‘I’ll tell you something else, Mother, he knows all our business. About the old man, Dumas, my boy, everything. He made her tell him, been torturing the life out of her with it. How’s that for the icing on the fucking cake!’

‘NO! She told him? Dear God in heaven, the stupid, stupid girl.’

‘Not stupid. Frightened, terrified, mentally ill, lots of things, Mum, but not stupid. We were the stupid ones to countenance the marriage in the first place. I’ll see Joshua O’Malley meself, and shut his trap up once and for all if he ain’t careful. He needs knocking down a peg and I’ll see to it myself!’

Kevin Carter, Briony’s driver, was surprised by the look on her face when she emerged from her sister’s house. Her usual good nature seemed to have deserted her and her face was a mask of anger. She got into the back of the car.

‘Elizabeth O’Malley’s, pronto.’

Without further ado, he drove. Briony sat in the back. Wrapped in her coat, she stared out of the window at the passing streets. Children played on the pavements, men lounged against the lampposts. It was like going back in time. The streets were no different from how they had been when she was a child. Since the war times had changed. Only the people in these streets had been passed by. They still lived in the same back to backs, soot-blackened and small. They still kept a few chickens if they could afford it, or a rabbit or two in a hutch knocked up out of a jerry crate. They still lived hand to mouth, still had that look of hopelessness about them.

The car pulled up outside Elizabeth O’Malley’s and Briony got out slowly. It was seven-thirty, still light enough to see everything that was going on around her. A group of ragged children hunched around a doorway, their game of five jacks forgotten as they gazed at the lady in the deep green coat who owned a car. One little girl scratched at a festering flea bite on her ankle and broke the skin. She dabbed at the blood with dirty fingers.

Briony saw curtains twitching, and a mother with a young child on her arm stopped where she was and stared at her. Briony recognised her: Lily Bains, a girl she had gone to school with. She smiled and nodded and banged on Elizabeth O’Malley’s front door. The knock resounded through the house and instinctively Briony knew no one was there.

‘Lily, do you know where she is?’

Lily stepped back a pace, unsure whether to talk to Briony, a woman who was spoken of in hushed whispers these days; the girl with whom she had once played Tin Pan Alley and shared some childish dreams.