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there quickly. Kingswear was not easily accessible because the roads were so narrow and winding, and their house was at the far end of it.
    ‘Stay very still,’ she ordered her mother. ‘I’ll just go into the house to get you some water and something to put over you. Don’t try to move, the police will be here any minute.’
    To Charlie’s amazement, Sylvia’s eyes opened wide with a look of terror and she struggled to sit up. ‘You called the police?’
    Charlie pushed her mother back down. ‘Of course I did. I dialled 999. They’ll send an ambulance too.’
    When Sylvia didn’t answer, just turned her head away from her daughter and lay there sobbing, Charlie was totally baffled by her reaction. But assuming Sylvia was in deep shock, and too badly hurt to be rational, she ran back to the house.
    After the heat of the garden, the kitchen felt very cool. Charlie splashed her own face with water, filled a glass, and seeing the long cotton shirt her mother usually put on after sunbathing hanging over a chair, snatched it up. The shock of what she’d witnessed was making her shake, but struggling to control herself, she went back outside.
    Her mother had moved. She was now half sitting, leaning back on her elbows, looking at her knees in stunned horror, tears rolling down her face and staining it with mascara. Charlie knelt beside her and supporting her with one arm, held the glass to her lips for her to sip it. ‘Do you think you could manage to put your shirt on?’ she asked gently as she put the glass down.
    To her surprise her mother silently lifted one arm and allowed Charlie to slip the shirt on. This was heartening, suggesting her injuries were not quite as serious as she first thought. But as the second arm went into the shirt Sylvia screamed out again in agony, so Charlie laid her down gently, buttoning up the shirt round her.
    ‘Don’t try to move again,’ she said. She could hear the siren of a police car in the distance and hoped it was coming here. ‘The ambulance men will give you something for the pain, just hold on.’
    ‘What did you tell the police?’ Sylvia asked in a strangled tone, clutching Charlie’s hand so tightly it hurt.
    ‘Only what I saw from the window, the two men hurting you. Who were they, Mum?’ she repeated. ‘Were they something to do with Dad?’
    Sylvia groaned again. Charlie could see by the way her forehead was furrowed with lines that she was struggling not to scream aloud with the pain and her heart went out to her. ‘I love you, Mummy,’ she whispered. ‘Try to tell me what this was about.’
    Her mother looked at her, her eyes bleak and agonized. ‘I can’t. I don’t understand it all myself,’ she said in a whisper. ‘All I can say is that your father is in bad trouble. It’s been coming for years and now it’s finally caught up with him. But you must say nothing about him to the police, Charlie. Promise me?’
    *
    The police and ambulance arrived simultaneously just a few minutes later, and as their first priority was to get Sylvia into the ambulance and off to hospital, Charlie wasn’t questioned in any depth. She related only what she had seen through the bedroom window, and as her mother lost consciousness while she was being lifted on to a stretcher, she couldn’t be asked anything.
    But once at Dartmouth Hospital, after Sylvia was first x-rayed and then taken away to the operating theatre, a policeman who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Willows took Charlie into a small office to talk to her. Although he was a local man, judging by his strong Devonshire accent, Charlie had never seen him before. He was a very big man, at least six foot, with the kind of powerful physique she associated with rugby players. He had a red face, shiny with perspiration which he kept mopping up, and he seemed puzzled rather than angry that something like this had happened on his territory.
    ‘You say the men didn’t ring the front-door bell but came