“Okay,” Lindsay said. If anyone deserved the truth, it was Julie. She’d lost more than anyone, hard though it was for Lindsay to imagine Union Jack’s death as any kind of loss. “It wasn’t just the geegees that put the jam on your bread, Julie. There’s no easy way to say this. There isn’t a polite word for what Tom was up to.” She sighed. “Julie, Tom had been supplementing your income for the last nine years with a bit of blackmail.”

Julie shook her head confidently. “You’ve got it wrong, you’ve not read his shorthand properly. What kind of a man did you take him for? He might have rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, for he were never shy about speaking his mind. But blackmail? Not Tom. Blackmail’s for cowards. Tom were no coward.”

“The proof’s here, Julie, in his own hand,” Lindsay said. “Nearly nine years ago, Tom discovered that one of his union officers was a murderer. Rather than hand them over to the police, he bled the killer dry. There’s a list of dates and amounts, ranging from £150 a week to £500. Then, when he became general secretary of the Journalists’ Union, he discovered that the officer in question was financing those payments by embezzling union funds. Tom couldn’t do anything about it at the time, because he was desperately trying to paint a wonderful picture of the JU so that the merger with the inkies would go ahead without a hitch. The last thing he could afford was the scandal of an officer with a hand in the till.

“But circumstances changed. After the mergers, it became clear that AMWU’s finances were far from as healthy as they should be. The pressure was on for a full-scale inquiry into the union’s finances. Tom knew as soon as that happened, the truth was going to emerge, and it was going to look as if his stewardship of the JU was, at the very least, less than careful. He’d be lucky not to end up looking negligent, and his chances of surviving were pretty slim. The only way he could safeguard himself was to cash in his chips and reveal who the guilty party was. That way, he’d end up looking vigilant for making the discovery, and selfless, for not hesitating to expose someone who’d formerly been a JU official.”

Julie was still shaking her head in disbelief. “I can’t tek it in,” she said. “He never said owt to me about any of this. I thought everything were sound as a pound now the unions had all come together. Poor Tom! What a thing to carry round with you. He must have been itching to clean the slate and let the union know who’d been stealing their money.”