‘You should teach your child to have some respect for the dead,’ he had raged at her mother. ‘Death is not a sideshow at the fair, something to snigger about.’

She was very lucky that her father was out of the shop that day and he never got to hear about the escapade. She and Christine never dared go to the undertakers again, though.

Molly rushed up the stairs, hoping Mr Weston hadn’t seen her from a window. She didn’t want him informing her father about this either.

‘Molly!’ Simon exclaimed as he opened the door. ‘What a delightful surprise. Come on in. I was getting very bored writing and was just going to make some tea. Nice to have you to share it with.’

Molly handed him the buns and the honey. ‘A little present in return for some advice,’ she said.

She loved Simon’s posh voice, and he looked lovely, in a creased, open-necked shirt and grey flannel trousers, with his feet bare and his hair all tousled.

His flat was just a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom, all rather shabby and untidy. She glanced through the open door to his bedroom and, seeing the unmade bed, guessed he never made it.

‘Yes, I know I live in squalor!’ He laughed, guessing this was what she was thinking. ‘I really ought to get a housekeeper; I’m quite useless at the domestic stuff.’

‘I’d offer to come and do it for you,’ Molly said, ‘but I doubt my father would approve of that.’

‘Did he do that?’ Simon indicated her black eye.

Molly hesitated; she might have known the make-up wouldn’t fool anyone. She wanted to deny her father had done it, but she guessed that Simon had already heard that her father was a bully. ‘Yes, and that’s why I need some advice. I want to leave home.’

‘Well, I don’t know if I’m the best person to give advice, but I’ll do my best,’ he said.

‘Obviously, I can’t go right away, I’ve got to wait, as I’ll be called as a witness at Cassie’s inquest. Mind you, if they are as slow at organizing that as they are at finding out what happened to Petal, I might still be here at Christmas.’

They sat at the kitchen table, which Simon hastily cleared of books and dirty tea cups, then, over tea and the buns, discussed the lack of effort the police had put into finding Petal. Like Molly, he didn’t think the police had been very thorough.

She told him her idea about posters with a picture of Petal on them being printed, stuck up in post offices, railway stations and other public places.

‘I agree,’ Simon said. ‘A six-year-old isn’t that easy to hide. Someone must have seen her – unless, of course, she was killed and buried very soon after Cassie was killed.’

‘If the murderer was going to kill her, surely they would’ve done it at the same time as killing Cassie? It makes no sense to risk taking a child somewhere else,’ Molly said. ‘That’s why I think she’s alive.’

‘Then, logically, Cassie’s killer has to be someone who would care about Petal, like her father. If only we knew about him, and what happened between him and Cassie. It must have been something seriously bad for her to come and live in Sawbridge like a hermit,’ Simon said.

Molly nodded in agreement. ‘Have the police tried to find her diary? Or who Cassie worked for on Thursdays? As I see it, there are many things they could follow up, but they haven’t bothered. I bet if Petal was the child of a policeman or a schoolteacher they wouldn’t have given up so quickly.’

‘What does your policeman friend say on the subject?’

‘I haven’t really had any opportunity to talk to him and, anyway, I think he’d tell me that was police business. But he did intervene the other day when my dad did this.’ She pointed to her face. ‘He warned Dad he was going to report him, and I think he scared him a bit, as Dad hasn’t been so nasty since. But then that’s what I came for advice on. I know it’s time for me to leave.’

‘You must,’ Simon said, nodding his head. ‘There’s a big, wonderful world out there waiting for you. Sawbridge is fine for a writer like me who wants quiet, but not for a pretty girl in her prime.’

‘I’m not pretty,’ she said.

‘I think, then, you must have a distorted mirror,’ he retorted, leaning forward and touching her cheeks lightly. ‘You are also bright, kind and adaptable. I know girls are conditioned into thinking that getting married and having babies is the be all and end all. But that isn’t so. Since the war ended there are so many opportunities arising for women. Everyone knows how well women coped when all the men were off in the army, and I don’t think any right-minded person would want to push you all back into the kitchen.’

‘You sound like Cassie,’ Molly said.

‘She made me aware of things I’d never considered before,’ he admitted. ‘I hadn’t ever noticed that women got a different deal to men, not until I met her. I suppose I was like every other male, brought up to think women were there purely to serve us.’

‘Yes, Cassie was quite militant. She raged on about women getting a lower wage than men when they did the same job. That was something I hadn’t even thought was unfair – I just accepted it.’

‘I got the impression she’d been pushed around, and that was why she was the way she was. Maybe she’d had a tough childhood, or it could’ve been her experiences since she had Petal. Mind you, she always evaded questions about her past. I’d have given anything to have got her full story. Did she tell you much about it?’

Molly shook her head. ‘No, she could never be drawn on it. I asked her once where she’d met Petal’s father and she told me very bluntly that it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about.’

Simon chuckled. ‘She could crush you with a couple of words, couldn’t she? But then she must’ve taken an awful lot of stick for having a mixed race baby. I don’t know why that should horrify people so much. I think I’d prefer a black one – they’re very cute, with a better finish than white babies.’

Molly laughed at that. She’d always thought Petal was far more attractive than any other child of the same age she knew. ‘People seem to be scared of anything or anyone that’s a bit different. I heard a couple of women talking in the shop a while ago about someone they knew who was going to Italy for a holiday. “I wouldn’t want to eat any of that foreign muck,” one said. The other one said she’d be afraid she’d catch something nasty. You could go to Weston-super-Mare and catch something nasty, couldn’t you?’

Simon smiled. ‘During my stint in the army, lots of the other chaps had a real phobia about trying any food different to what they’d had at home.’

‘I can’t imagine you in the army,’ said Molly with a smile. ‘You just don’t seem the type.’

‘You mean I look like a milk-sop?’

‘No, of course not,’ she insisted. ‘It’s the guns thing, and needing to be very fit.’

He laughed. ‘I’m stronger than I look and, for your information, I learned to use a shotgun at eleven and used to shoot rabbits and ducks. But if you’d seen the lads who were called up at the same time as me, you’d have thought none of us would make soldiers. But then it was the same in the First War – farm lads, bank clerks, carpenters and plumbers, not fighters. Few of us welcomed call-up, but we had no choice so we buckled down and made the best of it.’

‘It must have been scary thinking you might be killed.’

‘I never allowed myself to dwell on that. The army was the making of me. It made me more self-sufficient, I learned to value what it is to be English, and to be grateful to my parents for giving me such a good start in life. If you’d seen the plight of all the refugees in Germany at the end of the war! They’d lost everything – their homes, families, their health – they were hanging on by a thread. I tell you, Molly, it made me realize how lucky I was that England was safe and I had a home and family to go back to.’

She was touched by his sincerity. ‘I can imagine. Cassie often talked about articles she’d read about how it was in Europe – all those displaced people, cities smashed to pieces. Did you talk to her about it?’