‘I know nothing about it,’ Mrs Baines said flatly. ‘And if I did, I shouldn’t tell you. I’ve done with it. I’ve cut that part of my life clean way.’

‘It must have been very horrible, for you to feel so violently about it.’

Mrs Baines ignored the bait.

‘It’s all over and done with,’ she said.

‘It’s for Ethel’s sake, Mrs Baines. A poor helpless child. If you would just . . .’

In a strangely even, controlled voice, Mrs Baines said:

‘Miss Mayfield, if Ethel Rigby stood in the road and a bus was coming, I wouldn’t move my hand to pull her on the pavement. Fretting about her was the start of things going wrong for me. Through her, I lost my husband and my self-respect. The one I’ll never get back, the other’ll take me years.’

‘Don’t you think,’ Miss Mayfield said diffidently, ‘that perhaps to help me might go quite a long way towards the recovery of your self-respect – that is, of course, if you really feel you have lost it.’

‘I tried to help you. When I wrote to you. What good did that do? You’re after me like a bloodhound, and you wouldn’t be warned. You go right on, busy bodying about, and one day it’ll be a “Poor Miss Mayfield, she must have had a weak heart; too much kneeling!” And they’ll say, “What a nice way to die – in church, at your prayers.” Well, I’ve warned you.’

And helped me, too, if you did but know. I was never sure that they would dare use the church. . . .

Mrs Baines moved her arm and looked at her watch.

‘I mustn’t waste any more of your time,’ Miss Mayfield said. She rose reluctantly, looking at Mrs Baines’s neat head and thinking of all the knowledge she must have hidden away there. For a moment she was on the verge of anger; then she remembered that there were some men who had been prisoners of war who could never be brought to mention their experiences. If Granny Rigby’s cult ran in any way true to form, Miss Mayfield could imagine how very distasteful a brush with it must have been to a woman of Mrs Baines’s nature.

‘There’s just one thing,’ Mrs Baines said in quite a different voice, pleading, uncertain. ‘You wouldn’t tell anybody where I am, would you? Decent places to live are so hard to find. I wouldn’t want to have to move again.’

‘You know I wouldn’t. I hope everything will go well for you and Sydney, always. Remember me to him, won’t you? I was very fond of Sydney. And now that I have found you, perhaps next time I come to London I might look you up again?’

‘That would be nice,’ Mrs Baines said, without much enthusiasm.