Without a Trace by Lesley Pearse Page A

‘Molly, all kinds of women over the years have turned to it when they have no money and children to feed,’ he said. ‘It’s the oldest profession, as I’m sure you know. But maybe Cassie had just one man who paid her and that’swhere she went every Thursday. Is that any different, really, to having a lover who is a married man and buys you a dress or gives you jewellery?’
    ‘Put like that, I suppose it isn’t,’ Molly said reluctantly. ‘But Cassie was so independent.’
    ‘It is very hard for any woman to be truly independent,’ George said reprovingly. ‘They don’t get paid the same as men, most have problems getting childcare, and there’s very little sympathy for an unmarried mother.’
    ‘That’s very modern of you,’ said Molly with a touch of sarcasm. ‘I never expected a boy I went to school with in Sawbridge to have sympathies with women’s problems.’
    He smirked. ‘I’m not brave enough to voice them in the pub, though, so that makes me look like a knight in rusty armour.’
    After the sadness of the funeral and the bad feeling at home, Molly was glad to put it all aside and just enjoy being with George. Despite knowing him all her life, she hadn’t realized that he’d seen action in Germany after he was called up in 1944. She remembered, of course, him leaving the village, bound for an army camp to train, along with a couple of other local boys who were eighteen, too, and all called up together. For some reason she’d imagined he spent his time working in stores or something, because he never said a word about his experiences when he returned after the war was over. It pleased her that he was so modest, never seeking glory or feeling the need to boast. She realized she had underestimated her old schoolfriend.
    ‘Then I joined the police force after I was demobbed,’ he said. ‘That snotty friend of yours, Simon, said it was because I needed to follow orders, like I was some half-wit, but at leastI’m doing something worthwhile, not just sitting at a desk scribbling like him.’
    ‘He’s rubbed you up the wrong way,’ Molly said with a smile. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve become, like so many around here, suspicious of strangers?’
    ‘I’ve got nothing against strangers, or even writers. I just don’t like the way he brags,’ George said. ‘He was holding forth in the pub about how he got wounded in Normandy, then when he recovered he went out to India to teach English. He spoke as if none of us had done anything and never been anywhere.’
    ‘I haven’t found him like that,’ she said, but, in truth, Simon had been a bit dismissive of some of the locals. ‘But you kept it very quiet about being in Germany. I didn’t know that.’
    ‘Everyone was doing something during the war,’ he said. ‘I don’t think many of us knew what our old friends were up to.’
    ‘I’d have written to you if I’d known,’ she said. ‘I suppose I thought you were stuck out at Aldershot or somewhere.’
    George grinned. ‘The night before I left there was a dance in the village. You were with John Partridge all evening – I couldn’t even get one dance with you. I expected you to be married to him by the time I got home again.’
    ‘John Partridge!’ Molly exclaimed. ‘He had goofy teeth and sticking-out ears! I only danced with him that night because I felt sorry for him. And I’m glad I did, because the poor man was killed by a V2 in early 1945. He was only in London for an interview.’
    George’s smile vanished. ‘Gosh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. What bad luck! My mother wrote and told me. He was going to become a priest, wasn’t he?’
    ‘That’s what he wanted to do, but he’d already been turned down by both Oxford and Cambridge, so that interview he was going for was for some far lesser college or training place.’
    ‘Fate is a strange thing,’ George said thoughtfully. ‘We could be driving back to Sawbridge this afternoon and die in a car crash. Or I