Maureen was transported for a moment back to the birthday party. She heard the excited chatter, saw the presents being opened by Florrie Duncan and remembered the song they all sang with such passion. They were barbed memories now.

‘Will I have to be there?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid so,’ replied Keedy. ‘That’s why the more you talk about your friends to me, the easier it will be when the coroner asks you questions. He’ll want to know about the sequence of events but I want to delve a little deeper.’ Maureen was watchful. ‘You do want the person who planted that bomb caught, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Then we need your assistance.’

She looked hunted. ‘There’s nothing else I can tell you, Sergeant.’

‘Oh, I think you can. You just don’t realise it yet. Let’s start with a comment you made when we first came here,’ he suggested. ‘You talked about Florrie Duncan looking out for you.’

‘That’s right — she was older and more experienced than the rest of us.’

‘You said that she stopped men at work from pestering you. Is that true?’

‘Oh, they never bothered me very much.’

‘What about the others?’ pressed Keedy. ‘We can leave out Florrie because she obviously wouldn’t stand any nonsense and Shirley Beresford was married so she was protected in a sense. The same goes for Agnes Collier. She had a husband and a baby. But that still leaves Jean Harte and Enid Jenks.’

‘Jean lost her fiancé at the front. She never looked at another man.’

‘What about Enid?’

Maureen’s head fell to her chest and her body seemed to shrink into the settee. Keedy watched her struggle with feelings of guilt and betrayal. He was sorry that he had to put her under such pressure but believed that it was necessary. The women were bonded by the job they did and the visible consequences of doing it. They were likely to confide in each other. Maureen was a quiet, sensitive young woman whom the others could trust. She’d know what was happening under the surface of the lives of her friends.

She raised her eyes. ‘Will I have to say this at the inquest?’

‘No, Maureen, the questions will be confined to what happened at the pub.’

‘I wouldn’t want her father to know about it, you see.’

‘We certainly won’t tell him.’

‘He didn’t want Enid to have a boyfriend. He was very strict about that.’

‘Go on,’ he whispered.

‘But there was someone at the factory that Enid liked and it was obvious that he liked her. He was always there when she arrived and when she left the factory. In the end, he asked her out. She was too afraid to go at first. But,’ she recalled, ‘he didn’t give in. There were little presents and he was always very polite to her. So Enid took a chance. She told her father she was going out with some of her friends but she went off with this man instead.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Maureen, ‘but she was very strange the next day. All she’d say was that she never wanted to see him again.’

‘Was that the end of it?’

‘No, Sergeant,’ said Maureen. ‘It was the start of something else. He didn’t bother her at work because he knew that Florrie would go for him, but he followed Enid home and stood outside her house. When she went to church one Sunday, he was in the congregation even though he lived miles away from that parish.’

‘Didn’t she complain to her father?’

‘How could she? It would have meant telling him that she went out with the man and her father would have raised the roof. Enid was being persecuted and there was nothing she could do about it.’

‘Was he still stalking her at the time of that birthday party?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten all about him until you asked me about Enid. He really made her suffer. He kept sending her these little notes to say she’d never escape him. Enid showed me one. It was horrible.’

‘What did it say?’

‘It said that, if he couldn’t have Enid, then nobody would.’

Keedy took out his notebook. ‘I’ll need the man’s name.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Royston Liddle was up early that morning to help the milkman on his rounds. He enjoyed the work because it gave him the opportunity to meet a large number of people in the area as he ladled milk out of the churns and into their jugs, basins or other receptacles. Liddle was also allowed to drive the horse and cart, a real treat for him. He yearned for a time when he had a milk round of his own even though he knew, in his heart, that it would never come about. He could never master the sums involved in charging the right amount of money. As an assistant, however, he did everything that was asked of him and it gave Liddle a sense of well-being. On his way back home, he passed the stricken pub once again. The landlord was standing outside, talking to Ezra Greenwell. Liddle joined them in time to hear the old man voice his uncompromising opinions.

‘Good riddance to them!’ snarled Greenwell.

‘That’s a shocking thing to say,’ Hubbard rebuked him.

‘But for those damned women, I’d have got back safely to my house that night instead of being rushed to hospital with a mouth gushing with blood.’

‘You got off lightly, Ezra. The five of them were killed.’

‘Don’t ask me to mourn them. I’d prefer to give three cheers.’

‘That’s very bad of you,’ said Liddle, inserting himself into the discussion with his inane grin at variance with the seriousness of his argument. ‘The police told me it was murder. Nobody deserves to be blown up like that, Ezra. How would you like it if your daughter had been in the outhouse at the time?’

‘She’d have more sense than to take a job at the munition works,’ said Greenwell. ‘Martha knows that a woman’s place is in the home.’

‘My wife knows that,’ Hubbard chimed in, ‘but, in her case, staying in the home means working in the pub as well because we live above it. We used to, anyway. Those days could be over now.’

‘Then you should be blaming those stupid women as well.’

‘They didn’t ask to be killed by a bomb, Ezra.’

‘They brought bad luck and disaster to the Goose.’

‘It’s not their fault,’ said Liddle.

‘What do you know about it, you ignoramus?’

‘Royston is entitled to his opinion,’ said Hubbard.

‘Not when he starts talking out of his arse.’

Liddle was offended. ‘That’s rude, Ezra.’

‘Then bugger off. Nobody asked you to butt in.’

‘All I did was to say I’m sorry about those poor women.’

‘And so am I,’ added Hubbard, casting a jaundiced eye at the pub, ‘even though I’ve been left to pick up the pieces.’

‘When do you want me back?’ asked Liddle.

‘I’m not sure that I do, Royston.’

‘But you always said that I worked hard for you.’

‘It’s true — you did. And if we carry on at the Goose, I’ll want you there as usual. Do we start all over again or sell the pub to someone else? It’s not an easy decision to make, Royston.’

‘If you leave,’ boasted Liddle, ‘I’ll take over the Goose.’ The others laughed scornfully. ‘What’s the joke?’

‘You are,’ said Greenwell, cackling.

‘Running a pub is a complicated job,’ explained Hubbard. ‘I grew up in the trade because my father was a publican. It’s beyond you, Royston.’

‘I could learn.’

‘You haven’t even learnt your ABC properly,’ sneered Greenwell.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Forget it, Royston,’ said the landlord with a fatherly hand on his shoulder. ‘The Goose is not for you. What you can do, you do very well. Be satisfied with that.’

Liddle accepted the truth of the advice. Since he was feeling hungry, he decided to go home for a late breakfast. As he walked away, he could hear the two of them still laughing at him. It was dispiriting but he soon shrugged off his irritation. After a lifetime of being derided, he found that mockery no longer hurt him. He was about to take a short cut through an alleyway when he remembered what had happened the last time he’d been that way. Alan Suggs had ambushed him and handled him roughly. Even though he knew that Suggs was probably at work, he took no chances of a second encounter, choosing instead to make a long detour. When he eventually came into his own street, he told himself that Suggs was not a danger to him. Having made some vile threats, he hadn’t carried them out. Besides, Liddle had Inspector Marmion on his side. He was protected.