Betty had never been told which army officer had delivered the news of Kasey’s death, but now as her eyes met Samuel’s she knew it would have to have been him. The nice bloke, the one all the boys liked, the one who appreciated music.

She flicked back her hair, a gesture of defiance, and held his gaze boldly, all the while pounding away at the piano like an automaton. But she couldn’t disguise the truth. The hardness in her eyes spoke to Samuel of nothing but pain.

He didn’t even finish his beer. Giving her the slightest nod of recognition, which he hoped signalled his sympathy, he left the bar. He needed to get home to Amelia.

At the very moment Samuel left The Brown’s, Pete Vickers was settling himself into another bar, the Seaview down on The Strand.

The Seaview was a raucous pub without the architectural elegance and gentrified atmosphere of the Queen’s Hotel, home to the American Officers’ Club further along The Strand. But the Seaview was after all home to the Australian Officers’ Club, and Aussies were known to be raucous. There was never any sense of decorum and certainly no recognition of hierarchy at the Seaview. In fact, the bar was known to attract the rowdiest of customers, and the rooms upstairs, which housed the officers when in town on leave, were considered little more than a brothel.

Pete was following through with his plan. It was Friday night and he was at the pub where the Aussies hung out. If he was going to get any information from the Queensland Nasho boys of the 51st Regiment, this was the most likely place he’d find them and tonight was the most likely night they’d be here. Tonight or tomorrow, and if none of them turned up tonight he’d come back tomorrow.

He’d enquired at the bar and Alf, the old bartender whom he’d known for years, had said yeah, a number of the young blokes from the 51st regularly came in on a Friday or Saturday, and yeah, he’d be happy to point them out when they did.

Pete sat at the bar sipping away slowly at his beer. He’d arrived early. The pub wasn’t yet overly noisy, but with only a few hours of opening to hand it wouldn’t be long before it was; men needed to make the most of the limited drinking time at their disposal. He hoped the boys he was after would turn up before things got too rowdy.

He was in luck. About halfway through his second beer, they arrived, three of them, very young, barely twenty.

‘That’s a few of ’em,’ Alf prompted with a none-too-subtle jerk of his head as they walked through the main doors. ‘Good kids.’