“Manipulative? A user?”

“Of course. But without seeming so obvious. He was a charmer, was Danny, when he wanted to be. When he wanted something. If he committed the occasional indiscretion, odds were there’d be people to cover it up, people who didn’t want any grief to fall on him.”

“You’re saying he bribed his way out of an investigation?”

“I’m saying he didn’t have to. He was golden, was Danny. Untouchable.”

“Rape isn’t a simple indiscretion, Mrs. . . . Canning . . . and Danny wasn’t particularly charming when he wanted to have sex with the girl we’ve just talked to.”

Carol made a dismissive gesture. “He always got what he wanted, one way or another. There’s no doubt he was screwed up. But he’s not stupid. He might not have had much formal education, but he taught himself.”

“The point remains,” Banks went on, “that the girl did report the assault, the rape, to the local police at the time, which makes me inclined to believe that it did happen.”

“And they did nothing. What I said before still stands. She got pissed and went too far. Regretted it in the morning.”

“Then why would she bother going to the police and raking it all up? Surely that must have been painful for her. Nobody knew. Why not just get on with her life and chalk it down to inexperience?”

“I don’t know. Guilt? Shame? Maybe she wasn’t too bright. Maybe she got pregnant.”

“She didn’t.”

“Don’t tell me Danny used a rubber Johnny. That’d be a first. He wouldn’t know how to put one on.”

“She didn’t get pregnant.”

Carol Canning drank some more gin, and her eyes seemed to blur out of focus, then, very slowly, under a puzzled frown, they sharpened again and she took off on a different tack. “On the other hand,” she said. “Neither did I.”

“What?”

“Get pregnant. I thought it was me, but maybe he was shooting blanks. I mean, I had three with Kenny. Kenny might have been no great shakes in the bedroom department, but he had the right stuff, apparently. Danny just had to touch me and I came like the dickens, but Kenny just had to look at me and I’d get pregnant.”

“Didn’t you go to a doctor?”

“With Danny? No. We didn’t care that much, really. We were having too much of a good time to want kids. Even when we were married we didn’t see that much of each other. I was still touring then, first with the girls, then solo. And if Danny was playing the rear end of a horse in a Christmas panto in Leeds, I was Widow Twanky down in Brighton. It was a crazy life.”

“And if you had got pregnant?”

“There were ways of dealing with it, even then.”

“Why did you split up?” Winsome asked.