Miss Mayfield raised herself a little, and the room went into a spin. She lay down again.

‘How do you know? What happened?’

‘How I know is, I seen her. Back of her head all bashed in and her neck lolling. Like this . . .’ Ethel gave a horribly lifelike imitation. ‘What happened I didn’t stop to ask. I was more took up with keeping out of my gran’s clutches, and out of the Rectory. We was nearly done for when Mr Maverick came roaring up and I screeched at him to take you to the doctor. He showed sense, I’ll say that for him. I reckon myself he smelt a rat.’ She drew breath. ‘What next, thass what I wonder. The one thing I do know, I’ll never go back to my gran; not after what she done to my rabbits.’

‘You certainly shan’t. You can come and live with me, Ethel. Unless there’s anywhere you’d rather be.’

‘What I’d like above all is to go and live with Miss Bedfellow, at Yarmouth. Oh, she is nice.’

‘I could arrange that easily.’

‘Just by saying you’d show some snaps? Without showing them, I mean.’

‘It’s rather more than snaps; it’s a film, like you see at the cinema.’

‘With everything on it that went on last night?’

‘Yes. You see, now I have that, I can put a stop to it all. There’s nothing they dread more than exposure.’

‘Thass right,’ Ethel said thoughtfully. Then she added, ‘But if they never see you’ve got it . . . I mean, all along, couldn’t you hev said you had it. Where’s the difference?’

‘Because now I have it. And if they don’t give up the whole business, or if you and I have any “accidents”, then it is there for all to see.’

‘Yes,’ Ethel said. ‘I can see that.’ She rose from the chair. ‘Mrs Maverick said I was to tell her when you woke up. And what would you like for your breakfast?’

‘Some tea, please, Ethel, and a slice of bread and butter, perhaps.’

Halfway along the landing, there was a bathroom. Ethel turned in to it and locked the door. Pulling up her cardigan, she took the camera from the pouch in which it had lain. She had never handled one before, so what she had to do took a little time. And she pulled the plug twice, just to make quite certain. She had no qualms over what she was doing. She had confidence in Miss Mayfield, and if she said she could do what she wanted with the camera locked up in a Bank, what did it matter whether there was a film in it or not? Why should she leave, for someone one day to see, a cinema film of herself, stark naked, with a wreath of flowers on her head? Wasn’t that what she had objected to all along?