Much later she went up to her room in the attic. She did not have a writing desk nor paper nor pen. But she did have a piece of an old laundry bill and a pencil. And she did have a little table beside her bed, and if she moved the water jug to the floor she could make a space to write. She considered for a moment and then she wrote, as she had always known she was going to from the moment she had picked up Mr Dunlevy’s newspaper:

Dear Mrs Flowers …

Verity was with child. It had not occurred to Alasdair. And yet why should she not be with child? His child.

The elderly clerk watched him, watched his face, seeing all or seeing nothing, it was impossible to tell.

‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ the man said, with a sigh for all of Man’s failings or, more precisely, for all of Woman’s failings. ‘I fear you were sadly deceived by Miss Trent, sir. She was not set upon the moral path you must have presumed. Or if she was, she has strayed very far from it.’

‘Indeed,’ said Alasdair.

But a child! His ears rang with it. And she had told him nothing, though they had lain together so intimately, her nakedness a thing of wonder in his arms, her breath on his chest, the softness of her flesh beneath his fingers. He had done this, given her his most precious gift, and with it she had created a child. Their child.

He would not think of that other child, the one his wife had carried inside her for eight months and that had reversed the natural order of things by dying before it was born.

But the joy and the grief—they made him giddy!

‘She has been offered spiritual support but refused it, I believe,’ continued the clerk in the manner of one for whom the rejection of God’s love was, clearly, incomprehensible.

‘Then I shall see her myself,’ Alasdair declared, rising once more and casting himself, in both their eyes, the hero.

But there was something, a cliff edge it was, that he remembered he stood at, balanced precariously. He peered over its edge and felt the dizziness of vertigo.

‘She has not said who the father is, I take it?’

The elderly clerk shook his head. ‘She has not. As I say, she remains in a state of unconsciousness. Though perhaps she has said something to the police? I cannot say. And perhaps the wretched woman does not, herself, know.’

‘Good God,’ said Alasdair, as this seemed expected.

The precipice was gone. But at once a second opened up to take its place, this one right beneath his feet and he almost could not speak.

‘But, Mr Gregson, you mentioned the police. I still do not understand why the police are involved. There was an injury to Miss Trent, but—no, I am afraid I do not understand.’