“Quick to judge? Were you listening when I told you what happened to my grandmother?” demanded Sam.

“OK, keep your hair on. Sorry, not trying to be funny. You’ve made a right mess of yourself, you know that? God, when I was young, I’d have given my right arm for hair like yours and Pam’s. Anyway, Madge Gowder, the twins’ mother, were still alive then, though ailing. It was her being sick and then dying that set Jim Gowder, her man, drinking away what was left of the farm. Sad really, when you think what they once were. Employed a dozen men, didn’t tip their hats to the squire, and had their own pew in the church. Madge would have seen little Pam right but, like I say, she was sick. For a while the doctor was never away, then the vicar was there as often as the doctor and we knew it couldn’t be long.”

“The vicar? Mr. Swinebank’s father, you mean?”

“Yes. And Sam, the curate. In fact, Sam was probably there more often. Madge preferred Sam. Everyone did. Old Paul was hot on hell, but Sam had the knack of making religion sound a lot more attractive somehow.”

“I bet!” said Sam harshly. In her eyes, this saintly fucking curate was still number one suspect. “So Madge Gowder died, right?”

“Yes, she died. It was little Pam who was with her, or found her, no one knows which. Someone went to Madge’s room, and there she was, dead, with Pam sitting at the bedside, holding Madge’s hand. She was in a state, but not the kind of state that drew attention, if you follow me. Just even quieter and more withdrawn than ever. You could forget she was there. I suppose eventually someone would have thought to ask what was to become of Pamela, left up there with the two lads and their drunken father. But Sam Flood didn’t hang around to ask. He took her out of Foulgate straight off. Gave her a bed up at the vicarage. His own bed. The Rev. Paul didn’t like it, nor old fish-face Thomson, his housekeeper. They reckoned that if God’s house had so many mansions, He didn’t need the vicarage, so they wanted her out. But they couldn’t just chuck her into the street. By now she was a worry to us all, quiet as a ghost and looked like one too. Like I say, most of us put it down to losing her mam and dad and then losing Madge Gowder in quick succession. There were some ready to gossip, of course. In a village there always are and generally it’s best not to listen…”

“Especially when the gossip’s about the local saint!” Sam burst out.

Mrs. Appledore’s hand, which had been resting lightly on hers, suddenly gripped it till it hurt.

“Listen,” she said, and her voice which till now had been conciliatory and understanding was harsh and emphatic. “You make a big thing of liking things straight. Well, there’s something we’ve got to get straight. I heard what you said in the bar and I hear what you’re saying now. But you’re wrong, absolutely wrong. What happened to Pamela Galley I don’t know, but one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that she got nothing but love in the proper Christian sense from Sam Flood!”

In this mode, Edie Appledore was formidable, but Sam refused to be fazed.

“How can you be so sure? He was a man, wasn’t he?” she declared. “He had her to himself at the vicarage. OK, you all say he was a good man, a very good man, but good and bad doesn’t come into it when their cocks start crowing. All it means is that afterward he must have known that what he’d done was unforgivably wrong, for anyone, let alone a priest, and he couldn’t live with himself, so he committed suicide. How else can you compute the data?”

“Data? Is that the way you see things?” said Mrs. Appledore scornfully. “You come here from the other side of the world and within two minutes you’re making judgments like it can be done by arithmetic.”

“So point out my errors,” said Sam. “I can only work with what I’m told and round here that’s not a lot! Someone got my gran pregnant and then she was shipped to the other side of the world in some cockamamie scheme that charities, churches and the government dreamt up between them. And the only guy Pam seemed to trust and be close to is a curate, and he tops himself. Come on, Edie! You must have wondered if something was going on. For God’s sake, it wasn’t as if there weren’t rumors flying around that he was having underage sex! What kind of community is it that can hear gossip like that and not do anything about it?”

She drew her hand away from the landlady’s and stared defiantly into her face. But the woman’s gaze was focused over her shoulder. Sam looked round to see Thor Winander standing in the doorway. His expression was untypically serious. He nodded, not at Sam but at Mrs. Appledore, then came into the room, closing the door behind him. He sat down at the far end of the table.

Edie Appledore’s attention returned to Sam and she said in a still flat voice, “You’ve been talking to Noddy Melton, haven’t you? For once, he’s right, old Noddy. Yes, there were stories about Sam having a relationship with an underage girl.”

“There you go then!” cried Sam triumphantly. “Do it with one, you get a taste for it, isn’t that what they say?”

Then something in Edie Appledore’s face made her add, “If it was true, of course. Was it true, Edie? Do you know it was true?”

The woman’s gaze moved from Sam to Thor Winander and back.

Then she said, very quietly, “Oh yes, it was true, my dear. I know that for sure. You see, the girl was me.”

For a second Sam was completely thrown.

Then her mind incorporated this new information and all she could see was that it confirmed her theory. A priest who could screw around with one kid wouldn’t have too much difficulty screwing around with another! It was going to be hard to press this point without hurting the woman sitting before her, who looked to be hurting enough already, but she was getting too close to the truth now to hold back.

She said gently, “I’m sorry, Edie, but surely you can see that if Sam and you were – ”

“No!” broke in the woman. “You’re missing the point, which is that Sam and I weren’t! And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to, believe me! What you need to get straight is we’re not talking perversion here, we’re talking love!”

This sounded like denial to Sam. She said, “Edie, you can’t have been more than a kid back then…”

“That’s right. A kid. In fact when he first came to Illthwaite on holiday to visit Thor, I was just thirteen. I remember he came into the pub and we looked at each other and that moment I grew up. I think he knew too that I was the one for him. And don’t imagine that shows he had a thing about kids! I was an early developer. From twelve on I was a stunner, though I say it myself, fit for any man’s bed. I could see it in our customers’ eyes every night of the week. You must have known girls like that.”

“Yeah, my best friend’s one of them,” admitted Sam. “All the same, it doesn’t make it right – ”

“You’re not listening! There wasn’t anything to make right. We just looked. Sam must have got a real shock when he found out how young I was. He never caught my eye after that, not till he came to be our curate. I was fifteen by then. I make no bones about it, I went after him. Few months more and I would be sixteen and legal. I could be wedded with my dad’s permission and bedded without it! Not that I wanted to wait. But Sam wasn’t having any, even though once we started seeing each other, it was clear he fancied me as much as I fancied him. God, he must have had the willpower of a saint, the tices I put on him! But his beliefs made him hold out till I was legal. At least that’s what I thought. No kid looking forward to Christmas found the days drag by as slowly as I did those last few weeks till my sixteenth.

“And at last it came. It was on a Saturday. My mates kept me busy all day, and that night Dad and the regulars put on a bit of a party for me here in the pub. Sam didn’t come. I didn’t mind. What he and I were going to do to celebrate didn’t need a roomful of people. Next day, Sunday, I went to church in the morning. Sam was taking the service. He kept on looking toward me from the pulpit then looking away. God, I could hardly keep still in my seat, people must have thought I’d got worms! Sam and I usually met on a Sunday night after evensong but I couldn’t wait. I helped Dad in the bar that lunchtime till it got toward closing – it was two o’clock on a Sunday back in them days – then I told Dad I’d do the clearing up when I got back – he liked to go fishing on a Sunday afternoon – and I set off up to the vicarage.