guessed to be Old Grace Hall. The long, low stone shape set with a typically large café window near the bridge must be my destination.
It was time to go.
‘You can drive over the bridge and park by the Green. Come into the café, which opens at ten, and you will find me there,’ Ms E. Price-Jones had written.
The bridge was very narrow, but had embrasures on either side into which pedestrians could press themselves to escape any traffic. I came to a halt opposite the café, between a lime-green Beetle and a white van so bashed and battered that it looked as if it was made from a crumpled piece of dirty paper.
As I reached for the door handle, a movement out of the corner of my eye stopped me dead. A thin, wiry man was just turning into a gateway beyond the Tudor house and glanced back with an oddly furtive air as he did so.
My heart thudded to a stop for a moment and then restarted: it wasn’t Mike, unless he’d taken to dyeing his hair bright red. I would have to stop seeing bogeymen around every corner.
Getting out and pulling my jacket around me, I headed across the road, noticing for the first time a large entrance turnstile between the café and the bridge, with wrought ironwork over it, proclaiming it to be the entrance to the River Walk and Fairy Falls.
The café window was set into one end of Lavender Cottage and bore a sign over it:
Ice Cream and Angels
Café-Gallery
The scalloped edge of a striped awning showed beneath it, where it had been folded back against the wall in a protective housing. In summer, it must pleasantly shade the small paved area in front of it, where a few white-painted wrought-iron tables and chairs were now stacked together. A grassy bank dividing it from the road was decorated with an ancient ice-cream vendor’s tricycle, the box in front planted up with variegated ivy and spring bulbs.
It had been brightly painted and the gilded lettering on it advertised Verdi’s Ice Cream.
It was all very picturesque, but a sharp cold spatter of rain hit me and I ran for the café door.
There was a heavenly chiming as I went in, appropriate for somewhere called Ice Cream and Angels, and I found myself in a surprisingly large, white-painted room, with a tiled floor like a chessboard and light wooden chairs and tables. Hung along one wall were large oil paintings, their subjects hard to make out at a glance.
The only customers were a middle-aged couple dressed for the ascent of Everest, in parkas, knitted hats, rucksacks, boots and sticks, who got up and left as I went in, bidding me good morning as they passed.
‘Dear me! Perhaps I should have offered to find them a Sherpa for the ascent of the Fairy Falls,’ said a small, elderly lady sardonically as she appeared from behind the counter at the far end of the café. She had turquoise hair cut in a sleek pageboy bob, lively dark eyes and a puckish grin.
‘They’ll probably go out by the turnstile at the top of the falls and hike up to Thorstane,’ suggested a young man who had been half hidden by a huge and ancient stainless-steel coffee machine.
The woman lost interest in the hikers and advanced on me, holding out a thin hand encrusted with huge semi-precious stone rings. ‘I am sure you must be Marianne Ellwood. Welcome, my dear!’
I shook the hand gingerly and it rattled metallically.
‘I’m Elfrida Price-Jones, but do call me Elf – everyone does.’
‘Thank you, and you must call me Marnie,’ I told her.
‘Short and sweet,’ she approved. ‘And this is Charlie Posset, whose family have the pub on the other side of the bridge, the Devil’s Cauldron – they’re distantly related through my mother’s side. Such a lot of it in small villages like this,’ she added, and Charlie grinned.
He was a very engaging-looking youth, with a wide mouth, a mop of indeterminate brown hair and freckles.
‘I’m finishing off my gap year by helping in the café,’ he said. ‘The lure of all the ice-cream I could eat was too much for me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.
‘Marnie’s the new gardener,’ Elf explained to Charlie. ‘I told you she was coming, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, but not that she was arriving today.’
‘Didn’t I?’ she said vaguely. ‘Never mind, she’s here now. Come along, Marnie, let’s sit in the window with a nice hot cup of coffee and get acquainted. Frothy or