‘And they still haven’t found the murderer or the little girl?’ he asked when she had finished.

‘No, they haven’t,’ Molly said. ‘Actually, I think Cassie came from round here. She kept a journal, and in it she mentions Rye and the marshes quite a bit. I’m intending to ask about and show people her photograph in the hope that I might get a lead I can hand over to the police.’

‘Gosh, that is interesting,’ he said, then smiled. ‘Well, in a gruesome sort of way. But you have photographs? Might I see them? You never know, she might be someone who worked here at some point.’

‘I could go and get them now,’ Molly volunteered.

She got the pictures from her room but, sadly, Mr Bridgenorth didn’t recognize Cassie. However, he did applaud her persistence in trying to find Cassie’s family and suggested places in town where someone might remember her.

It was his interest in both the case and her part in it that really warmed Molly to Mr Bridgenorth. She didn’t understand why other staff said he was chilly or aloof.

Molly had telephoned her mother twice since she’d been at the George, each time in the evening, when she knew her father would be at the pub. She didn’t talk for long, because long-distance calls were expensive and, anyway, her mother was useless at chatter: she dried up after a couple of minutes and Molly had to fire questions at her to keep the conversation going. Yet she did sense her mother’s relief that Molly had left London for a nice part of the country and that she was happy in the hotel.

Cassie had often asked Molly why her sister, Emily, had left home and hadn’t kept in touch. Back then, Molly had never really admitted how very nasty her father could be, so she hadn’t been able to explain adequately why Emily had cut herself off, or the rage she still felt against their mother.

Now Molly was beginning to understand and sympathize with her sister’s feelings. She didn’t feel angry at their mother, but she was finding talking to her on the telephone a bit of an ordeal, as it always brought on reminders of her father’s cruelty and how her mother had just accepted it. And she was one for letting unspoken reproaches hang in the air, and there were long, awkward silences which Molly didn’t know how to fill. Without going home and facing both of her parents, she couldn’t ever hope for complete reconciliation, and no sensible person would go home if they knew their father was never going to meet them halfway.

When asked how the shop was doing, Mum merely said it was ticking over; she never spoke of new lines they were selling, or if anyone had failed to pay their monthly account, and Molly just had to hope her father wasn’t alienating customers with his grumpiness, or hitting his wife.

The only thing her mother volunteered was to say how kind George was, always popping in when it was cold to see if he could carry coal upstairs for her and generally checking up on her. But even this sometimes seemed to be a reproach, as if her mother was hinting that Molly had let him slip through her fingers instead of encouraging his attentions.

Molly had told her mother a dozen or more times that there was nothing but friendship between her and George. She did feel a little guilty that she’d never told him why she left Bourne & Hollingsworth; he must be as puzzled by it as her mother was. But then, she couldn’t bring herself to tell either of them the truth, as it still shamed her to be labelled a thief. She couldn’t ever say that she was coming home for a visit either, because it was too far to go and, anyway, she couldn’t stay at home, and taking up George’s offer to stay with his family wasn’t really an option now that she’d met Charley.

That was another thing she ought to tell George about, but she didn’t know how to go about it. If George saw himself only as her friend, there would be no problem, but she had a sneaky feeling he felt he was more than that, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings or make him jealous. Cassie would’ve roared with laughter about this. Molly could almost hear her friend berating her for being frightened of upsetting people. She would’ve pointed out that it made life unnecessarily complicated.

Reading through Cassie’s journal again, Molly realized that her friend had spoken of Rye as a favourite place to visit, not as if she lived there. One entry said, ‘Caught the early bus to Rye.’ To Molly, this implied that Cassie had travelled from an isolated village with a limited bus service. She studied a bus timetable and a map of the area and found that buses going to and from Hastings were regular, as they were on the route to Tenterden. So, in all likelihood, Cassie came from somewhere on the marshes between Rye and Hythe. As she didn’t mention the sea or beaches, Molly felt it must be inland, perhaps one of the tiny villages like Brookland, Old Romney or Ivychurch.

On her afternoons off Molly usually found somewhere new to ask about her friend and show the photographs. She’d already called at the library, and at the doctor’s and dental surgeries in Rye, but she’d drawn a blank at all of them. No one recognized Cassie.

Now that spring had arrived, Molly was looking forward to exploring the surrounding countryside and villages on her afternoons off, and she thought the best way to do it was by bicycle, as the land was flat as far as the eye could see. Albert, the old man who lit the fires, had told her there were a couple of ladies’ bicycles in the shed out in the backyard. Apparently, they were kept for the use of guests. All she had to do was check if it was all right for her to borrow one.

There was just one person who thought he might have seen Cassie before, and that was Ernest.

He’d squinted at the photograph for some time. ‘Her face is familiar,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but I’ve never met anyone called Cassandra, or Cassie. Maybe she was someone who came in a few times when I first got here five years ago. I don’t think it could’ve been more recent.’

‘She’s dead now,’ Molly told him, quickly telling him the story and that Petal was still missing. ‘I want to try and find her family. If she did come from somewhere around here, surely someone would remember a black baby.’

Ernest agreed that they would and said he would ask his wife because, as a teacher, she had contact with people from a huge radius around Rye. ‘Usually, she doesn’t forget anyone,’ he said with a proud smile. ‘We’ll be out together, and someone she taught twenty years ago will come up to her. She always remembers them, not just their name but the things they were good at.’

‘Then I hope she might help me with this,’ Molly said. ‘Local knowledge is invaluable.’

But, for now, seeing Charley was more important than questioning people about Cassie. She sensed from the tone of his letters that he was really serious about her, even if he hadn’t actually said anything to confirm that. She was serious about him, too: he was the last thing she thought about before dropping off to sleep at night and her first thought in the morning. She wished there was another girl of her age working at the George, someone she could talk about such things to, but all the female staff were in their mid-thirties or older, all married women with kids, and, although they were warm and friendly, they were hardly the kind she could have a heart to heart with about falling in love.

In women’s magazines and films love was always depicted as a kind of sickness, where the victim couldn’t eat, sleep or function normally. Molly, however, was sleeping like a top, eating like a pig, because the food in the George was so good, and, if anything, she was functioning on a day-to-day basis more efficiently than she ever had. It was true that Charley was never far from her mind – her stomach did a little flip every time she thought about his kisses – and she really missed seeing him all the time, as she had in Whitechapel. But was that love? Or just an infatuation that would fizzle out one day?