‘Happy Christmas!’ he shouted, coming forward to the table where he laughingly off-loaded his wares, before swinging Molly into his arms. Her heart sank. It wasn’t Jack. It was the bargee, Mick. Mick, with a broad smile on his handsome face, and two very excited children clinging to his trousers. Mick, not Jack. The realization cut through her like a knife.

‘Come on, Molly sweetheart… let’s have you resting!’ he told Molly while leading her gently back to the chair. There was a special tenderness in his voice and a knowing look in his amber eyes, which told Molly that he knew what had happened: the night’s trauma, the boy-child, even that her husband had deserted them. No doubt Tilly had sent her son, Joey, to let Mick know what had taken place here. Though Molly would be eternally grateful that the children would have a proper Christmas after all, she wished that it could have been Jack who had provided it. As it wasn’t, she wondered how she could ever forgive him.

Chapter Five

‘You pay me to advise you, Mr Crowther, and I am advising you now… stay as far away from Emma Tanner as you possibly can. Now that the date for the court hearing is set, you can only make matters worse should you even consider approaching her.’ Mr Dunworthy leaned forward across his vast desk-top and, peering intently through his tiny spectacles at the grim-faced man before him, he repeated in a softer yet more penetrating voice, ‘Stay away from Mrs Tanner, or be prepared to face the consequences.’ His voice was authoritative and free of emotion, but in the privacy of his own thoughts, the man was only just beginning to realize how very much he disliked Caleb Crowther: once a Justice who was feared and hated by all who were brought before him, but now retired and soon to be at the wrong end of a courtroom himself.

‘To hell with it, man!’ Springing from his chair with such anger that it was sent spinning on its axis, Caleb Crowther stormed back and forth across the office, his fists clenched tight behind his back and his head bowed to his chin. In spite of his fierce response to Mr Dunworthy’s instruction to ‘stay away from Mrs Tanner’, there was an air of despondency about his bent countenance, and more than a suggestion of fear. Suddenly he swung round to face the small, fish-like face behind the desk. ‘I should go and see the bitch… confront her and warn her off for her own good. This business is all wrong and you know it. The damned woman’s vindictive… got her facts all wrong. If you ask me, her brains have been addled by the Australian sun. She spent too many years amongst the convicts… there’s not a manjack who was ever transported that did not claim they were innocent. Emma Grady was no different!’

‘So you’re still convinced she had a hand in the murder of her husband?’ Mr Dunworthy was not of the same mind. He never had been.