At first she’d thought about running a brothel upstairs, but it would invite too much trouble with the law, she’d decided, so, reserving several of the rooms as private accommodation and office space for herself and staff, she let out the others to guests. All but the larger room at the back, that is, the one that could be privately accessed via the hotel’s rear steps. Here was the preserve of those trusted customers who wished to gamble – poker for the main part, although Baz had recently installed a blackjack table. Where he’d got it from Val had no idea and she had no intention of asking. Thirty-year-old Barry ‘Baz’ Taylor was the consummate con man and the restrictions of war seemed to work in his favour. A past master in the nefarious black-market trade, he acquired so many commodities denied to the general public that where they came from was anyone’s guess. Fresh fruit and vegetables, butter, eggs and meat, even petrol, which was severely rationed. Val was one of the few Townsville citizens who still drove a car, all thanks to Baz. She could only presume the man had some inside connection with the Americans, who shamelessly flaunted the goods so readily available to them.

In any event, Baz had total charge of the Gaming Room, as it was known, and Val was happy to leave things that way. She didn’t even care if he was robbing her on the side, as she suspected he was – the place was attracting a great deal of custom, and customers meant money. Particularly now with the Yanks in town.

She realised that once again it was quite possible she’d linked up with a gambler, for Baz himself was a regular at the poker tables. But if so at least this gambler was successful, and she was not personally involved with him. Baz was merely convenient for business. At least that’s what she told herself. Baz was actually indispensable for business.

The Gaming Room was of course illegal, but they kept it discreet, and Val had decided early on that gambling wouldn’t be likely to cause as much of a problem with the law as prostitution.

These days, however, she’d changed her mind. Since the takeover of the town by the military, brothels were springing up all over the place, and despite disapproval from some local quarters, no-one was going to close them down. Certainly not the military, and therefore not the government. The military – who had the government in their collective pocket – were only too happy for troops to ‘satisfy their basic male urges’ with prostitutes rather than risk any form of emotional and lasting involvement with a woman, thereby losing focus upon the job at hand, which was to fight a war. The military, and most particularly the Americans, so far from home, were quite happy to have prostitutes available to service their men.