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"I promised you a proposition that would interest you, a murder case that would fascinate you, and Sunday lunch," Charles said calmly, trying hard not to seem too amused by what he recognised as a relatively mild manifestation of the infamous Raisin temper. "We haven't even scratched the surface yet."

"Well, you can scratch it on the way to the restaurant," Agatha said, yanking open the car's passenger door. "Let's go!"

"First, the murder," Charles said, climbing into the driver's seat and starting the engine. "William Harrison was a well-respected man in this area. He was steward of the estate that belonged to Lady Juliana Noel, whose father built Campden House. Lady Juliana no longer lived in the area, but she trusted Harrison, who had worked for the family since her father's time, to run the estate. He set off to collect rents from Lady Juliana's tenants one afternoon, telling his wife he would be home in time for supper, but he never returned. She sent their servant, John Perry, out to look for her husband, but Perry didn't come back that night either."

"Was he killed, too?" Agatha slipped her shoes off again, letting the car's heater warm and dry her feet. "No, he showed up the next morning when Harrison's nineteen-year-old son, Edward, went out looking for his father."

"Where was Harrison going?" Agatha asked, and Charles felt a flush of triumph. In that instant, with those two questions, he knew he'd piqued her interest and that now there would be no stopping her until she knew all the details.

"Actually, we're heading in that direction now," he explained. "Harrison aimed to collect rents from the villages of Charingworth and Paxford, and also call in at Ebrington on the way home. We're booked for lunch at the Ebrington Arms."

He pulled out onto the road, heading away from Chipping Campden. "We'll be there in no time," he said. "It's only a couple of miles, a little less the way the old man would have walked across the fields."

"Old?" Agatha asked. "How old?"

"He was probably in his mid-sixties, but it was a journey he'd taken many times. He had worked for the Noel family pretty much all his life. He was also on the board of the local grammar school—a very methodical, particular and proud man by all accounts."

"He'd also have been very old for the time, wouldn't he? People didn't live so long back then."

"There's certainly some truth in that," Charles said, his head rocking from side to side as though weighing points for and against with his ears. "Infant mortality was dreadfully high but if you made it to adulthood and then into your twenties and were still reasonably healthy, you were clearly made of strong stuff. If you ate well and kept active, you could expect to live on into your seventies."

"So what did actually happen to him?"

"Therein lies the mystery!" Charles slapped a hand on the steering wheel to emphasise his point. "John Perry's account of how he went looking for his master didn't make much sense, so the local magistrate had him locked up to make sure he didn't disappear. Villagers were organised into search parties to try to find Harrison, but all they turned up was the hat and scarf."

"I assume the magistrate would then have suspected foul play."

"Quite right. John Perry was questioned again, and this time he pointed the finger at his brother, Richard, and their mother, accusing them of having bumped off old Harrison to rob him of the rents he had collected. He said they told him they were going to dump the body in a pond or a cesspit."

"Yuck! Were the mother and brother still in the area?"

"Yes. They were arrested but denied everything. Look—we're almost there."

An attractive, modern-looking house faced with mellow Cotswold stone came into view on the left, and the ditches and hedgerows that had lined the road gave way to neatly trimmed grass verges. Charles followed the road round to the right where Ebrington's older cottages crowded in on both sides before they came upon a short yet elegant terrace of houses with expertly thatched roofs. Agatha made a mental note to make enquiries with the owners should she ever need work done on the thatch of her own cottage in Carsely.