‘It was big enough for her to get all her files in, so she didn’t need a briefcase.’ Hannah gave a sudden smile. ‘She loved it. It was made of soft, red leather.’

‘These notebooks you’re talking about, she’d have carried them in the bag too?’

‘Probably.’ Hannah was losing interest now. She was staring out of the window. ‘Do you think Simon will be back soon?’ As if the boy could somehow save her from her sadness, as if he was the only person who could.

Chapter Seventeen

Joe Ashworth thought it was all very well for Vera to give her orders, but prising Holly from the Lister house hadn’t been easy. In the end there’d been a compromise: she said she’d go as soon as the family liaison officer turned up in the afternoon. Which meant that in the morning he was on his own in Barnard Bridge and, while Vera had said someone would know about Jenny’s lover, tracking that person down hadn’t proved easy either. Ashworth had grown up in one of the pit villages in south-east Northumberland – though there hadn’t been many pits left even when he was a small child. It was the sort of place where kids played in the streets and their mams sat on the doorsteps, watching them and gossiping. He had no problem digging out secrets on his old stomping ground. Vera said he was like a magician, that he could conjure confidences from thin air. But there was no magic to it. He’d wander into the nearest social club, slip into the dialect that marked him out as one of their own, and soon the barmaid would be telling him what he wanted to know. Or directing him to someone who could help. Everyone liked telling stories, and Joe was a good listener.

This place was different. He arrived just before nine, thinking that he might catch the young mothers as they dropped their bairns off at school, forgetting of course that there was no longer a school in the village. It had been converted into a swanky house, two big cars parked where once the playground had been. There was the playgroup that Connie Masters’s daughter attended, but that only ran for three days a week. He looked at the notice outside the village hall. Not today. The main street was empty of pedestrians, though there was a steady stream of traffic and the vibrations of the lorries seemed to churn in his head and stopped him thinking clearly. The baby had woken a couple of times in the night and the lack of sleep didn’t help.