“Who is he?” she squeaked.

“It—it’s Mr Rollison,” said Whiting, nervously. “I—I somehow didn’t think you would come, Mr Rollison.”

“We can go on from there,” smiled Rollison, leaning against a piano which took up most of one wall. “Why didn’t you open the front door as soon as we knocked?”

Whiting licked his lips.

“They—the men told me not to.”

“Do you know who they were?”

“No, I’ve never seen them before,” answered Whiting. “They came about ten minutes before you—came the back way.” He licked his lips again. “They said we wasn’t to help Mr Kemp or go to the church—if we did, they said, they’d—” he stopped, tongue-tied.

Rollison’s eyes held a steely glint.

“The men who uttered menaces!” he murmured. “Whom did they threaten? Your children?”

“Yes!” Whiting gasped.

“We had to promise we wouldn’t help Mr Kemp!” Mrs Whiting cried, “we don’t want anything to happen to our children, Mr Rollison!”

“Of course you don’t and nothing will,” Rollison assured her. “Why do they want to keep you away from church, Whiting? Do you know?”

“They—they only just told us that,” said Whiting, “but I think I know why. I was—I was with Joe Craik,” he added with a nervous rush. “We was walking down to the hall together and two men bumped into us. They went off and Joe said they’d picked “is pocket but the only thing missing was his knife, he said, and he might have left that at his shop.”

“Go on,” murmured Rollison.

“Well, we hadn’t got much further on when three more were waiting for us, near the hall,” Whiting said, sending a troubled glance at the old woman in the corner, who clearly disapproved of his frankness. “They started leading off about Mr Kemp. It wasn’t fair, the things they said—it just wasn’t fair. I didn’t want any trouble but Joe answered back and before we knew where we were, they was on us. We had to hit back,” Whiting added, defensively. “The police come and one of them was on the pavement—I thought he’d knocked hisself out. Instead—”