‘Look,’ said Alec. ‘Donny? Look, she had nothing to do with William getting done over.’

‘Yeah she did. It was done because of her. By that light-fingered bastard Dickie Cole. Everyone knows it. It was at your wedding to Lil, they had a falling-out and Dickie and one of his bastard mates got my brother, my fucking brother, alone on a bomb site and beat the crap out of him. And now I want to know where she is, and you are going to tell me.’

‘No,’ said Alec.

Again, his head was whacked back against the brickwork. Panic was setting in. It was like during the war. It was a nightmare returning, plunging him into madness all over again. He was shaking now, his resolve splintering away to nothing. After all, what did he owe that flashy mare Dora? She was the black sheep of the family, a disgrace; they all said so. So what was he taking a beating for her for?

‘She’s gone up north,’ he blurted out.

Donny grew still, his grip on Alec tight. ‘Where up north?’

‘Yorkshire. To one of the aunts.’

‘Go on,’ said Donny.

Alec told him the rest. He hated himself for it, but he did.

39

Dora was settling in at Aunt Min’s, although big burly red-faced Uncle Joe gave her the creeps. First night she was there, he was all smiles and nice, then he started wandering into her bedroom in his striped pyjamas at all hours ‘just to check you’re OK,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ she said the first time he did it. ‘I’m fine.’

The second time he checked she was OK, she was still polite, ushering him back out the door loudly, so that Aunt Lil heard every word from the front bedroom. Dora heard raised voices after that one. And for a while, Uncle Joe’s night-time visits ceased.

Then they started again.

On Joe’s third visit, he arrived to check ‘that she was OK’ while wearing only his pyjama jacket. Seemingly, he had somehow forgotten his pyjama bottoms – and there was his old man out on show, swinging hopefully in the breeze.

After that, Dora pulled the tallboy across the door and the next time he tried to get in, he couldn’t. And she thought that Aunt Min knew what the randy old git was up to, because Min’s attitude toward her niece grew frostier by the day.

Now Dora sat in her bedroom and looked out at the sheeting rain over the mist-shrouded dales and thought that this was going to be a bloody long haul, having this kid. She still thought it was dead inside her, and she wondered, she really did, why it didn’t just come away, bleed out of her. She had never felt so alone. She missed the sparkle of London, missed all the lovely places that bastard Frank had taken her to and the people she’d met there. Oh, Aunt Min was company of sorts – although she worked Dora half to death, getting her doing the cleaning and washing-up while Uncle Joe was out and about on the farm.