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  Louise said nothing but she felt wary.

  ‘I have some bad news for you,’ he said. ‘Tell me first, which lawyer did you use when you bought the cottage? Local man?’

  ‘I inherited it,’ Louise said. ‘From my aunt. She bought it from Mr Miles’s father.’

  ‘We have to hope it was a straightforward mistake then, and not a put-up job.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The conveyancing. According to the deeds held at the county archive office, this was once two cottages with two cottage gardens.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your aunt only bought the one. They had been converted into one property by 1950, but originally there were two owners of two separate houses: Mr Miles senior – Andrew Miles’s grandfather – and Mr Stephen Miles, his younger brother. Your aunt occupied the whole property but she bought only from Mr Miles senior. The property was never declared as one house, the garden was never declared as one garden. In theory, Mr Stephen Miles the younger brother, or his heirs, still own half of this house and half of the garden.’

  Louise stared blankly at Captain Frome. He opened the manila envelope and spread photocopies of ageing documents on her coffee table. ‘Then the trail goes cold,’ he went on. ‘But local belief is that Mr Stephen Miles had a number of children, all now deceased except for one daughter – Rose. Mr Miles senior had a son who inherited the farm, and his son is Andrew Miles, our Mr Miles. This cottage was used as a gamekeeper’s cottage and then a farm labourer’s cottage and then finally sold as one unit to your aunt, and subsequently inherited by you.’

  ‘I only own half ?’ Louise asked.

  ‘And the other half is owned by Rose Miles,’ Captain Frome concluded grimly. ‘This accounts for why she makes so free with her accusations of trespass. She probably knows perfectly well that she is the owner of your orchard, and indeed, half your house. She’s probably just biding her time before she strikes.’

  ‘Strikes?’

  ‘Blackmail, Miss Case. Presumably she came to discover the lie of the land and shortly she will be threatening you with a claim against your property. I should imagine that she will settle for a cash payment to go away – her sort usually do. But until you settle this matter, she probably has a full legal right to your orchard and to half your house and, what is worse, she is the Achilles’ heel of the Wistley Keep the Convoy Out!! campaign.’

  Louise was stunned into complete silence for long minutes. ‘This is a nightmare,’ she eventually said.

  ‘It is!’ the Captain confirmed. ‘We shall be made a laughing stock. Here we are campaigning for total control of all travellers and their forced moving on, and here we have, in the heart of the village, half a property and a site owned and legally registered to a vagrant. We can’t even have her moved on. We can’t prosecute her for trespass. She owns her site. She has a legal right to rent her site out to others if she wishes. She could have a dozen vans on that orchard tomorrow and we could do nothing to stop her.’

  Louise closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again. ‘Nothing?’ she asked faintly.

  Captain Frome leaned a little closer and his voice dropped low. ‘If I were you, I would go down to her van with a legally prepared document, quite watertight, and I would offer her a couple of thousand pounds to disappear and never come back.’

  ‘She’s very stubborn,’ Louise said. ‘I can’t imagine her disappearing. And I haven’t got a thousand pounds.’

  ‘Then you may have to be a little stubborn yourself,’ Captain Frome suggested. ‘No access to her property through your gate, for instance. No visitors allowed. No deliveries. No services. Don’t supply her with any water. Report her to the relevant Health authorities. Report her to Social Services. You have a friend who is a social worker, don’t you? Ask her to register the woman under the Mental Health Act as someone who should be restrained for her own safety. I think we can find ways of making her life here too uncomfortable to tolerate. We can probably get her locked up. There’s a section of the Mental Health Act we can call in. Sectioned,’ he said with relish. ‘We’ll get her sectioned.’

  It sounded as if he was preparing to slice her into sample fillets. Louise said nothing. She was thinking about invoking the full force of the property-owning patriarchal law against one mischievous old lady.

  ‘I don’t ask for thanks,’ Captain Frome said.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Louise said. ‘You have been incredible officious.’

  ‘Just doing my duty as a neighbour.’ He beamed at her. ‘I am after all the new chairman of the neighbourhood watch committee. Sir Henry Wilcox of Wistley House was the original chairman but there was a vote of no confidence in him at the last meeting and I took the chair.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘He had shown himself very casual in his response to the emergency. Very casual indeed. But it was a close-fought thing. The whole issue swung on one vote.’ He leaned forward and tapped his finger against his rosy nose. ‘Your vote, actually.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘You gave me your proxy vote, if you remember. It was your one vote which swung the decision in my favour. So I’m the new chairman of the neighbourhood watch committee, and chairman of the Keep the Convoy Out!! sub-committee.’ Captain Frome glanced at his watch. ‘Heigh ho! I had better go,’ he said. ‘Though it is rather that time of day.’

  Louise said nothing. She had no idea that ‘that time of day’ indicated that it was noon and an appropriate time for her to offer Captain Frome a glass of dry sherry or, better still, a whisky and water. She merely rose to her feet and Captain Frome, an English gentleman, had no choice but to rise too.

  ‘I’ll leave these documents with you, shall I?’ he asked. ‘You’ll want to take them in to your lawyer. I suppose you could consider suing your aunt’s lawyer for incompetence. That could be a useful and fruitful avenue.’

  Louise looked with distaste at the documents spread on the coffee table. It seemed to her that in two brief days she had lost her lover, her academic credibility, her job, and had now discovered that she did not own half of her home.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ Captain Frome said again, raising his hat to her and striding energetically to his Rover. ‘The new neighbourhood watch committee does not seek thanks. Just support. Just support.’

  Louise nodded dully. ‘Thank you,’ she said like an obedient child and stood respectfully in the doorway until he had gone.

  Rose appeared from behind the oak tree that grew before the front door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Louise asked abruptly.

  ‘Listening at the door,’ Rose said helpfully. ‘So the party’s still on, is it?’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘All of it,’ Rose said reasonably. She felt rather affronted at the implication that she might have been listening but failed to do a thorough job. ‘All of it, of course.’

  ‘About the cottage?’

  ‘Well, I knew that already.’

  ‘You knew that you own the orchard?’

  ‘I told him so when he came and tried to turn me off. I accused him of trespass on my land. It shut him up good and proper. That’s the trouble with these little tinpot colonels. They hate to see a woman win.’

  ‘You knew that the conveyancing was never done on the second cottage?’

  ‘And that I own half the house? Yes, I knew that. I’ve always known that.’

  Louise sagged against the doorpost. ‘I think we had better go to a lawyer and get this straightened out,’ she said wearily.

  ‘No real need,’ Rose replied. ‘I only ever stay here in May. I never wanted the house. And anyway, I’ll be dead soon.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Louise said bitterly. ‘So you keep saying whenever it’s convenient. But I suppose you think you can come here every May, forever. And even if you do die, then who is going to inherit and come rolling up the drive next May? Who are you going to leave it to that I have to put up with for the rest of my life?’

  Rose lo