“I was so naïve; I thought she’d just flush it out and it would all be gone, but it wasn’t like that. I had to go back home to my mother and pretend nothing had happened, and then in the middle of the night the cramps started.”

She had crept to the lavatory, carrying the towel she used to protect the bedsheets. As she lowered herself onto the seat there was a sensation of something bursting and a torrent of blood, and clots like raw liver hit the sides of the bowl.

“Oh, Jean. What an awful experience.”

“My mother found me on the floor. She was very good—she must have called the doctor. He’d been quite kind to her after my father died, but he wasn’t kind to me.” I know what you’re about, young lady. If it wasn’t for your mother, I’d see you prosecuted—you and the person who did this to you. Even in her state of near delirium Jean had felt the burning shame of his judgment and the injustice that she had to bear it alone. “He seemed to take great pleasure in telling me that I’d probably never be able to have another child.”

Howard shook his head and his hands clenched the steering wheel, but he didn’t interrupt.

“We moved not long after that, so that was the last I saw of him, thankfully.”

“Had you ever considered keeping the baby? The father wasn’t willing to . . . take responsibility?”

“No. He wasn’t really . . . available, as it turned out.”

“Married already?”

“Oh yes. Anyone but me would have worked that out straightaway. He had a wife and children. I wasn’t even his only girlfriend.”

They had used to meet in the White Swan in Crystal Palace, not far from the Swinneys’ flat in Gipsy Hill. If Frank was early, which he seldom was, he would wait inside enjoying a pint until she arrived. More usually he was late and Jean, who was not comfortable sitting alone in a pub, would stand outside, checking her watch and fretting. Sometimes, more often than she liked to acknowledge, he failed to turn up at all.

“He did pay for the abortion, though.”

“Is that the best you can say for him?”

“Pretty much.”

He had finally turned up at the pub after an absence of three weeks, when she had almost given up. “Hello, lovely lady,” he said and, registering a certain brittleness in her response, “You’re annoyed with me, aren’t you?”

“I was worried when you didn’t show up. Twice.”

“Silly girl.”

He had kissed her fiercely—it was the sort of kiss designed to stop a woman from talking and there was no passion in it. They’d left the glow of the pub and crossed into the park, past the stone scars of the old Crystal Palace.

“What did you want to go worrying for?”

“Because I’m pregnant.”

She had watched the words land on him like a woman’s blows—a nuisance but doing no real damage.