‘What was it?’ asked Vee.

‘Spiritual healing. Using her nose.’

‘Her nose?’

‘She’d stand in front of the person and smell which parts of them required healing. And then she would take a scent bottle – one that had been blessed – and squirt that particular part. She had numerous testimonials from satisfied customers.’

Vee was assailed by the jealousy she always felt when learning about people who made easy money, apparently legally. ‘Did they say what sort of scent it was?’ she asked.

‘Cedar, I think. I rather suspect it was a moth spray.’

Vee almost laughed, and then remembered where she was, and why she was there, and it was as if someone had dropped a cinder block on her heart. ‘Oh dear God,’ she said, involuntarily, and covered her face with her hands.

‘I wish I could help you,’ said Jepson, half turning.

‘You can’t.’

‘You know, there isn’t much I haven’t seen or heard about – I’ve covered crime and scandal and cruelty and extortion, and I can’t think of anything that shocks me any longer. Are you being dunned for a loan? If you need some money, I could help you out.’

From the corner of his eye, he saw her shake her head.

‘Or is someone threatening you in some way?’

She straightened, as if jabbed in the back. He spoke even more softly. ‘Are you being blackmailed?’

The door opened as he said the words, and Vee flinched so violently that the table jerked forward and her empty tea cup fell over.

‘Can I get you anything else?’ asked the elderly waitress, rather crossly. By the entrance, a small girl and her mother were shaking snow off their matching tam-o’shanters.

‘Another tea, please,’ said Vee, her voice wavering like a musical saw.

‘I’ll have a cocoa,’ said Jepson, and then, as the waitress left, he turned his head towards the wall again. ‘It’s much commoner than you might think – there’s a case in the paper every week because nearly everyone has something they’d rather keep hidden. Often it’s not even a past crime, it’s just something quite ordinary – a shameful moment – and half the time the blackmailer has no intention of actually exposing the victim, because they’d end up in trouble themselves. My advice would be: don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Pay up.’

There’s the voice of someone who’s never heard the policeman’s knock, thought Vee. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she said.

‘You might think that,’ said Jepson, ‘but I spent twenty-four years in a marriage that should have ended in five, because I was blackmailed. Not for money – well, it was partly for money, I suppose …’

Footsteps approached. ‘One cocoa. One tea,’ announced the waitress. ‘You do know that we don’t charge extra if you want to sit at the same table,’ she added, tartly.

Vee gave her a look. ‘Go on,’ she said, once the waitress had left. ‘If you can, I mean. If you want to.’ She kept her eye on the window, on the passers-by, bulky with scarves, heads down against the snow, and Jepson ran a finger over his moustache and wondered why he had just told someone he scarcely knew a fact that he had never told anyone else, and he thought that it was partly because he wasn’t having to look her in the eye. An inadvertent confessional; the Catholics knew a thing or two.