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Kelly could only stare at the old in surprise as the man brushed the toad down. Then he unzipped a bag tied around his waist, which Kelly saw was filled with soil and leaf matter. He plopped the toad inside and zipped the bag up again.

‘You all right there, lass?’ he said, standing up and wiping his hands on trousers that were already filthy. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Not got used to them yet round ‘ere?’

‘No,’ Kelly said. ‘I was just a little surprised because your amphibious friend rather resembled one that I found on my window ledge this morning.’

‘‘Twas probably him,’ the old man said. ‘I’ve been looking for him for ages. Larry loves a good wander. Can’t have him wandering too far, though, in case he starts breeding with the local population. Larry is an Amazonian giant horned toad. He’s not native to this country, and if he decided to spread a little of his spawn around, it might create something of a plague.’ Larry grinned. ‘I try to keep his family confined to that old well when they go out and about. ‘Did you know giant Amazonian horned toads like to snack on potatoes?’

‘I didn’t know they grew many potatoes in Brazil,’ Kelly said.

‘That’s why,’ Ned replied.

Then he squinted at her.

‘Say, aren’t you that tabloid reporter? I’ve been hearing all about you.’

‘That’s the first time I’ve heard The Brentwell Daily referred to as a tabloid,’ Kelly said. ‘Although it has broken a couple of council scandals over the years. But that’s right. My name’s Kelly. You’re Ned, aren’t you?’

‘Neville Chadfield,’ he said. ‘But just call me Old Ned. Everyone else does.’

Kelly smiled. ‘Sure. Well, it’s nice to meet you, um, Old Ned. Out of interest, who did you hear about me from?’

Old Ned patted a stomach large enough that it could potentially have been crushing Larry in his pouch and grinned.

‘That’ll be the boss,’ he said. ‘Talking about you all the time, he is.’

Her first thought was of Clive Dawkins before she remembered that Clive Dawkins was missing.

‘You mean Mr Edward?’ she said, stumbling over her words and sounding like a twelve-year-old pupil fawning over her PE teacher.

‘Mister Edward?’ Old Ned said, laughing. ‘That’s right. Ed. He happened to mention he’d met this journalist snooping around the village. In fact, he happened to mention her on more than one occasion.’

‘More than one occasion?’ Kelly asked. ‘Would that be precisely two, or multiple times?’

‘Well, there was that time I was cleaning out the pens. Then there was that time I was scrubbing down the chicken enclosure. And definitely that time when I was replacing the bog roll in the car park toilet. There might have been one or two more.’

Despite being mildly disgusted that Edward would have mentioned her during multiple unpleasant cleaning activities, Kelly was nevertheless pleased that he had at least been thinking about her.

Not, of course, that she had been thinking about him or had any real interest in getting to know him better.

‘And just out of interest,’ she said, ‘can you remember what he said?’

‘Something along the lines of, ‘Poor little lass. Doesn’t know what she’s getting in for. If she isn’t careful, she’ll go the way of that first one what showed up here.’’

Kelly lifted an eyebrow.

‘The first one?’ she said. ‘What do you mean, the first one? Was there someone else from The Brentwell Daily that came up here?’

She felt a sudden pang of disappointment, as though she had merely been a replacement for someone who hadn’t wanted the job, then wondered with a sudden jolt whether there was someone else here, and they were perhaps being pitted against each other for the same job.

Then Old Ned patted his stomach and flapped a filthy hand dismissively.

‘No, no. He was talking about the first one, all them years back. Ain’t no report of our first parade because the bloke that came up here to review it disappeared.’

After a little more questioning, only some of which centred around whether Edward had talked about her in a favourable light or not, and whether his consideration of her being pretty had been a personal observation or more of a generalisation based on her relative youth and the apparent lack of comparable young women of a similar age in Briar Speckles, Kelly established that Edward wasn’t at work today because he had gone into Brentwell and then to the garden centre on the Willow River Road to pick up some supplies.

Apparently, some deer had knocked down one of the fences around the park’s exterior, and he needed to get some replacement posts.

When Kelly suggested that that ought to be a job for a gardener, Old Ned had merely shrugged.