‘I’ve borrowed Dad’s car,’ George said, pointing out the green Austin A40 Devon which was parked by the churchyard gates. ‘He said if I scratch it he’ll wring my neck.’

Molly smiled. Very few ordinary people in the village had cars yet, and she’d often seen people admiring Mr Walsh’s when he parked it outside the pub or the post office. She felt quite honoured to be getting a ride in it.

‘We’ll have lunch at the pub I’m taking you to,’ George said as he drove away from the high street. ‘I always think that after something distressing you need food to lift your spirits.’

Molly half smiled. George was always making rather odd remarks and she rarely knew how to respond to them. ‘Did you find the funeral distressing, then?’ she asked.

‘In as much as there were no family there to mourn Cassie,’ he said. ‘I hardly knew her, unlike you, but it is tragic for someone so young, with so much to live for, to lose their life in such an awful way. As for all the sadness and mystery about Petal, that’s really getting to me. I know you don’t believe we’re doing anything about it down the nick, but I promise you I’ll be keeping it in the forefront of everyone’s mind.’

‘So what would be your plan?’

‘Well, it seems to me that one thing I could do is to try and find out what Cassie’s real name was. I’ve already spoken to Miss Goddard, the headmistress, and asked her if she saw Petal’s birth certificate when she enrolled her at the school. But she didn’t. Miss Goddard said she asked Cassie to bring it in, but she said she had mislaid it. Unfortunately, Miss Goddard didn’t chase it up. I’d say Cassie had made up both their names, and she’d only do that if she was running from something or someone.’

‘What do you mean, “from something”? Something illegal?’

‘Possibly, or maybe she got involved with villains and found out stuff they didn’t want her to know. But I have other questions, too. What did she live on? Do you know?’

‘No, I don’t. She might have got some national assistance, I suppose, but she always struck me as too proud for that, and as the kind of person who manages on very little.’

George glanced round at her. ‘However careful she was, she’d still need some money. I think she got it on her weekly trip to Bristol.’

‘Out of a bank, you mean?’

‘No, Molly, from some kind of work. But what kind of job only requires you to be there one day a week?’

‘She did cleaning.’

‘I don’t think that would pay enough to keep herself and Petal.’

‘So how do you think she got by?’

‘Prostitution?’

Molly was shocked and surprised by him. ‘No, she wouldn’t do that,’ she said indignantly.

‘You’re being a bit illogical, not to say naïve,’ he said with a shrug. ‘You told me about Cassie’s lovers, and that she had very liberal ideas, compared with most women. You even said she had sex with a man she’d just met in the library.’

‘Yes, but she wouldn’t do it for money.’

‘Why wouldn’t she?’

Molly thought about that for a little while. She had never seen a prostitute, but she had always imagined them as raddled-looking women with tight clothes and too much make-up standing on street corners in slum areas of the cities.

‘Cassie just wasn’t the type to do that,’ she said at length.

George chuckled. ‘Molly, all kinds of women over the years have turned to it when they have no money and children to feed,’ he said. ‘It’s the oldest profession, as I’m sure you know. But maybe Cassie had just one man who paid her and that’s where she went every Thursday. Is that any different, really, to having a lover who is a married man and buys you a dress or gives you jewellery?’

‘Put like that, I suppose it isn’t,’ Molly said reluctantly. ‘But Cassie was so independent.’

‘It is very hard for any woman to be truly independent,’ George said reprovingly. ‘They don’t get paid the same as men, most have problems getting childcare, and there’s very little sympathy for an unmarried mother.’

‘That’s very modern of you,’ said Molly with a touch of sarcasm. ‘I never expected a boy I went to school with in Sawbridge to have sympathies with women’s problems.’

He smirked. ‘I’m not brave enough to voice them in the pub, though, so that makes me look like a knight in rusty armour.’

After the sadness of the funeral and the bad feeling at home, Molly was glad to put it all aside and just enjoy being with George. Despite knowing him all her life, she hadn’t realized that he’d seen action in Germany after he was called up in 1944. She remembered, of course, him leaving the village, bound for an army camp to train, along with a couple of other local boys who were eighteen, too, and all called up together. For some reason she’d imagined he spent his time working in stores or something, because he never said a word about his experiences when he returned after the war was over. It pleased her that he was so modest, never seeking glory or feeling the need to boast. She realized she had underestimated her old schoolfriend.

‘Then I joined the police force after I was demobbed,’ he said. ‘That snotty friend of yours, Simon, said it was because I needed to follow orders, like I was some half-wit, but at least I’m doing something worthwhile, not just sitting at a desk scribbling like him.’

‘He’s rubbed you up the wrong way,’ Molly said with a smile. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve become, like so many around here, suspicious of strangers?’

‘I’ve got nothing against strangers, or even writers. I just don’t like the way he brags,’ George said. ‘He was holding forth in the pub about how he got wounded in Normandy, then when he recovered he went out to India to teach English. He spoke as if none of us had done anything and never been anywhere.’

‘I haven’t found him like that,’ she said, but, in truth, Simon had been a bit dismissive of some of the locals. ‘But you kept it very quiet about being in Germany. I didn’t know that.’

‘Everyone was doing something during the war,’ he said. ‘I don’t think many of us knew what our old friends were up to.’

‘I’d have written to you if I’d known,’ she said. ‘I suppose I thought you were stuck out at Aldershot or somewhere.’

George grinned. ‘The night before I left there was a dance in the village. You were with John Partridge all evening – I couldn’t even get one dance with you. I expected you to be married to him by the time I got home again.’

‘John Partridge!’ Molly exclaimed. ‘He had goofy teeth and sticking-out ears! I only danced with him that night because I felt sorry for him. And I’m glad I did, because the poor man was killed by a V2 in early 1945. He was only in London for an interview.’

George’s smile vanished. ‘Gosh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. What bad luck! My mother wrote and told me. He was going to become a priest, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s what he wanted to do, but he’d already been turned down by both Oxford and Cambridge, so that interview he was going for was for some far lesser college or training place.’

‘Fate is a strange thing,’ George said thoughtfully. ‘We could be driving back to Sawbridge this afternoon and die in a car crash. Or I could get shot by some hoodlum tonight when I go on duty. You just never know what’s in store for you.’

‘A cheerful thought,’ Molly said. ‘But if I don’t get home soon I know what will be in store for me. Dad will be on the war path.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Four days after the funeral Enoch Flowers came into the shop. Molly had been surprised to see him at Cassie’s funeral. He hadn’t spoken to her there, not even a nod, but that wasn’t unusual, as he was famously silent.

Molly thought he looked like a gnome: short and tubby with a slightly too large head and deep creases in his face, like an apple that has been kept too long. No one knew exactly how old he was, but it was generally thought he was in his seventies. Yet he still ran his farm alone, milking over thirty cows a day, along with all the other chores.