It struck her, as she coughed her way through the first fag she’d had in years, that Jepson wasn’t looking as uncomfortable as you might expect for a man whose landlady had just wept noisily and unexpectedly in front of him.

‘You do this, don’t you?’ she asked, with sudden realization. ‘For the newspaper. You talk to people after they’ve seen horrible things.’

‘I do on occasion, yes.’

He hesitated, and then pulled out a chair opposite her and sat as he always did, a little on the slant, so that she couldn’t see the crumpled depression where his left ear had been.

She had never asked him about it; she touched a hand to her own ear. ‘The Great War, was it?’

‘Yes. They tried to sew it back on, but it didn’t take. Still, I wasn’t exactly Valentino to begin with, so …’ He gave a twitch of a smile. He still had the slender build of so many of those grinning lads who’d marched off to war carrying packs nearly as large as themselves. He had, too, the careful, raw, guarded air of those who’d returned – a generation dropped and then carelessly mended, the pieces not quite aligning. Bits missing.

‘Were you already married then?’ she asked.

He looked startled. ‘No. No, I met Della afterwards.’ The conversation seemed suddenly to stall, and Jepson’s face lost all expression, his fingers picking at themselves, his pale eyes focussed on someone who wasn’t in the kitchen. You’d think he was the one who’d lost a spouse, thought Vee, and then realized that she was mixing him up with a previous lodger whose wife had gone to her aunt in Cheadle, to escape the bombs, and that Jepson had never before even mentioned a wife, and that she had undoubtedly just put her foot in it.

‘Well …’ she said, awkwardly.

‘And what about you, Mrs Overs?’ asked Jepson, with an obvious effort, and still looking as if he’d accidentally swallowed a lead weight. ‘Where did you meet your husband?’

And now it was her turn to stall, since it was exactly the sort of question she always worried about, but never planned for. She heard herself give a false and breathy laugh – ‘Ooh, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it!’ – and then Noel came in, thank God, and she didn’t have to decide which particular lie to tell. Though it wasn’t until she was giving Noel a dry summary of the accident – one that omitted her own near-miss – that she remembered tomorrow’s appointment, and felt her heart trip over itself.

‘Oh, I’ve come across Sergeant Bayliss,’ said Jepson. ‘He’s not a bad sort.’

‘What will I have to say to him?’

‘Simply what you saw. He’ll talk to all the witnesses, and then get a draughtsman to draw up a diagram of the scene so that they can use it in court.’

‘In court?’

‘It’ll be a coroner’s case – road traffic accidents always are.’