‘No!’ The word rattled like a bullet around the room and then Val continued almost in a whisper, ‘If Rick fancied anyone, it was himself. I wondered if he was into men at one time, but there was no sign of that, either. He was a loner. His interest in Margaret was . . .’ she paused to find the right word ‘. . . professional.’

And then Vera understood. ‘He wanted to be her pimp.’

‘He thought she’d do better with a man to handle things for her.’ Val stared out of the window and her words were defensive. ‘He’d been knocking around with the gangs in town. He knew how they operated and he saw himself running the same sort of schemes out here on the coast.’

‘Did he sell drugs to Susan Coulson?’ Vera pictured the man she’d seen in the photo. Dark hair, long over the ears. Hard grey eyes. It triggered another, more recent memory.

‘He’d sell his own mother,’ Val said. ‘If the price was right.’ Her voice suddenly bitter. Vera blinked and the pictures in her head shifted again and became firmer.

‘But you protected him. You let him operate from your pub.’

‘He’s my son!’ It came out as a wail.

‘So that night, Billy Kerr’s birthday party.’ Let’s get on with the story.

‘That night something was going on. I talked to Rick and told him I didn’t want any bother. But you could smell it. The violence. He was twitchy, angry. I wondered if some of the old crowd had threatened him, if he was expecting them to come and get what he owed them.’ The big woman closed her eyes briefly. Vera could tell that in her head she was standing behind the bar, pulling pints, cracking jokes, and all the time waiting for her son to ruin all that she’d achieved there. It would take a certain kind of courage not to fall apart. ‘Everyone had drunk too much, and it got wild and noisy, folk out in the street. I lost sight of Rick, but I couldn’t go and see what was happening. It was dark by then, but steamy hot, like it was a tropical country. You longed for a thunderstorm to clear the air. Or a bit of a breeze.’

Her attention was caught by the television again for a moment. A middle-aged couple with a dog at their feet, standing arm-in-arm outside their dream cottage. A universe away.

‘Then we saw the fire in the yard. The flames so high that you could see them from inside the Coble. By then it was gone midnight and I’d carried on selling past closing time, because everyone expects a lock-in when it’s somebody’s birthday. And I knew the police would come and I’d be in danger of losing my licence, so all I could think of was getting the place cleared.’