The Pretty Ones

It seemed to Emma as if her happiness could never end. Admittedly it was something of a whirlwind marriage to husband, Barnaby, who remained in many ways a stranger, a man she had only recently met, but she felt she loved him with all her heart. Even the shock of discovering that he had been married before, and had twin daughters, could not diminish all she felt for him.

But then one day, in a rain-sodden field in the Kent countryside, the discovery of a small shallow grave was to raise to the forefront of Emma's mind all the doubts she had been at such pains to keep repressed. Just how had her husband's previous wife so mysteriously disappeared? Had she really gone on an expedition up the Amazon River? Was it likely that she would have left her two young daughters for so long? And wasn't there something disconcertingly sinister about the fact that the two governesses for the children had simply vanished into the night?

After all, the body in that grave had to belong to someone.