But next day the Market Burger House was open for business as usual. Stephen took particular note of it after he had taken Lyn to the Mootwalk and parked the car in the market square. The restaurant was the only one in Hilderbridge, in the Three Towns probably, that served breakfast. People were breakfasting, some were just having coffee. An Indian girl in a blue sari was at the cash desk in Marianne Price’s place. Stephen went across the square to Whalbys.

Dadda lived alone in the three-storey house in King Street, a narrow foinstone house, one room deep and heated with oilstoves. The workshop was the coachhouse next door and the room above it. Over the double doors, painted dark brown, was a sign in gilt lettering that said: Whalby and Son. Restorers of fine furniture. The sign was peeling and you couldn’t read it from the other side of the square but the Three Towns knew who Whalbys’ were without that. A Whalby and his son had been there for as long as anyone could remember and Dadda used sometimes to boast on his good days that Alfred Osborn Tace had himself been a customer and that Whalbys had recovered the seats of the Hepplewhite chairs at Chesney Hall.

Stephen said hallo to Dadda before going upstairs to start work on the three-piece suite they had brought in on Friday. Dadda was smoking. Between his nutcracker lips was one of the thin twisted little cigarettes he made himself. The frames of the furniture were sound, a lot better than the kind of stuff they manufactured nowadays. He began tearing off the old, almost ragged, tapestry and prising out tacks. The scent of tobacco was wafted up the stairs. Dadda only smoked when he was contented and then he would get through forty or fifty a day, bringing on a cough and staining his fingers yellow-brown. Dadda might have been a lot different, Stephen thought, if his wife hadn’t deserted him. Or was it because he was the way he was that she had walked out one day when Dadda was at work and he at school, leaving a note on the kitchen table and the remains of the week’s housekeeping money? He had been too young to read the note but he could still remember how that table had looked when he came in, its top at the time the height of his own shoulder. He could still remember the piece of folded exercise book paper, the three pound notes and the pile of coins at eye level.

Dadda never spoke of her directly. When, a long time ago now, Stephen had tried to call him Dad or Father and drop the babyish name, he had shouted that Stephen was all he had in the world and couldn’t he have a little bit of kindness and call him by the one name that meant something? And sometimes he had clasped Stephen to him, almost crushing the breath out of his body, muttering his tortured affection. It was only in such oblique ways that he referred to his state of deserted, now divorced, husband. There were no photographs of her in the house in King Street, and the photographs Stephen had seen he had wrested out of old Mrs Naulls. He guessed she had been named after Lady Irene Nevil’s daughter in Wrenwood. She had Tace’s colouring. She was slender and very fair with long golden hair and as unlike as possible any Naulls that had ever been.

The wind had dropped and a cold whitish mist from the river lingered in patches. Lyn walked across the cobbles and over the Old Town bridge. This morning the water was clear and silvery, chuckling a little as it lapped over the smooth, oval, brown stones. A pair of swans drifted down towards the town centre.

She was early for work as usual because Dadda liked Stephen to be in soon after nine. She whiled away time walking along the Mootwalk, an ancient wooden cloister that faced the Hilder and under which was a row of shops: an optician’s, a hairdresser’s, a wine shop, a jeans and sweater boutique, a newsagent, the pet shop. There was a pale green sweater in the window of Lorraine’s she thought she might buy. That sort of green, a clear, pale jade, was her colour. The newsagent’s Sunday paper placard was still outside: ‘Local Girl in Moors Murder’.

A few cars passed along the cobbles or parked, a few people on foot were on their way to work, not many. The great influx would be north of the river, the other side of town where Cartwright-Cageby’s mill employed 60 per cent of the working population of Hilderbridge. Down here it was always quieter, it was older, it was peaceful. The ramparts of the moor could be seen in the distance, its peaks blurred against a leaden sky, their lower slopes wrapped in mist.

Lights came on in the Mootwalk shops as one by one they began to open. Out of the pet shop window a cat looked at Lyn with champagne-coloured eyes. It was in a wire pen on top of some tortoises and under a pair of lop-eared rabbits. The cat looked at Lyn and opened its mouth in a soundless mew.

Lyn didn’t much like the old man who kept the shop. He ogled her and once he had come out and asked her if she would like a dear little puppy dog to keep her warm in the night. He wasn’t there this morning. Instead, there was a man of about her own age, no older, tidying up the cartons of fish food on a shelf behind the counter. She pushed the door and went in.

‘I’ve been looking at the cat in your window.’

He came out to her. ‘Attractive colour, isn’t it?’

‘I wanted a ginger kitten, but it’s not exactly ginger.’

‘More beige, wouldn’t you say? Or even peach. It’s not a kitten either, it’s more than half-grown. Someone brought it in on Saturday and said she had to go to Africa and would I take it.’

Lyn was indignant. ‘That’s awful, taking it to a pet shop. You wouldn’t know who might buy it. It would be kinder to have it put down.’

‘Oh, come. Not this pet shop. Not under my management.’

Lyn glanced up at him. She had trained herself not to look at men, a restraint that wasn’t difficult to practise in this case. He was rather nondescript, not very tall, thin, mousy-haired, as unlike dark handsome Stephen as could be. But what on earth made her compare them?

‘Are you the manager? What’s happened to Mr Bale?’

‘In hospital, having a hernia operation. I’m his nephew. I’m looking after things for him.’ The cat mewed, not soundlessly this time. He opened the pen and lifted it out in his arms. ‘He’s a fine healthy cat, a neutered tom. I’d estimate his age at around nine months.’

‘I wanted a kitten,’ Lyn said. ‘Isn’t it strange the way everyone’s got kittens to dispose of when you don’t want them and none when you do?’

‘Have this one and save him from a fate worse than death.’

Lyn held the cat. It felt tense and afraid. Its eyes seemed to her full of tragic puzzlement. She made up her mind quickly, the way she always did. ‘I will have him,’ she said. ‘I can’t take him now, though. I have to go to work, Gillman’s the optician’s. I’ll come back at one when I finish.’

She phoned Stephen.

‘How much does he want for it?’

‘D’you know, I didn’t ask.’

‘Never mind, darling,’ Stephen said, ‘as long as it’s what you want. You’re to have just what you want.’

He went back to the armchairs. Dadda wouldn’t have a phone extension upstairs, preferring to summon him with a shout when it rang. He got his way in most things, had despotically guided Stephen’s life, had chosen Lyn for him, before that had picked him out of this school, pushed him into that, as soon as he could removed him altogether from academic threat. Stephen would have liked further education, though he hadn’t expected Oxford or Cambridge or even, say, Nottingham. He would have settled for Hilderbridge College of Technology. If he had fought Dadda, with the backing of the school and the rumblings there had been about court orders to override parents, if he had struggled, he could have got there. But he never fought Dadda. He had left school willingly, or very nearly, glad to be pleasing Dadda, rewarded with a secondhand motor bike and next year a car, and had learnt Whalbys’ trade. Or learnt some of it. He would never be able to do what Dadda could, those exquisite inlays, that delicate carving, achieving that mirror polish, and all with hands like a gorilla’s paws. His heart wasn’t in it. He could drive the van and upholster a settee.