“Queenie told me how Harold had broken into Napier’s office one night. She had seen him sitting outside the brewery earlier that evening in his car. She hadn’t gone over. She thought he might be crying and didn’t wish to intrude. It was only when the news went round the following day that she had put two and two together. It was grief, she said; grief made people behave in the strangest ways. In her opinion Harold was on a course of self-destruction. In smashing those Murano glass clowns to smithereens, he was deliberately challenging Napier to do his worst. Their boss was hell bent on revenge.” Maureen paused and dabbed her nose. “So Queenie took the blame. Being a plain woman, she said, made it easier; Napier was thrown off balance. She told him she had accidentally knocked the clowns while dusting.”

The girl laughed, but she too was crying. “You mean to say this all happened because your husband smashed some glass clowns? Were they valuable?”

“Not at all. They had belonged to his mother. Napier was a vicious thug. He had three wives, and he gave them all black eyes. One ended up in hospital with broken ribs. But he loved his mother.” She gave a limp smile, which hung on her face a moment, until she shrugged and cleared it away. “So Queenie stood there and took the blame for what Harold had done; and then she let Napier fire her. She told me all this, and she asked me to tell Harold not to worry. He had been kind to her, she said. It was the least she could do.”

“But you didn’t tell him?”

“No. I let him suffer. And then it became another of the things we couldn’t say, and drove us further apart.” She opened her eyes wide and let the tears fall. “You see, he was right to walk out on me.”

The garage girl didn’t answer. She took a further flapjack and for several minutes she seemed to be thinking of nothing other than the taste of it. Then she said, “I don’t think it’s true that he walked out on you. I don’t think you’re a fraud either, Mrs Fry. We all make mistakes. But I do know one thing.”

“What? What?” moaned Maureen, rocking her head in her hands. How could she ever mend the mistakes of so long ago? Her marriage was over.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t be stuck here, making biscuits and talking to me. I’d be doing something.”

“But I drove all the way to Darlington. It made no difference.”