‘All right,’ said Wexford, ‘all right. So you lived here with Matthew and you had your job at the Andromeda and then Paddy wrote to say he was coming down, and on Saturday he did come. And you took Monday evening off work to be with him and exchanged your Tuesday turn with another girl – and so we come to Wednesday, yesterday.’

Leilie sighed. She didn’t seem unhappy, only rueful. ‘Paddy said he’d babysit. He said he’d asked Tony over and Johnny and a fella called Pip Monkton, and they’d be in all evening. I said he wasn’t to bother, I could take Matthew next door into Julie’s, and Paddy got mad at me and said Julie was an interfering bitch and didn’t I trust him to look after his own child? Well, that was it, I didn’t, I kept remembering what he’d done to Patrick, and that was because Patrick cried. Paddy used to go crazy when he cried, I used to think he’d kill him, and when I tried to stop him he nearly killed me. And, you see, Mr Wexford, Matthew’d got into this way of crying in the evenings. They said at the clinic some babies cry at night and some in the evenings and it’s hard to know why, but they all grow out of it. I knew Matthew’d start screaming about eight and I thought, my God, what’ll Paddy do? He gets in a rage, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and Tony wouldn’t stop him, he’s scared of him like they all are, Paddy’s so big. Well, I got in a real state. Mum’d come out of hospital that morning, she’d had a major op, so I couldn’t take him there and go back there myself and hide from Paddy, and I couldn’t take him to work. I did once and they made a hell of a fuss. I just couldn’t see any way out of it.

‘Paddy went out about eleven. He never said where he was going and I didn’t ask. Anyway, I went out too, carrying Matthew in the baby carrier, and I just walked about thinking. I reckon I must have walked miles, worrying about it and wondering what to do and imagining all sorts of things, you know how you do. I’d been feeding Matthew myself and I’m still giving him one feed a day, so I took him into a field and fed him under a hedge, and after that I walked a bit more.

‘Well, I was coming back along the Stowerton Road. I knew I’d have to go home on account of Matthew was wet and he’d soon be hungry again, and then I saw this pram. I knew who it belonged to, I’d seen it there before and I’d seen this girl lift her baby out of it. I mean, I didn’t know her name or anything but I’d talked to her once queuing for the check-out in the Tesco, and we’d got talking about our babies and she said hers never cried except sometimes for a feed in the night. She was such a good baby, they never got a peep out of her all day and all evening. She was a bit younger than Matthew but it was funny, they looked a bit alike and they’d got just the same colour hair.