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have been all bad,” Dylan said. “After all, she gave Holly a very happy childhood until she disappeared.”
    “Children are easily fooled. A child doesn’t understand right from wrong. If a child is having fun, it’s happy. It doesn’t care about education, financial stability or anything like that. Do you think Anita would have put Holly through university? Never in a million years.”
    “Aunt Joyce,” Holly said, “it’s my decision to try and find out what happened to Mum. If you have anything useful to tell Dylan, then please do so. I’m very grateful for all you and Len have done for me over the years, but slagging off Mum isn’t going to help, is it?”
    “Of course it’s not,” Len said with a stern glance at his wife. “Mind, there’s not a lot we can tell you, Dylan, because we didn’t see much of Anita. I was offered a job down here and so we left Lancashire when Holly was six. It’s such a long journey that we didn’t go back very often. Then Joyce and Anita’s parents died, so we saw even less of her. On the rare occasions we went back to visit my sister or brothers, we’d call on Anita, maybe go out for a drink with her even, but no more than that.”
    “It was enough,” Joyce said. “More than enough.”
    “You knew Anita’s father then,” Dylan said. “What was he like?”
    “Ian was a smashing bloke,” Len said.
    “Too good for her.”
    Dylan was longing to slap Joyce. She was like a snake, spitting malicious venom with every breath. But not as good looking. In fact, given her looks, her sour grapes had probably been present since the lovely Anita had entered her world.
    “We were at their wedding, of course,” Len went on, ignoring his wife again. “It was only a small do, at the local registry office, but—”
    “She only married him because she was expecting,” Joyce said.
    “Even so, she was happy that day.” Len smiled at Holly as he spoke. “She looked an absolute picture and she didn’t stop smiling. She wanted everyone to be happy with her.”
    “When she disappeared,” Dylan said, “was there anyone special in her life? Apart from Holly, I mean. Anyone she’d met recently? A new man perhaps?”
    “There was never anyone special in her life.” Joyce’s tone was scathing. “She was too selfish. Even Holly, her own daughter, wasn’t special. If she had been, she’d never have gone off and left her, would she?”
    “We never heard of anyone,” Len said, “but we hadn’t seen her that year. We’d had a card from her the previous Christmas with her usual scribbled note, but that was all. We hadn’t been to Lancashire that year, you see.”
    “Can you tell me if she ever mentioned a man named Terry Armstrong to you?”
    “Not that I recall.” Len looked to Joyce for confirmation.
    “She wouldn’t have mentioned her men to me,” Joyce said. “She’d have got pretty short shrift if she had. She had a daughter. She shouldn’t have had time for men.”
    Dylan wondered if Joyce was religious. It often seemed to him that, the tighter a person clasped the Holy Word, the more un-Christian they became…
    “If she’d been in any sort of trouble, would she have come to you for help?” Dylan addressed his question to Len, who was more helpful, but Joyce answered anyway.
    “Money, you mean?”
    “Any sort of help.”
    “I doubt it,” Len said, and he seemed to regret that. “We just didn’t have the contact.”
    “I see. So how did you find out that she’d gone missing?”
    “The police came to see us,” Joyce said, “wanting to know if we’d heard from her. Well, of course we hadn’t. But as I say, I wasn’t going to shirk my responsibility. Family is family no matter what. We went straight to Dawson’s Clough and fetched Holly.”
    “It wasn’t quite as straightforward as that.” Len spoke with the patience of a man well used to clarifying his wife’s snappy remarks. “As Holly was only eleven, the police soon had social