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learn.’
    I t was on the tip of his tongue then, to tell her. To go back over the night of the storm and whatever else had happened in his house that night, but that would be later. Instead theyspied upon the birds in the bay, and made pies in the sky, she said.
    From the pier, Jones watched them go.
    They played like the children they were.
    And then, they worked.

C HAPTER T WO
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    Picture:
A shop window with condensation on the inside of the glass, light streaming out into a narrow street. Busy figures half visible inside. A barbershop sign. After Edward Hopper, Artist unknown. Part of a series of shops and streets painted in the 1930s.
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    I t was months before anyone other than Jones noticed that Di Quigly was back, although it would be fair to say that few of them had noticed she was gone. The Quiglys had always been on the edge and well nigh invisible: scarcely anyone knew them. It was only the shopkeepers who remembered Di and her nifty fingers, and even they were slow to make the connection, even Monica.
    On a grey October morning, Monica’s unisex hairstylist opened early.
    Delia was the oldest client at ninety-five, and spoke in a grumbling monotone. She still walked a dog, and it was shewho had seen Di and Thomas Porteous coming out of the big house that she remembered as a school. Someone else had seen them at the station, getting on a train.
    ‘Well, well, well. Thomas Porteous,’ Delia said. ‘Well, it wasn’t a pretty story, but there aren’t many of those. It’s a story with holes in it, like a string bag, and where do you get a string bag, these days?’
    Monica was putting rollers in Delia’s hair. Tuesday was discount for the over sixties, including Delia, who thought she should get it for free.
    Monica discarded a yellow roller too old for further use and picked another.
    ‘That house,’ continued Delia. ‘It was a dame school, see? Primary school for the parish, started by some rich do-gooder. Got closed in the sixties. Old William Porteous and his missus ran it and lived over the shop if you see what I mean, and he was mad about education, education, education. After it shut, he got to own it, no one knows why. Maybe they gave it to him rather than knock it down, and people don’t like that. Why should he get a free house? Anyway, he kept opening it up for kids. Had those marvellous parties, until they got stopped.’
    Monica slowed down with the curlers.
    ‘So? Why? What’s wrong with having parties for kids?’
    ‘No licence, or some such. Might have been funny things going on, see what I mean?’ She tapped her nose. ‘Someone said so, reckon old William Porteous loved them kids a bit too much and not in the right way. Anyway, Young Thomas was a war baby, toddled off to London as soon as he could, like anyone with half a brain did. Came back to visit with that bitch of a wife and kids after he got married and then later, when he wasn’t. Settled here after his mum and dad died andleft it to him, which was quite a surprise ’cos no one knew they actually owned it. And Thomas got rich, what with all his inventions. Not just a teacher by then.
She
must have been sick as a parrot, that wife, Christina, that was her. You don’t leave the man
before
he gets real money. That’s stupid. Should’ve waited.’
    Sorting out fact from fiction was always a problem. Monica was fifty to Delia’s nigh-on endless age and Monica had a vested interest in local knowledge, tending to believe in the senior memories. She tightened the last roller over the last strand of hair hard enough to make Delia screech and then loosened her grip, because Delia was a highly satisfactory customer, always ready to fill in historical gaps – whether the information was accurate or not hardly mattered. The hairdryer came down. Delia pushed it up and continued talking. It was a week since anyone listened and she was going to go on as long as she could.
    ‘They reckon he was a bit dodgy, old William Porteous.