The next morning, I rang Martin Kerr.

I asked him straight out. “Did Greenfields use my grandmother's recipe to make your new pasty?”

He laughed. A big, easy laugh.

“Ellie, love. There's no such thing as a secret pasty recipe. It's meat, potato, swede, onion and pastry. Every pasty in Cornwall's the same. We developed ours ourselves. Over two years.”

“It has twenty-one crimps, Martin.”

“So?”

“So nobody else in Cornwall crimps twenty-one times. It's my grandmother's number. And it's in the recipe you made me hand over for a food safety audit.”

The laughing stopped.

“Be very careful, Ellie,” said Martin. His voice had gone flat and cold. “You're a small business. We're Greenfields. If you start telling stories about us, no supermarket in Britain will ever touch you again. I'll make sure of it. And our lawyers will bury you.”

He hung up.

I looked at my computer screen. The little red recording light had just switched off.

I wrote the date and time at the top of a new page in my notebook. Then I wrote down every word.