“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.

“I don’t really see as it has anything to do with your investigation, but we just drifted apart. We really did. It was easy, so easy we never even noticed it happening.” She waved her cigarette arm theatrically in the direction of both of them. “I mean, he went one way—variety shows, lousy pop songs, quiz programs, bad movies—and I went another—Granny Takes a Trip, psychedelia, dope, acid, country weekends with the Maharishi, the whole shebang. Even us pop girls had a bit of fun, you know. I made a solo album, a folky sort of thing, like Vashti Bunyan, but it went nowhere. I had a nice voice. They all said so. New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Record Mirror. Even Danny said I had a nice voice.”