“How’s Mother?” he asked. “ I must have frightened her. Shall I go and see her?”

“She’s well,” Molly replied. “You can explain to her later.”

“She won’t understand. She doesn’t listen.”

“It must be very difficult to live with someone who doesn’t listen.”

“It’s impossible. I know that I should make allowances. She hasn’t had an easy life. Father was never here. She brought me up practically all by herself. But I can’t go on being grateful. I try to explain that I make sacrifices too, but she doesn’t listen. If it wasn’t for her I could have married. Other people have so much freedom now. These young people, the children in school, some of the teachers even, they have so much freedom and they just abuse it. It’s wicked.”

“Is that why you wrote the letters?”

“You know about the letters?” he asked quickly. Molly nodded.

“I’ve been so worried about them. I knew that you would find me.” He fell silent, studying the stain on the carpet and the splinters of broken glass. George was fascinated by the conversation; he was afraid to move for fear of breaking the spell of understanding between the two. Because he knew that somehow Molly did understand this man whose moods and anxieties were, to him, incomprehensible. If he were mad, she seemed capable of bringing reason to his madness.

“You wrote the letters,” she said, in the form of a question, “because you thought that they had too much freedom?”

“I wanted them to pay,” he said angrily. “They hurt me so much and I wanted them to pay. He didn’t care how much it meant to me, my Saturday mornings with the children.”

Not those letters! George screamed silently to himself. I know all about those letters. What about the others, the letters to Sally? But Molly allowed Cranshaw to continue talking.

“They liked me, they really liked me. It wasn’t like the children at school. Some of the little ones used to hold my hand. Then he started coming with us on to the marsh. I was pleased. I was glad to have him there. But he started lecturing to me in front of the children, laughing if I made a mistake. He said that I couldn’t see properly and that I was getting old. Not in so many words, but that’s what he meant. He had no right to criticize. I saw them together on the marsh one day, him and that woman from Fenquay. She was wearing one of those dresses that you can see right through, and nothing underneath. I was in one of the hides and I could see them. They had no shame. They even had her child with them. I knew then that I had to do something about it. They weren’t the sort of people to look after the village children.”

“So you wrote to the children’s parents and told them that Tom was a drug addict. How did you know that he had taken drugs?”