She said very quietly, now staring down at her fingers, ‘’Course I know Tony. I reckon he was here too, I don’t know, I was out at my job.’ Her voice went up a bit and her chin went up. ‘I’ve got an evening job down the Andromeda. Cloakroom attendant, eight till midnight.’

A sign of the times, was what Wexford called the Andromeda. It was Kingsmarkham’s casino, a gambling club in a spruced-up Victorian house out on the Sewingbury Road. He was going to ask why an evening job, what had happened to her full-time work – for at the time of his last encounter with Leilie she had been a stylist at Mr Nicholas, the hairdresser’s – when his eye fixed itself on an object which stood on one end of the mantelpiece. It was a baby’s feeding bottle with dregs of milk still in it.

‘I didn’t know you had a baby, Leilie,’ he said.

‘He’s in the bedroom,’ she said, and as if to confirm her words there sounded through the wall a reedy wail which quickly gained in volume. She listened. As the cries grew shrill she smiled and the smile became a laugh, a burst of laughter. Then she bit her lip and said in her usual monotone, ‘Paddy and them were here babysitting for me. They were here all evening.’

‘I see,’ said Wexford. He knew then beyond a doubt that Paddy Jasper had not been there, that his friends had not been there, but that on the other hand they, or some of them including Jasper and his brother, had been up in Ploughman’s Lane robbing Baron’s Keep. ‘I see,’ he said again. The baby went on crying, working itself up into a passion of rage or misery. ‘Is Paddy the child’s father?’

She came the nearest to rudeness she ever had. ‘You’ve no right to ask me that, Mr Wexford. What’s it to you?’

No, maybe he had no right, he thought. That ninety-nine out of a hundred policemen would have asked it was no reason why he should. ‘It’s nothing to me,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Leilie. You’d better go and see to him, hadn’t you?’

But at that moment the crying stopped. Leilie Somers sighed. In the flat next door footsteps sounded and a door slammed. Wexford said, ‘We’ll be back,’ and followed Leilie out into the passage. She went into the bedroom and shut herself in.

Burden let them out and closed the front door. ‘That’s her second child, you know,’ he said as they went down the stairs. ‘She had a kid by Jasper years ago.’

‘Yes, I remember.’ Wexford recalled Father Glanville’s implied admonition and said carefully, ‘Where is he or she now?’

‘She’s a baby batterer, is Leilie Somers. Didn’t you know? No, you wouldn’t. The case came up when you were ill and had all that time off.’ Wexford didn’t much like hearing his month’s convalescence after a thrombosis described as ‘all that time off’ but he said nothing. ‘I was amazed,’ said Burden severely, ‘to hear you apologizing to her as if she were a decent respectable sort of woman. She’s a woman who’s capable of giving a helpless baby a fractured skull and a broken arm. Those were her kid’s injuries. And what did Leilie get? A suspended sentence, a recommendation for psychiatric treatment, all the nonsense.’