‘You could ask Mr Stellion if she could stay here for the time being. There are the two attic rooms I used to use, now empty. Nell and Mum could both fit in there and it’d satisfy the gossips,’ suggested Gina.

‘Gina, that’s a grand idea, although I mustn’t assume that Mr Stellion will say yes.’

‘I’ll ask Mrs S now. She likes Mum,’ said Gina.

Mrs Stellion was very upset to hear about the end of Dora’s marriage and that she’d had to escape and seek the protection of Tom Arnold. She asked Dora to come to see her, and Ellen, too, and she listened to their story. Then she agreed to let Dora and Ellen have the attic rooms and made a lot of fuss about whether they were all right after the violence they’d suffered over the years, and whether they’d be comfortable enough there. She had Mrs Bassett making tea for everyone, and could not have been kinder, though the whole business was such a strain on her that she then had to go and lie down on her bed with the curtains drawn.

Gina saw James drive away mid-morning. This was what she had been waiting for. Since the previous evening when she’d seen him give the bag to the rough fella lurking at the back door of that awful pub, she had been almost bursting with curiosity, and James’s reluctance to tell her anything had only fuelled her desire to find out.

Carrying a large pile of clean towels as a cover for her actions, she went into his room and shut the door. Everyone was at work and Mrs Stellion was lying down.

It was odd, now Gina had met him, to think that this room was where James slept when he came home. With the Spitfire suspended from the ceiling, it was like a little boy’s perfect bedroom, not a man’s room at all.

His things were lying around untidily. Gina knew she needed to cover her tracks, so she decided to make a note of where anything was before she moved it. She couldn’t see a bag like the one he’d given to the man in the pub, though she thought he’d taken a couple out of the car on his arrival. However, she hadn’t actually seen him leave the house and he might have taken the second one with him. Nor could she see anything that might have been what the man had given him in return.

She went over to the wardrobe, remembering Mrs Thwaite’s hiding place for the stolen gin, and opened the door. There was a shirt and a jacket hanging inside, and that was all. Of course, the first thing she did was search the jacket pockets, but they were empty. The little pigeonholes at the side had only a few small items of clothing in them.