‘I don’t see why not.’ He got out of the car, then went round and opened her door for her. It was still very cold.

She took his hand and pulled herself out, then stood for a moment looking up and down the street. On the pavement opposite, Peter Gruskin let himself into the church.

‘Could we go in there first?’ She nodded towards St Bartholomew’s. ‘For old time’s sake.’

Joe wasn’t sure what the priest would make of them wandering in, but it was a place of worship and it belonged to the community, not to one man. He crooked his arm so that Susan could hold onto it to steady herself as they crossed the icy road.

‘Were you a member of the congregation?’ he asked.

‘I was baptized there,’ she said. ‘And I went there to grieve, when they took the baby.’

‘Was it a boy or a girl?’

‘A little girl,’ she said. ‘I called her Ellen, after my mother. I don’t know what her new parents called her.’

‘You never tried to find out what happened to her?’ Joe tried to imagine what that would be like. To hand over a child when you’d been through the pain of labour and you’d held it in your arms. All those hormones rushing around your body and your mind.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair. Besides, they were right. I wouldn’t have been able to give her any sort of life.’

She opened the church door, and Joe let her walk ahead of him. Partly because he’d been brought up to think it was gentlemanly to let the woman walk first, and partly because Peter Gruskin spooked him. He was used to Methodist ministers, who dressed like everyone else, apart from a soft white collar at the neck.

Gruskin wasn’t there. He must be in a back room. They sat for a moment in a pew. Joe looked at Susan and almost expected to see her crying again, those big silent tears that she’d shed when she’d heard about Margaret, but she was just staring towards the altar. After a few minutes she stood up and he followed her out.

‘It brings it all back,’ she said. ‘Not the details – I was off my head most of the time and I can’t remember much – but how I felt.’

‘You said you knew Margaret’s boss,’ Joe said. They were outside now and the light seemed suddenly very bright and they were squinting against it.

‘Did I?’ She still seemed preoccupied by the church and glanced back to look at it.

‘That would have been Malcolm Kerr’s dad, Billy?’

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I expect that you’re right.’

‘Was Billy one of Margaret’s clients?’ It had just come to Joe as a possibility.

‘No, pet, I don’t think anything like that was going on.’