Naomi wondered why he had seen dead people often enough to make a comparison but didn’t really feel that she could ask. Instead, she took another sip of wine and listened hard, hoping for more. Inconsiderately, it seemed the men had now spotted an acquaintance and were calling him across. To Naomi’s disgust the conversation turned once more to crop prices and kids and other domestic issues and it was obvious that she would learn no more.

‘Are you all right over here all alone?’

She recognized Marcus’s voice and smiled in his direction. ‘I’m fine, thank you. We thought Alec should get on and do the mingling bit. I’m still a bit wary in company and places I don’t know.’

Marcus dragged out a chair and flopped down beside her. He set something that sounded heavy down on the table and then a second lighter object. ‘I’ve purloined a bottle,’ he said. ‘Want a refill? You look to be drinking red.’

‘Thanks. There seem to be a lot of people here.’

‘Free food and booze,’ Marcus said dolefully, echoing Alec’s sentiments, then he laughed, embarrassed. ‘Oh, don’t take any notice of me, my dear. Truth to tell most of them were friends to varying degrees and it’s good of people to want to pay their respects. Truth to tell, too, I really miss him. Miss him terribly.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Naomi said. ‘I wish I’d met him. From the stories Alec tells he was quite a character.’

Marcus laughed softly. ‘Oh, he was that all right. But he was a good man and … I cared for him. Cared deeply.’

Were they more than friends? Naomi wondered. ‘What you said in the church …?’ she asked tentatively.

‘What I said in the church, my dear, I meant. Meant every word and I’m hoping and praying I can persuade young Alec to take me seriously. God knows the local constabulary can’t or won’t. Rupert had a heart attack, they say. That’s what killed him. Lord knows, Rupe wasn’t in the best of health, but the doctor reckoned he could last a good ten more years if he took care of himself.’

‘And did he? Take care of himself?’

Marcus was silent. Naomi sensed him shake his head. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Rupert was his own man, did his own thing as we used to say. He loved life and, I suppose, he did indulge himself a little too much but … My dear, if I’d come to the house and found him dead in his chair, I would have accepted that. Lord knows, I expected it. Every time I came to Fallowfields I wondered if that would be the time I found my old friend dead. I made him give me a list of people I should call, just in case. But this way? It’s all wrong.’

Wrong shoes and no jacket, Naomi thought.

‘Was there an investigation?’

‘No, dear. Nothing. He’d seen the doctor a few days before and when they … cut him open, they found that his heart had just given out. Nothing suspicious. Just an old man out walking who had a heart attack and couldn’t call for help. That’s what they decided and nothing I can say makes them believe any different.’

‘Maybe that’s all there is to know?’

Marcus poured more wine into his own glass. Naomi had not been aware of him drinking it and she had not touched her own during their conversation. ‘I’ve tried to believe that,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to think of my friend in trouble, frightened, even in pain, I know he must have had the pain and that is bad enough. To suspect it could have been worse than that …’

‘But what exactly makes you think …?’

‘That he was murdered? Naomi, do you believe a man can be frightened to death?’

‘I don’t know. I think it’s possible.’

‘Well, I know that Rupert was afraid. He’d begun to lock his doors. Rupert, in all the years I knew him, never locked his doors. Then he monitored his telephone calls, used the answer phone; he hated the darn things. And there were people who came looking for him. Two men, he said, asking questions. One, I know, went to Fallowfields and Rupert was afraid.’

‘Didn’t he tell the police? Did he give you any idea who they were or what they wanted?’

‘No. No, nothing. He wouldn’t listen to me when I said he should report the incidents. He didn’t tell me who the man was or what was said or why he was suddenly scared of his own shadow. Naomi, in the days before he died, he didn’t even come to the shop. Rupert loved our little shop. He thrived on it; meeting people. To cut himself off from that. From his friends …’

‘From you,’ Naomi said softly.

‘From me. Yes. Rupert was my friend. My dear, dear, friend.’ His voice broke with the pain of it and Naomi reached out, hoping to find his hand without knocking over the wine. She touched his arm and laid her hand on the rough tweed of his jacket.

‘Alec has to do something,’ Marcus said fiercely. ‘He must do something. Rupert is dead and he cannot, in all conscience, just accept that and walk away.’

Four

Naomi was very quiet on the drive back to Fallowfields. She was not sure how seriously she should take Marcus Prescott; she sensed that Rupert’s death would have been almost more than he could bear no matter how it had come about. Worse almost than the death was the sense that his old friend had been unable or unwilling to confide his worries.

Naomi had no idea what it was that Rupert might have been worried about but she did wonder if, perhaps, something personal had been bothering him. Something too personal to have talked to Marcus about. That Marcus had been so used to being in the know would have made any secrecy on Rupert’s part seem out of character and it would have been easy – natural even – for Marcus to see his death as suspicious following so soon after this change in behaviour.

‘Penny for them,’ Alec said. ‘I saw Marcus had you cornered but you seemed to be holding your own, so I called off the rescue attempt.’

‘Not sure if they’re worth a penny,’ Naomi told him. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve agreed we’ll have lunch with him tomorrow.’

‘You’ve what? Naomi, I really don’t think … I mean, I’m sympathetic and everything, but don’t you think the old boy’s losing his marbles?’

Naomi was thoughtful. ‘No,’ she said finally, ‘I don’t think he is. At least, not the whole bag full. Anyway, we’ll be seeing him in the morning at the solicitors. It made it a bit difficult to say no. I thought, well, lunch in a public place, get it over and done with. He wanted to come out to Fallowfields and that would have been far more awkward. You could hardly throw him out if he got to be too annoying.’

She smiled in Alec’s direction and heard him laugh. ‘All right. I know when I’ve been organized. Won’t hurt, I suppose.’

‘No, and I think you owe him anyway.’

‘You reckon? How so?’

‘Oh, for Rupert’s sake, I suppose and also because Marcus was his closest friend …’ She hesitated, not sure if she really believed the next thing she planned to say or if she had been infected by Marcus’s zeal. ‘And because I think there might be something to what he said,’ Naomi admitted.

Tired, they had gone to bed early that evening but Naomi woke in the early hours. She felt her way to the en suite bathroom, proud that it was getting so much easier to orientate herself in strange places.

She found, to her annoyance, that she was now fully awake. Back in the bedroom Alec’s soft, steady breathing just added to her sense of irritation. He obviously hadn’t even noticed she had got out of bed. She sighed, stifling the irrational desire to get back into bed and wake him up and then pretend to have been asleep all the time.

Don’t be such a baby, she told herself.

She stood in the doorway recalling what Alec had said about the room. He said there was a window seat overlooking the garden. She would sit there a while. One window was open and she made her way towards it, guided as much by the slight breeze squeezing through the gap as she was from memory. The window seat was deep, comfortable and padded; an alcove really, with the window on one side. She pulled up her feet, wrapping her arms about her knees and leaned back against the wall. She laid her head against the closed pane and breathed deep of the night scents rising from the garden.