‘Maria was in a lot of pain and she was bleeding,’ Lafeyre continued. ‘In my view she needed to get to the Rotunda where they have the specialised knowledge and the right equipment for that sort of thing. She knew herself that something had gone seriously wrong. Dr Morrow arrived then, and he agreed with me that she had to go to hospital. We managed to get her to the carriage and make her as comfortable as we could. Scollan had us at the Rotunda inside a few minutes. They managed to stop the bleeding after a while. She was very weak, but I don’t think she was ever in mortal danger.’

‘Was she . . . in pain?’ Swallow asked.

‘Initially, yes, I’m afraid,’ Lafeyre said cautiously. ‘I know this is a difficult thing to accept, Joe, but pain is often helpful in these situations. It enables the doctors to identify and locate the problem. And they eased it for her with laudanum as soon as they could.’

Mossop pushed Swallow’s mug of tea an inch closer.

‘Will you not take a drop of scald there, boss? It’ll do you good,’ he said softly.

Swallow took the mug and raised it mechanically to his mouth. He sipped the hot brew without tasting it.

‘Could they do . . . nothing?’ he asked Lafeyre.

‘You have to understand, Joe, at that early stage of pregnancy the baby is very fragile. A lot of women lose their babies in the early weeks and months. A lot can go wrong, even where there isn’t an accident. . . .’

‘This wasn’t an accident!’ Swallow said coldly. ‘This was a killing. They murdered my child, Maria’s child. The bloody cowards. The bloody cowards came into our home while I was away and there was nobody there to stop them.’

‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ Lafeyre said quietly. ‘I’m truly sorry . . . for you and for Maria.’

He drank from his own mug.

‘In a situation like that, where the foetus suffers a trauma, even an indirect one, it’s really . . . dislocated . . . and there isn’t any way of putting it right again. The emphasis has to be on saving the mother, and that’s what they did. They did it very successfully, praise the Lord. The baby is gone, unhappily, but Maria is fine.’

All three men were silent. The sounds of the harbour came faintly through the windows. Voices on the wharf. The rattle of cartwheels on granite paving. Gulls calling.