"Yeah," said Kay, still looking at her notes. "So we go back to Terri. She came out of care herself. Has she ever attended parenting classes?"

"We offer them, but she's never been in a fit state to attend," said the woman from the nursery.

"If she agreed to take them and actually turned up, it would be a massive step forward," said Kay.

"If they close us down," sighed Nina from Bellchapel, addressing Parminder, "I suppose she'll have to come to you for her methadone."

"I'm concerned that she wouldn't," said Kay, before Parminder could answer.

"What do you mean?" asked Parminder angrily.

The other women stared at her.

"Just that catching buses and remembering appointments isn't Terri's forte," said Kay. "She only has to walk up the road to Bellchapel."

"Oh," said Parminder, mortified. "Yes. Sorry. Yes, you're probably right."

(She had thought that Kay was making a reference to the complaint about Catherine Weedon's death; that she did not think Terri Weedon would trust her.

Concentrate on what they're saying. What's wrong with you?) "So, big picture," said the supervisor, looking down at her notes. "We've got neglectful parenting interspersed with some adequate care." She sighed, but there was more exasperation than sadness in the sound. "The immediate crisis is over - she's stopped using - Robbie's back in nursery, where we can keep a proper eye on him - and there's no immediate concern for his safety. As Kay says, he stays on the at-risk register...I certainly think we'll need another meeting in four weeks..."

It was another forty minutes before the meeting broke up. Kay walked Parminder back down to the car park.

"It was very good of you to come in person; most GPs send through a report."

"It was my morning off," said Parminder. She meant it as an explanation for her attendance, because she hated sitting at home alone with nothing to do, but Kay seemed to think that she was asking for more praise and gave it.

At Parminder's car, Kay said, "You're the parish councillor, aren't you? Did Colin pass you the figures on Bellchapel I gave him?"

"Yes, he did," said Parminder. "It would be good to have a talk about that sometime. It's on the agenda for the next meeting."

But when Kay had given her her number, and left, with renewed thanks, Parminder's thoughts reverted to Barry, the Ghost and the Mollisons. She was driving through the Fields when the simple thought that she had tried to bury, to drown out, slipped past her lowered defenses at last.

Perhaps I did love him.

III.

Andrew had spent hours deciding which clothes he ought to wear for his first day's work at the Copper Kettle. His final choice was draped over the back of the chair in his bedroom. A particularly angry acne pustule had chosen to bring itself to a shiny tight peak on his left cheek, and Andrew had gone so far as to experiment with Ruth's foundation, which he had sneaked out of her dressing-table drawer.

He was laying the kitchen table on Friday evening, his mind full of Gaia and the seven solid hours of close proximity to her that were within touching distance, when his father returned from work in a state that Andrew had never seen before. Simon seemed subdued, almost disoriented.

"Where's your mother?"

Ruth came bustling out of the walk-in pantry.

"Hello Si-Pie! How - what's wrong?"

"They've made me redundant."

Ruth clapped her hands to her face in horror, then dashed to her husband, threw her arms around his neck and drew him close.

"Why?" she whispered.

"That message," said Simon. "On that fucking website. They pulled in Jim and Tommy too. It was take redundancy or we'll sack you. And it's a shitty deal. It's not even what they gave Brian Grant."

Andrew stood perfectly still, calcifying slowly into a monument of guilt.

"Fuck," said Simon, into Ruth's shoulder.

"You'll get something else," she whispered.

"Not round here," said Simon.

He sat down at a kitchen chair, still in his coat, and stared across the room, apparently too stunned to speak. Ruth hovered around him, dismayed, affectionate and tearful. Andrew was glad to detect in Simon's catatonic gaze a whiff of his usual ham theatrics. It made him feel slightly less guilty. He continued to lay the table without saying a word.

Dinner was a subdued affair. Paul, apprised of the family news, looked terrified, as though his father might accuse him of causing it all. Simon acted like a Christian martyr through the first course, wounded but dignified in the face of unwarranted persecution, but then - "I'll pay someone to punch the fucker's fat face through the back of his neck," he burst out as he spooned apple crumble into himself; and the family knew that he meant Howard Mollison.

"You know, there's been another message on that council website," said Ruth breathlessly. "It's not only you who's had it, Si. Shir - somebody told me at work. The same person - The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother - has put up something horrible about Dr. Jawanda. So Howard and Shirley got someone in to look at the site, and he realized that whoever's doing these messages has been using Barry Fairbrother's log-in details, so to be safe, they've taken them off the - the database or something -"

"And will any of this get me my fucking job back?"

Ruth did not speak again for several minutes.

Andrew was unnerved by what his mother had said. It was worrying that The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother was being investigated, and unnerving that somebody else had followed his lead.

Who else would have thought of using Barry Fairbrother's log-in details but Fats? Yet why would Fats go for Dr. Jawanda? Or was it just another way of getting at Sukhvinder? Andrew did not like it at all...

"What's the matter with you?" Simon barked across the table.

"Nothing," Andrew muttered, and then, backtracking, "it's a shock, isn't it...your job..."

"Oh, you're shocked, are you?" shouted Simon, and Paul dropped his spoon and dribbled ice cream down himself. "(Clean it up, Pauline, you little pansy!) Well, this is the real world, Pizza Face!" he shouted at Andrew. "Fuckers everywhere trying to do you down! So you," he pointed across the table at his eldest son, "you get some dirt on Mollison, or don't bother coming home tomorrow!"

"Si -"

Simon pushed his chair away from the table, threw down his own spoon, which bounced onto the floor with a clatter, and stalked from the room, slamming the door behind him. Andrew waited for the inevitable, and was not disappointed.

"It's a terrible shock for him," a shaken Ruth whispered at her sons. "After all the years he's given that company...he's worried how he's going to look after us all..."

When the alarm rang at six thirty the next morning, Andrew slammed it off within seconds and virtually leaped out of bed. Feeling as though it was Christmas Day, he washed and dressed at speed, then spent forty minutes on his hair and face, dabbing minuscule amounts of foundation onto the most obvious of his spots.

He half expected Simon to waylay him as he crept past his parents' room, but he met nobody, and after a hasty breakfast he wheeled Simon's racing bicycle out of the garage and sped off down the hill toward Pagford.

It was a misty morning that promised sunshine later. The blinds were still down in the delicatessen, but the door tinkled and gave when he pushed it.

"Not this way!" shouted Howard, waddling toward him. "You come in round the back! You can leave the bike by the bins, get it away from the front!"

The rear of the delicatessen, reached by a narrow passageway, comprised a tiny dank patch of stone-paved yard, bordered by high walls, sheds with industrial-sized metal bins and a trapdoor that led down vertiginous steps to a cellar.

"You can chain it up somewhere there, out of the way," said Howard, who had appeared at the back door, wheezing and sweaty-faced. While Andrew fumbled with the padlock on the chain, Howard dabbed at his forehead with his apron.

"Right, we'll start with the cellar," he said, when Andrew had secured the bicycle. He pointed at the trapdoor. "Get down there and see the layout."

He bent over the hatch as Andrew climbed down the steps. Howard had not been able to climb down into his own cellar for years. Maureen usually tottered up and down the steps a couple of times a week; but now that it was fully stocked with goods for the cafe, younger legs were indispensible.

"Have a good look around," he shouted at the out-of-sight Andrew. "See where we've got the gateaux and all the baked goods? See the big bags of coffee beans and the boxes of tea bags? And in the corner - the toilet rolls and the bin bags?"

"Yeah," Andrew's voice echoed up from the depths.

"You can call me Mr. Mollison," said Howard, with a slightly tart edge to his wheezy voice.

Down in the cellar, Andrew wondered whether he ought to start straight away.

"OK...Mr. Mollison."

It sounded sarcastic. He hastened to make amends with a polite question.

"What's in these big cupboards?"

"Have a look," said Howard impatiently. "That's what you're down there for. To know where you put everything and where you get it from."

Howard listened to the muffled sounds of Andrew opening the heavy doors, and hoped that the boy would not prove gormless or need a lot of direction. Howard's asthma was particularly bad today; the pollen count was unseasonably high, on top of all the extra work, and the excitement and petty frustrations of the opening. The way he was sweating, he might need to ring Shirley to bring him a new shirt before they unlocked the doors.

"Here's the van!" Howard shouted, hearing a rumble at the other end of the passageway. "Get up here! You're to carry the stuff down to the cellar and put it away, all right? And bring a couple of gallons of milk through to me in the cafe. You got that?"

"Yeah...Mr. Mollison," said Andrew's voice from below.

Howard walked slowly back inside to fetch the inhaler that he kept in his jacket, which was hanging up in the staff room behind the delicatessen counter. Several deep breaths later, he felt much better. Wiping his face on his apron again, he sat down on one of the creaking chairs to rest.

Several times since he had been to see her about his skin rash, Howard had thought about what Dr. Jawanda had said about his weight: that it was the source of all his health problems.

Nonsense, obviously. Look at the Hubbards' boy: built like a beanpole, and shocking asthma. Howard had always been big, as far back as he could remember. In the very few photographs taken of him with his father, who had left the family when Howard was four or five, he was merely chubby. After his father had left, his mother had sat him at the head of the table, between herself and his grandmother, and been hurt if he did not take seconds. Steadily he had grown to fill the space between the two women, as heavy at twelve as the father who had left them. Howard had come to associate a hearty appetite with manliness. His bulk was one of his defining characteristics. It had been built with pleasure, by the women who loved him, and he thought it was absolutely characteristic of Bends-Your-Ear, that emasculating killjoy, that she wanted to strip him of it.

But sometimes, in moments of weakness, when it became difficult to breathe or to move, Howard knew fear. It was all very well for Shirley to act as though he had never been in danger, but he remembered long nights in the hospital after his bypass, when he had not been able to sleep for worry that his heart might falter and stop. Whenever he caught sight of Vikram Jawanda, he remembered that those long dark fingers had actually touched his naked, beating heart; the bonhomie with which he brimmed at each encounter was a way of driving out that primitive, instinctive terror. They had told him at the hospital afterwards that he needed to lose some weight, but he had dropped two stone naturally while he was forced to live off their dreadful food, and Shirley had been intent on fattening him up again once he was out...

Howard sat for a moment more, enjoying the ease with which he breathed after using his inhaler. Today meant a great deal to him. Thirty-five years previously, he had introduced fine dining to Pagford with the elan of a sixteenth-century adventurer returning with delicacies from the other side of the world, and Pagford, after initial wariness, had soon begun to nose curiously and timidly into his polystyrene pots. He thought wistfully of his late mother, who had been so proud of him and his thriving business. He wished that she could have seen the cafe. Howard heaved himself back to his feet, took his deerstalker from its hook and placed it carefully on his head in an act of self-coronation.

His new waitresses arrived together at half-past eight. He had a surprise for them.

"Here you are," he said, holding out the uniforms: black dresses with frilly white aprons, exactly as he had imagined. "Ought to fit. Maureen reckoned she knew your sizes. She's wearing one herself."

Gaia forced back a laugh as Maureen stalked into the delicatessen from the cafe, smiling at them. She was wearing Dr. Scholl's sandals over her black stockings. Her dress finished two inches above her wrinkled knees.

"You can change in the staff room, girls," she said, indicating the place from which Howard had just emerged.

Gaia was already pulling off her jeans beside the staff toilet when she saw Sukhvinder's expression.

"Whassamatter, Sooks?" she asked.

The new nickname gave Sukhvinder the courage to say what she might otherwise have been unable to voice.

"I can't wear this," she whispered.

"Why?" asked Gaia. "You'll look OK."

But the black dress had short sleeves.

"I can't."

"But wh - Jesus," said Gaia.

Sukhvinder had pulled back the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Her inner arms were covered in ugly crisscross scars, and angry fresh-clotted cuts traveled up from her wrist to her inner arm.

"Sooks," said Gaia quietly. "What are you playing at, mate?"

Sukhvinder shook her head, with her eyes full of tears.

Gaia thought for a moment, then said, "I know - come here."

She was stripping off her long-sleeved T-shirt.

The door suffered a big blow and the imperfectly closed bolt shot open: a sweating Andrew was halfway inside, carrying two weighty packs of toilet rolls, when Gaia's angry shout stopped him in his tracks. He tripped out backwards, into Maureen.

"They're changing in there," she said, in sour disapproval.

"Mr. Mollison told me to put these in the staff bathroom."

Holy shit, holy shit. She had been stripped to her bra and pants. He had seen nearly everything.

"Sorry," Andrew yelled at the closed door. His whole face was throbbing with the force of his blush.

"Wanker," muttered Gaia, on the other side. She was holding out her T-shirt to Sukhvinder. "Put it on underneath the dress."

"That'll look weird."

"Never mind. You can get a black one for next week, it'll look like you're wearing long sleeves. We'll tell him some story..."

"She's got eczema," Gaia announced, when she and Sukhvinder emerged from the staff room, fully dressed and aproned. "All up her arms. It's a bit scabby."

"Ah," said Howard, glancing at Sukhvinder's white T-shirted arms and then back at Gaia, who looked every bit as gorgeous as he had hoped.