‘When did you last see him?’ The room was very hot and Vera hadn’t bothered to take off her coat. She felt almost faint.

‘Ages ago,’ the woman said. She paused. ‘He had problems. He had to go away.’

‘What sort of problems?’ Vera pulled her arms out of her jacket, but didn’t stand up.

‘He got into a bad crowd,’ Val said. ‘When we lived in the West End. He wanted the excitement. That male-pride thing. He was never one for settling down. That’s why we moved out here. I didn’t think his mates would find him out on the coast.’ She was staring at the television set, at a woman showing off a kitchen the size of her bungalow.

‘And did they?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Val said. ‘Things were going on. Maybe he’d just got the bug and wanted to play the hard man, to get a bit of respect in his own right.’ She paused. ‘Sometimes I think it’s worse for the boys. People expect them to be tough. Rick always wanted to seem tough.’

‘So people didn’t like him.’ Vera thought she was getting to the root of the matter now. An idea fired in her head, bounced around the facts, shifted her perspective. ‘He was cruel and people were scared of him. He always wanted to be top dog.’

‘He was showing off,’ Val said. ‘Hardly more than a lad when he first got into bother.’

‘What happened?’ Vera asked. ‘The night of Billy Kerr’s birthday party? The night of the fire.’

Val lay back in her chair as if she was suddenly exhausted. ‘I don’t know. Rick was wild that night. Drugs, I think. He was into all sorts.’ She looked at Vera. ‘You don’t want to believe that your kids might be bad. Because it’s your fault, isn’t it? Who else can you blame?’

Vera put her hand on the woman’s fat slab of an arm. ‘Tell me.’ Tell me your story.

‘We’d decided to have a bit of a party for Billy Kerr. The boys in the boats organized it. Paid for some food, got one of the wives to make a cake. It was hot. That summer it was hot every day. And from the start of the evening I could tell there would be trouble. There was a kind of tension. You felt there’d be one wrong word and the place would go up.’ The woman turned to look at Vera. ‘That Margaret Krukowski was at the bottom of it. She wound the men up. All of them. I read about her in the paper when she was killed, and I couldn’t recognize her. Some sort of saint. Religious. Spending her time in that place for women with problems. Well, she’d know all about that.’

‘Your Rick fancied her, did he?’