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‘Oh dear,’ Kelly said. ‘Did I make you drink too much?’

‘Not at all,’ Glynnis said. ‘After you’d gone, all the ghosts stopped by for a nightcap or two. They wanted to know what we were talking about.’

Certain Glynnis was messing with her, Kelly just humoured her with a smile, then offered to make the coffee, leaving Glynnis to patch herself up again.

‘Okay then, dear,’ Glynnis said, once they were settled. ‘Fire away.’

‘Well, I went for a walk this morning,’ Kelly said, ‘just to, you know, clear my own head. And I kind of found myself up on the hilltop. You know, by that old tree up there.’

‘Oh, I know the one,’ Glynnis said. ‘I think everyone does, dear. The Hanging Tree, you mean.’

‘That’s the one. Well, I was up there, and I kind of went off the path a little bit,’ Kelly said. ‘I got lost, and I kind of found an abandoned mansion.’

Glynnis sighed.

‘So you ignored the KEEP OUT signs and discovered that old building up there.’

‘Maybe,’ Kelly said with a smile. ‘Something like that.’

‘Well, I suppose you are a journalist. Journalists have a habit of ignoring rules.’

Feeling slightly chastened, Kelly searched for some kind of excuse but couldn’t come up with one. So instead, she just shrugged and said, ‘Blame it on youthful exuberance.’

‘Oh, I will, dear. I would also blame it on youthful exuberance if something in that crumbly old place had fallen down and hit you on the head. You’re very lucky. It’s extremely unstable.’

‘Plus, it’s haunted?’ Kelly said.

‘No, not at all. It’s just private property.’

‘Oh. Well, who actually owns it?’ Kelly asked.

‘That would be Clive Dawkins. After he purchased the land that he sold back at an extremely low price. I don’t think he has any plans to do anything with that old building. It would probably cost more to renovate it than it would to just knock it down and start over again. But it is something of a historical masterpiece.’

‘I could see that,’ Kelly said. ‘I actually went in, wondering if maybe Clive Dawkins was being held prisoner in there.’

‘Oh dear,’ Glynnis said, laughing. ‘You really think so?’

‘Not anymore,’ Kelly said. ‘There was no sign that anyone had been in there.’

‘Thankfully so,’ Glynnis said. ‘As I say, the place is dangerous.’

‘I don’t suppose you know much about it?’ Kelly asked.

‘Of course I do,’ Glynnis said. ‘If you want to know about that mansion, you’ve come to the right place. It so happens that it was owned right up until the late eighteenth century by the Littleslades.’

‘The Littleslades?’ Kelly asked, the name familiar from somewhere, though she couldn’t quite recall where she’d seen or heard it before. ‘That’s an unusual name.’

‘Quite. There used to be a lot of Littleslades around here back in the old days,’ Glynnis said. ‘They were one of the main families around here, and they lived up in that mansion from where they lorded over the local area. There were other cottages up there at the time, all of which were paying rent for the land use.’

‘So they were landowners then?’ Kelly asked.

‘That’s right. The Littleslades at one point owned about a quarter of the whole village.’

‘Wow. That’s amazing,’ Kelly said. ‘What happened to them?’

‘Well, sadly, it was a case of human folly,’ Glynnis said. ‘The patriarch of the family, Lord Brockwell Littleslade, had something of an affliction.’

‘What kind of affliction?’