If Jepson’s reporter instincts had noted anything, it was that Mrs Overs always acted as if she had fifty things that she wanted to say but was forcing herself to hold back at least forty-seven of them. Some of those were bound to be secrets; everyone had secrets.

The jam roll, somewhat lacking in jam, arrived and was eaten. The weak tea was sipped. The café, busy when he’d entered, fell into a mid-afternoon lull.

Vee, still glancing up every time the door opened, could sense Jepson just behind her, though she was careful not to turn her head. The letter she’d received had not specified an exact time, only that she should be in the Rose Café from two o’clock onward, and that she was to bring payment in a paper bag rather than an envelope. ‘As I know what you look like, there is no need to describe myself.’ For a mad moment, when Jepson had doffed his hat to her, she’d thought that he must be the mysterious letter-writer, blackmailing her from within the house, but it had turned out that he was just being unwontedly kind. Unwantedly. Though she was quite glad, now, not to be alone in the café during the wait.

She leaned an elbow on the table and put a hand to her lips. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘I can get the notes from the other reporter, later on. Besides, it was a very dull case.’

‘Was it?’

‘It revolved around Clause 5 of the National Emergency Confectionery Law of 1939. The sort of thing that ends up as two paragraphs on page seven.’

Vee stiffened as the café door opened again, and then relaxed at the sight of two women with shopping. For the umpteenth time, she checked her handbag, wedged between her feet. It contained Dr Simpkin’s jewellery, rolled in a piece of oil-cloth and placed in a paper bag: a garnet brooch, a ring that might be a sapphire, a necklace that looked expensive. She had kept back some of the other items in case the blackmailer asked again, because she knew that’s what blackmailers did. ‘I am aware that you are not actually Noel Bostock’s aunt, and that you are therefore living in Green Shutters under false pretences and using an assumed identity, something that would certainly be of considerable interest to the police.’ She’d opened the letter in the kitchen and had almost dropped dead, her heart jumping around like a clockwork monkey, the cheap paper gripped so tightly that her thumbnail had gone straight through the signature. Yours sincerely, A concerned observer. Thank God she’d been on her own, because it had been minutes before her lips had stopped trembling – and yet, beyond the shock, there had been an awful sense of inevitability; she’d spent half of her life waiting for one axe or another to fall.

‘You could tell me about an interesting case,’ she said to Jepson. ‘To take my mind off.’

‘All right.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Last month I reported on a woman who received a summons for failing to comply with a Ministry of Labour direction. She was supposed to report to a factory as a trainee, but she said she was already doing work of extreme national importance.’ He left an enticing pause.