This demonstrated one of the curious truths about Prosperous: in most things it ran pretty much like any other town of similar size. It had its rivalries, its intrigues. Men cheated on their wives, and wives cheated on their husbands. Hugo Reed didn’t talk to Elder Collingwood, and never would, all over an incident with a tractor and a garden gate some forty years earlier. Ramett Huntley and Milisent Rawlin, although superficially polite to each other, were obsessed with their bloodlines, and both had made regular pilgrimages back to the northeast of England over the years in an effort to trace their lineages back to royalty. So far neither had been successful, but the search went on. In Prosperous, business as usual was the order of the day. The town differed only in one crucial way from the rest, and even that had become a version of normal over the centuries. It was surprising what folk could accustom themselves to, as long as they were rewarded for it in the end.

‘You want some tea, Lucas?’ said Hayley.

‘Tea would be good,’ said Morland.

In Prosperous, you were more likely to be offered tea than coffee. It was a hangover from the old country. Ben Pearson was probably the only storeowner for fifty miles who regularly ran out of loose leaf Earl Grey and English Breakfast, and Yorkshire Tea teabags. And, damn, was there trouble when he did.

Inside, Hayley’s home resembled a Victorian house museum: dark wood antique furniture, Persian rugs, lace tablecloths, overstuffed chairs and wall upon wall of books. The chandeliers were late nineteenth-century reproductions by Osler & Faraday of Birmingham, based on a classic eighteenth-century Georgian design. Morland thought them excessively ornate, and ill suited to the house, but he kept that opinion to himself. Still, sitting at Hayley’s dining table always made him feel like he was preparing for a séance.

Hayley boiled some water and set the tea to brew. The teapot was sterling silver, but the tea would be served in mismatched mugs. China would have been an affectation too far. She poured milk into each of the mugs, not bothering to ask Morland how much he wanted, or whether he might prefer to do it himself. By now she knew his habits and preferences almost as well as his own wife. She added the tea, then found some shortbread biscuits and emptied four on a plate. Biscuits, not cookies: it said so on the packaging, which was also decorated with Highland cattle, tartans and ancient ruins.

They sipped their tea, nibbled the shortbread, and spoke of the weather and the repairs that would have to be made to the town office once winter was gone, before moving on to the real business of the afternoon.

‘I hear they buried that hobo,’ said Hayley.

Morland wasn’t sure that the man named Jude had been a hobo, strictly speaking. As far as he knew, hobos were migratory workers. Technically, Jude had been a bum.

‘Apparently so,’ said Morland.

‘Has there been any fuss?’

‘Not that I’ve heard.’

‘I told you there wouldn’t be. I had to listen to all of that bitching and moaning for nothing.’

Morland didn’t dispute the point. He had done all his arguing when the decision of the board had been communicated to him, but by then it was too late. He’d tried to talk Hayley around, but on that occasion she had proved immune to his charms.

‘It would have been preferable if he’d just disappeared,’ said Morland.

‘That would have cost more – a lot more. Books have to be balanced.’

‘It might have been worth it. I don’t think anyone would have come looking for a missing homeless man, and it’s hard to prove the commission of a crime without a body.’

‘Nobody’s trying to prove that a crime was committed. A hobo hanged himself, and that’s the end of it.’

Not quite, thought Morland. Hayley was thinking like a selectman, Morland like a lawman.

‘The problem, as I see it, is that we now have two dead bodies to no good end,’ said Morland.

‘Ben told me that he had no choice but to shoot the girl. You agreed.’

Yet I didn’t agree to the killing of her father, Morland was about to say, but he killed the words before they reached his tongue.

‘This town has survived, and flourished, by being careful,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to tell me that!’ said Hayley. A little blood found its way into her pale cheeks. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing all these years? Every decision I’ve made has been with the best interests of the town at heart.’

I’ve made, he noticed, not we’ve made. He wondered if this was how all despots began. At some point, someone had to speak truth to power. Then again, those who did frequently ended up with their heads on stakes.

‘I’m not questioning your commitment to the town, Hayley. Nobody is. But two dead from the same family could attract attention.’

‘One dead,’ she corrected him. ‘There’s one body, not two. Has the girl even been reported missing yet?’

‘No,’ he conceded.

‘And she won’t be either, because the only one who might have been concerned about her is now in the ground. By acting as we did, we solved the problem, or we would have if that damn fool Dixon hadn’t let the girl go.’

‘That’s an interesting choice of words,’ said Morland.

He hadn’t raised his suspicions with Hayley before now. He wanted to let them percolate some before he started pouring them out. Hayley nibbled on her shortcake, her tiny white teeth chipping away at it with the action of a hungry rodent.

‘You think he’s telling lies about what happened?’ she said.

‘I tried using a scrap of material to open the bolt from the inside, like he and Erin claimed the girl did.’

‘And?’

‘It worked.’

‘So?’

‘It took a while, and I had to use a piece of wood to pull the cloth in and form a loop, just as Erin Dixon did when I put her in the basement and asked her to demonstrate how the girl might have escaped. She told me she’d found the wood on the floor, and that the girl must have broken it off the bed. She showed me the bed, and there was a long splinter of wood missing that matched the piece in Erin’s hand.’

‘I’m waiting for a “but”.’

‘But there was blood on the floor by the bed when I let Erin out, and it was fresh.’

‘Could it have been the girl’s? She couldn’t have been gone for but an hour by then.’

‘If it was, the blood would have congealed.’

‘If it was Erin’s blood, maybe she cut herself when she was examining the wood.’

‘Maybe.’

Hayley set her shortbread down by her mug. She seemed to have lost her taste for sweetness.

‘Why would they have let her go?’

‘I don’t know. There are rumors about Harry’s business.’

‘I’ve heard. I’ve been concerned since they took that loan.’

‘The paint on his house needs a new coat, and that old truck of his might just be the only vehicle in Prosperous that’s in worse shape than yours. I didn’t have time to take a good look around his kitchen when I visited, but I saw that some groceries had been unpacked and hadn’t yet been put away. They’re buying cheap bread, generic pasta, a couple of packs of chicken joints that were about to expire but would be okay if you froze them, that kind of thing.’

‘They could have been for the girl. They weren’t going to be feeding her filet mignon.’

‘It just doesn’t sit right with me.’ He regarded her closely. ‘It sounds to me like you’re trying to defend them.’

‘I’m not defending anyone,’ said Hayley. ‘I’m trying to understand. If what you’re suggesting is true, we have a major problem on our hands. We’ll have to act, and that could cause unrest in the town. We don’t turn on our own.’

‘Not unless our own start turning on us.’

‘I still can’t figure out why they’d want to release her.’

‘Pity? Guilt?’

‘It’s not like we were asking them to kill her,’ said Hayley. ‘They just had to take care of her until we were ready. She was too thin. All this might have been avoided if Walter and Beatrix hadn’t brought us a junkie.’