Perry waited while she composed herself. ‘Jane told her mum, when she was about three months gone. Frank was enraged, concerned about his standing among the neighbours, many of whom were regulars at his betting shop, especially after Harold whispered to his brother in law that he’d seen her talking to West Indians. Eileen was religious, and wouldn’t hear of letting the girl have an abortion. Jane wouldn’t say who the father was, but I thought I knew.’

‘What gave you the suspicion?’

‘Linda and Harold had tried for a baby for years and got nowhere. Linda was just consumed with the desire to be a mother, and I think Harold had suggested years ago that they adopt. I had known that my Harold liked young girls, but I never guessed that he had taken advantage of his own niece, until Eileen whispered to me one day that her little Jane was pregnant.’

‘How did they conceal it?’

‘I think Harold threatened Jane to keep her mouth shut. And it would have destroyed the family, no mistake. Harold and Linda offered to bring up the child, and Linda dressed up for a pregnancy that she didn’t have. It seemed like the best solution. Frank got a bent doctor to write a series of false sick notes for Jane saying she had glandular fever, and pulled her out of school. Harold and Linda moved across to a rented flat on the other side of the High Road, to be on the safe side, away from nosy neighbours and Jane’s friends. The girl didn’t leave the flat for months once she began to show. So in November 1981, on the settee in that poky flat in Wandsworth, I delivered my granddaughter’s baby. It was a tiny little thing, just an angry red bundle of noise and fists. But it wasn’t black, thank God.’ Seeing Perry’s expression, she hurriedly added: ‘Not that I’m racial, mind. It just would have been harder to pass off as Harold and Linda’s.’

‘What about registering the birth, midwife visits and so on?’

‘The same bent doctor sorted that out. He had some gambling debts that Frank let him off. By the time social services and the NHS heard about little Graeme, he was already a toddler.’

‘But he would only have been six months old when Jane disappeared,’ Perry said. ‘I’m really surprised police didn’t look more closely into the origin of that child when your granddaughter disappeared.’

‘The Garrison family knows how to keep its gob shut. Besides, we had a story to tell that the police in those days liked to hear: gone off with a darkie.’

Perry recoiled at the epithet. ‘Did you suspect that Harold had killed her?’

‘Not at first. But I had noticed how she looked at him so accusing like. I think she wanted her baby back. And she used to cry a lot. We told the police how she’d been quite listless and down with the glandular and all that, and that was true. She was a living misery after we gave her baby away to Linda. I think everybody was worried that she was going to grass her uncle up.’