‘You are right. I am very close to my family. The fact that I was prepared to leave them behind and come to a foreign country is again a measure of how deep my love for Bill was.’

‘Yes.’ Carole wasn’t quite sure how to phrase the natural follow-on question.

But, fortunately, Malee saved her the trouble. ‘You are wondering whether I have been sending money to my family in Thailand.’

‘Well, I, er …’

‘Do not worry, Carole. You do not have to be hypersensitive with me. I know full well the kind of things that Fethering has been saying about me.’

‘Ah.’

‘And no, I have not been sending money back to my family in Thailand. I love them and hope to see them soon, but I have not been subsidizing them.’

‘“Hope to see them soon”?’

‘When everything is sorted out here, I will have to return to Thailand. I think I will be more welcome there than I am in Fethering.’

Again, Carole felt a kind of communal guilt. Without becoming overemotional, Malee’s words expressed the pain that her alien status had caused her. Fethering could be a chilly environment for people who did not fit one of its prescribed templates. And Carole could not completely exonerate herself from the kind of prejudice that the village consensus expressed. She couldn’t forget the remarks she’d made about ‘Mail Order Brides’.

‘My return home was meant to be in different circumstances,’ said Malee.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Bill really took to Thailand. When he was out there, he absolutely fell in love with the place. He talked of us living there after he retired.’

Carole remembered Tom Kendrick raising that possibility. ‘Did he have a plan as to when he intended to retire?’ she asked.

‘I would have said yes. He talked about September of this year. He said he couldn’t face another winter in England.’

‘You said you “would have said yes” …?’

For the first time in their conversation, Malee seemed uncertain, even a little confused. ‘Something happened to Bill in the last few months … the last few months of his life, I suppose I have to say.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He changed. Up until then, he had been so positive. From the moment we met, everything was positive. He was full of plans for us, plans for our future.’

Carole thought back to the last conversation she’d had with Bill, on the morning of his death. ‘Positive’ was the last word that could be used to describe it.

‘But then, suddenly,’ Malee went on, ‘round about October, I suppose, his mood changed.’

‘In what way?’