We sat up most of that night, talking. She opened up to me for the first time since we’d met. She told me the story of Jean Burdon – the little girl the newspapers had dubbed ‘evil’, of how she was neglected and physically abused by her father, left to roam around the abandoned bombsites of east London. ‘And then I made a friend,’ she said, her face ashen in the moonlight. ‘And I was so happy that I’d found someone who actually cared about me. I wasn’t emotionally intelligent. I didn’t understand about relationships, particularly with other kids. I had this rage inside me . . .’ She gave a little sob and I squeezed her hand in reassurance. ‘Anyway, when Susan – that was her name – decided she didn’t want to be friends with me any more I saw red. They said I picked up a brick and smacked her over the head with it. But I can’t remember doing that. I think I might have pushed her, though, and she fell and hit her head.’

‘Oh, Daphne.’

‘I went to prison – of course. Well, it wasn’t an adult prison. A secure unit. I was rehabilitated, thankfully by well-adjusted kind adults who taught me the rights and wrongs my own parents never did.’ She pulled the quilt up to her chin and shivered as though remembering.

‘It must have been awful,’ I said.

‘It was less awful than the house I was brought up in.’

I couldn’t even imagine. My own upbringing had been lovely, the only child to two kind, attentive parents.

I let Daphne talk that night about her childhood, her life. How she was given a new identity as Sheila Watts, how she’d had to steal the identity of Daphne Hartall from her friend Alan when she realized that the journalist, Neil Lewisham, had discovered who she really was.

I didn’t tell her my story. Not then. I’d kept it a secret for so many years that to speak it out loud would have felt too much.

And I didn’t want things to change between us. Daphne might feel uncomfortable if she knew my history. I continued to let her believe I was a widow, that my ‘husband’ had died before you were born.

I hadn’t even told her about my last girlfriend.

Audrey and I were together a long time. We didn’t hide our sexuality: there was nobody to hide it from. My parents were dead and she came from a very liberal, cerebral family. Her parents were academics. Even in the 1970s, with free love and the sexual revolution, there were still those who judged us, who thought nothing of telling us of their disapproval.

But when I turned thirty I wanted the one thing Audrey couldn’t give me.

A baby.

And that was when I met Victor.

42

Lorna

‘WE NEED TO RING DS BARNES,’ SAYS LORNA, FIRST thing the next morning.