent of the flowers. Bees droned around her, gathering pollen. She opened her eyes again and saw gulls circling over Harksmere.

“Here we are, dear,” said Mrs. Kettering, coming back out with a tray. First she offered a tall glass to Annie, then she took the other for herself, set the tray aside and sat down. The deck chairs faced each other at an angle, so it was easy to talk without straining one’s neck.

“Hobb’s End,” Mrs. Kettering said. “That takes me back. I can’t say I’ve really given the place much thought in years, though I can see it from the bottom of the garden now, of course. What do you want to know?”

“As much as you can tell me,” Annie said. Then she told Mrs. Kettering about the skeleton.

“Yes, I saw something about that on the news. I’d been wondering who all the people were, coming and going.” Mrs. Kettering thought for a moment. Annie watched her and sipped lemonade. A robin lit down on the lawn for a few seconds, cocked an eye at them, shit on the grass and took off again.

“A young woman, about five foot two, with a baby?” Mrs. Kettering repeated, brow knotted in concentration. “Well, there was the McSorley lass, but that was when we arrived. I mean, she’d have been well over thirty by the time we left, and she had three children by then. No, dear, I can’t honestly say anyone comes to mind. The far cottage, you say, the one by the fairy bridge?”

“Fairy bridge?”

“That’s what we used to call it. Because it was so small, only fairies could cross over it.”

“I see. That’s right. Under the outbuilding.”

Mrs. Kettering pulled a face. “Reg and me lived at the far end, just down from the mill. Still, I must have passed the place a hundred times or more. Sorry, love, it’s a blank. I certainly don’t remember any young woman living there.”

“Never mind,” said Annie. “What can you tell me about the village itself?”

“Well, however close to Harkside it was, it had its own distinct identity, I can tell you that for a start. Harksiders looked down on the Hobb’s End people because it was a mill village. Thought they were a cut above us.” She shrugged. “Still, I suppose everyone’s got to have someone to look down on, don’t they?”

“Do you remember any doctors and dentists who used to practice there?”

“Oh, yes. Dr. Granville was the village dentist. Terrible man. He drank. And if I remember correctly there were two doctors. Ours was Dr. Nuttall. Very gentle touch.”

“Do you know what happened to his practice? I’m assuming he’s dead now?”

“Oh, long since, I should imagine. And Granville was probably pushing sixty when the war started, too. You’ll be after medical and dental records, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt you’ll have much luck there, love, not after all this time.”

“Probably not. What other sorts of people lived in the village?”

“All sorts, really. Let me see. We had shopkeepers, milkmen, publicans – we had three village pubs – farm laborers, drystone wallers, van drivers, traveling salesmen of one sort or another, a number of retired people, colonels and the like. Teachers, of course. We even had our very own famous artist. Well, not exactly Constable or Turner, you understand, and he’s not very fashionable these days. Come with me a minute.”

She struggled out of her deck chair and Annie followed her into the house. It was hot inside and Annie felt the sweat trickle down the tendons at the backs of her ears. It itched. She was glad she wasn’t wearing tights.

Because of the sudden contrast between bright sunlight and dim interior, she couldn’t make out the furnishings at first, except that they seemed old-fashioned: a rocking chair, a grandfather clock, a glass-fronted china cabinet full of crystalware. The room into which Mrs. Kettering led her smelled of lemon-scented furniture polish.

They came to a halt in front of the dark wood mantelpiece, and Mrs. Kettering pointed to the large watercolor that hung over it. “That’s one of his,” she said. “He gave me it as a going-away present. Don’t ask me why, but he took a bit of a shine to me. Maybe because I wasn’t a bad-looking lass in my time. Bit of a rogue, Michael Stanhope, if truth be told. Most artists are. But a fine painter. You can see for yourself.”

Annie’s eyes had adjusted to the light, and she was able to take in Stanhope’s painting. She had a passion for art, inherited from her father. She smiled to herself at Mrs. Kettering’s remark. “Bit of a rogue.” Yes, she supposed that fit her father, too. Annie also painted as a hobby, so she was intrigued to look upon the work of Hobb’s End’s neglected genius.

“Is that Hobb’s End before the war?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Kettering. “Just after war broke out, actually. It was painted from the fairy bridge, looking toward the mill.”

Annie stood back and examined the work carefully. The first thing she noticed was Stanhope’s peculiar use of color. The season was autumn, and he seemed to take the hues and tones hidden deep in stone, fields, hillsides and water and force them out into the open, creating such a pattern of purples, blues, browns and greens as you never saw in a real Yorkshire village. But it made perfect sense to the eye. Nothing seemed to be its true color, yet everything seemed right somehow. It was uncanny, almost surreal in its effect.

Next, she noticed the subtly distorted perspective, probably a result of cubist influences. The mill was there, perched on the rise in the top left corner, and though it looked as if it should dominate the scene, somehow, by some trick of perspective over size, it didn’t. It was just there. The church, just to the right of the river, managed much more prominence through its dark and subtly menacing square tower and the rooks or ravens that seemed to be circling it.

The rest of the composition appeared simple and realistic enough: a village High Street scene whose people reminded her of Brueghel’s. There was a lot of detail; an art teacher might even describe the work as too busy.

The villagers were doing the normal things – shopping, gossiping, pushing prams. Someone was painting a front door; a man straddled a roof repairing a chimney, shirt-sleeves rolled up; a tall girl stood arranging newspapers in a rack outside the newsagent’s shop; a butcher’s boy was cycling down the High Street beside the river with his basket full of brown-paper packages, blood-streaked apron flapping in the wind.

The rows of houses on each side differed in size and design. Some were semis or terraces, front doors opening directly onto the pavement, while some of the larger, detached houses stood back behind low stone walls enclosing well-kept gardens. Here and there, on the High Street side, a row of shops broke up the line of houses. There was also a pub, the Shoulder of Mutton, and its sign looked crooked, as if it were swinging in the wind.

Normal life. But there was something sinister about it. Partly it was the facial expressions. Annie could detect the smug, supercilious smiles of moral rectitude or the malicious grins of sadism on the faces of so many people. And Stanhope had included so much detail that the effect had to be deliberate. How he must have hated them.

If you looked long enough, you could almost believe that the man on the roof was about to drop a flagstone on some passerby, and that the butcher’s boy was wielding a cleaver ready to chop off someone’s head.

The only characters who looked in any way attractive were the children. The River Rowan was neither very wide nor very deep where it ran through the village. Children were playing in the shallows, splashing one another, paddling, the girls with their skirts gathered around their thighs, boys in short trousers. Some of them looked angelic; all of them looked innocent.

The more Annie looked, the more she recognized that there was something religious, ecstatic, in the children’s aspects, and the link with the water also brought to mind baptism. It was a sort of religious symbolism reminiscent of Stanley Spencer, though not quite so blatant. Over it all, the church brooded with its sense of menace and evil. The mill was nothing but a husk.