and Libby lifted her glass. The remaining two customers stood up and stared at her as they left the restaurant. Libby looked the other way.
After a while, Harry came back with his jacket over his arm.
‘There’s no need to walk me home, you know.’
‘It’s late. Ben would have my guts for garters.’
‘I always used to walk home on my own before I met Ben.’
‘But you don’t now. Come on. Pete’s away with Ben, anyhow, so there’s no one waiting for me.’
‘That sounds vaguely illicit.’
Harry grinned down at her and tucked her hand through his arm. ‘While the cat’s away, eh? Well, you did tell me Ben was jealous of me.’
‘Yes, odd that.’
‘No, it isn’t. You use me like a girlfriend and talk to me. Not the same way that you talk to him.’
‘I do now,’ said Libby. ‘I think part of it was because he was always so against me doing things on my own, I didn’t want to discuss them with him.’
‘Not so much doing things on your own, as investigations on your own.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
The village was quiet. A few cars swished down the high street, but all the lights were out in the shops and the pub. Somewhere on the other side of the road, the little river Wytch trickled along its deep gully towards the dewpond near Steeple Farm, after which it disappeared underground and eventually joined the creek near Creekmarsh. Libby and Harry turned the corner by the vicarage, where the great lilac tree overhung the wall.
‘At the risk of sounding even more illicit,’ said Libby, ‘do you want a nightcap?’
‘Thought you’d never ask.’ In gentlemanly fashion, Harry took the key from Libby and opened the front door. Sidney glared from the third stair.
‘Hello, walking stomach,’ said Harry.
‘Scotch? Or wine?’ Libby turned on lights and went into the kitchen.
‘Scotch, please.’ Harry followed her. ‘Still happy here in Bide-a-wee?’
Libby turned to him smiling. ‘I love it. I can never thank you enough for finding it for me.’
‘It seemed to suit. Pete and I looked at lots for you, but this one struck a chord. Still not going to Steeple Farm, then?’
‘No.’ Libby carried the bottle and glasses into the sitting room. ‘It doesn’t feel like home. And Ben’s accepted that now.’
‘I know. But I do wonder what will happen in the future.’
‘What do you mean?’ Libby handed over a glass and offered a jug of water.
‘Steeple Farm is Pete’s and James’s when their mama dies, so that doesn’t come into it, but what about the Manor?’
‘Oh.’ Libby shifted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. We’ve never discussed it.’
‘Won’t he expect you to go and live there when Greg and Het shuffle off?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.’ Libby took a healthy swallow of whisky and coughed.
‘No. So what do you want to talk about? Grisly murder?’
‘Don’t be daft.’ Libby added water to her whisky. ‘There haven’t been any, but…’
‘But what?’ Harry heaved a theatrical sigh. ‘Come on. You’ve got a theory.’
‘Well, I just wondered…’ Libby thought for a moment. ‘Suppose some of those bodies, even though they do belong to the sanatorium, shouldn’t be there? Suppose there were mistakes in medication? Or people were used as guinea pigs?’
Harry stared at her. ‘You know, you’ve got the most unpleasantly fertile imagination.’
‘No, but it could be, couldn’t it? After all, they haven’t been buried in consecrated ground. I always thought that was illegal.’
‘I don’t think so. I think you have to get permission to bury someone in the garden, but I don’t think it’s illegal, exactly.’ Harry shook his head. ‘What a conversation.’
‘Well, you must admit it’s odd. Especially back in the fifties. I mean, most people had a normal funeral in those days, didn’t they?’
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ said Harry. ‘But if the body Ian dug up had something wrong with it he’d have noticed, surely?’
‘The cutter-up would, not Ian himself. And if something had gone wrong, I doubt if it would show after all this time. All they were looking for was a modern body, and it wasn’t.’
‘I assume you mean the pathologist?’
‘Couldn’t think of the word. Yes, him. Or her.’
‘So will you tell Ian your new theory?’
‘I don’t see how I can. Unless he gets in touch with me. With us.’
‘And you think he won’t?’
‘We-ell, he sort of said he would this afternoon. Just have to wait and see, I suppose.’
‘And you’re not exactly good at that, are you, Mrs S?’
‘No.’ Libby made a face. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
Half an hour later after Harry had left, Libby turned on the laptop and typed “TB treatments” into the search engine. It soon became apparent that although TB was still around today, for some years it had not been considered fatal and, apart from the increasingly outdated “fresh air” treatment, was treated very successfully with antibiotics.
There were other stories, she found, similar to the one Cameron had told her, of people being virtually incarcerated in hospital for months. And descriptions of the operation to collapse a lung, and the more frightening descriptions of tuberculosis of other parts of the body. Tales of doctors who worked in these isolation sanatoria who had the disease themselves and had the shortest possible prognosis. After a while she switched off, thoroughly depressed at the thought that there were still millions of cases diagnosed every year, and frequently those cases were also HIV sufferers.
Nevertheless, it looked as though there were no recorded treatments of TB that could have been either unethical or illegal, so that particular theory bit the dust. Libby turned off the laptop.
On Sunday morning, feeling distinctly on edge, she forced herself to concentrate on the abandoned painting on the easel in the conservatory. Routine, that was the ticket. Forget all about weird buildings, ghostly music and exhumed bodies. Unfortunately, all that happened was that she began a new watercolour of a weird building, a ghostly piano and an exhumed body.
It was almost twelve o’clock when the phone rang.
‘Libby?’
‘Terry! what’s happened? Is Jane OK?’
‘It’s a girl!’ Terry Baker sounded exhausted.
‘Oh, Terry!’ Libby found herself unexpectedly close to tears. ‘How big? When? Is Jane all right?’
‘Six pounds eleven ounces, this morning at about nine. Jane’s fine, but it was a long time.’
‘When did you go in?’
‘Actually, she went in on Friday afternoon on her own.’
‘I knocked on Friday. Wish I’d known. Don’t say she was in labour since then?’
‘Not really. Her waters broke. So she called an ambulance. I met her there, but nothing happened until yesterday evening.’
‘Oh, it’s terrific, Terry. When will she be home? Oh, and what’s her name?’
‘Imogen, and they’ll be home tomorrow. I’ll get her to give you a ring.’
‘You do that. Lovely name. And I’d go home and get some sleep if I were you. Have you phoned Fran?’
‘No, she was next on the list. Will you do it?’
‘Course I will. Give Jane and Imogen lots of love.’
Fran was at Guy’s shop.
‘Will we go and see them?’ she asked.
‘After Jane’s rung us. They’ll have enough to do getting themselves settled, and they’ve got to deal with Jane’s ma. Do you think she’ll mellow with a grandchild?’
