LITMIR.BIZ

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You've already told me — three times," he says testily, feeling he's heard sufficient eulogizing of Minnie Dennon, Daphne's overly amorous septuagenarian friend, to last a lifetime. "Though God knows how she can afford it."

      Fifty miles away, in Daphne's hometown of Westchester, Minnie Dennon has a similar concern as she takes a contemplative look around her tacky little flat and spends a few moments thinking how different her life may have been without fate's malevolent hand.

      "Some people have all the luck," she muses, as she checks that she has turned off the gas stove and the single-element electric fire, then quietly closes the front door behind her and listens for the latch to drop, before sliding the key under the doormat. "That's it, then," she mutters and, head down, pushes out into the rain. She has an important engagement — one of the most important in her life — and in veneration of the occasion she is wearing the drab olive suit she'd bought for her Alfred's funeral.

      "Thirty-five years with the same man deserves some respect," she'd fumed at the time, nearly twenty years ago, when Daphne had suggested that the suit was perhaps a trifle sombre considering the flippancy with which she'd treated her marriage. "Anyway, it'll come in handy for your funeral," Minnie had added acerbically.

      The smell of mothballs surrounds Minnie as she makes her way down Watson Street, then she takes a few moments to pause at the top of the High Street and compare it with the childhood view she fondly retains.

      The picture in her mind may be faded and sepia-edged, but apart from some remodelling carried out by Hitler's flying circus, little has outwardly changed. A hotchpotch of wooden-framed Tudor buildings on one side of the street is mirrored in the windows of a few Victorian monstrosities, housing banks and a department store, on the other. The traffic is different; dozens of zippy little cars have replaced the monstrous traction engines that belched steam and smuts, though the gentle Clydesdales of the brewery's dray still clip-clop from pub to pub.

      Minnie juggles a few coins in her coat pocket and eyes the sweetshop on the corner of Mansard Street. A KitKat or Mars bar, perhaps? But, knowing there is no point in recounting her cash, she shakes her head. Her path is set and she moves on past the butcher's, and the Mitre hotel, to a small café crushed under the insensitive shadow of a 1950s multi-storey car park.

      Ye Olde Copper Kettle's front door leads Minnie into the past and, as she shakes off her coat, she winces at the huddle of youngsters crowding around the Internet terminals at the back of the room, so she closes her eyes and looks back. Stiffly starched white tablecloths match the aprons of the pink-faced young waitresses, their hair pleated up under lacy caps. The glow of a coal fire reflects warmly off the bone china crockery and polished silverware. Businessmen and bankers in blue mingle with tweedy farmers, and the town's Ladies sit in one corner poring over Paris chic in Tatler while they chat of Ascot and exotic holidays in Bournemouth or Brighton. But the depression of the late ‘20s has bitten deeply, and the genteel Edwardian tea-room is already fading.

      A coarse voice shakes Minnie out of her memories. "Yeah. What-can-I-get-ya?"

      "Just a cup of Earl Grey, please."

      "Sorry, luv. We've only got regular."

      "I remember coming here with my mother in the thirties," Minnie says, though it washes over the young woman.

      "Nice… Did you want the regular, then?"

      Minnie takes a deep breath; concerned that her plans are already unravelling.

      "I suppose so," she says, resisting the temptation to run as she scans the plastic furniture and industrial china, "but please can I have a proper teapot, with a cup with a saucer."

      The young counter assistant sees the despair in Minnie's eyes and softens. "Of course you can, dear. You just find a seat and I'll bring it over."

      As Minnie pulls a chair from under a table, one of the teenage Web gamers, Ronnie Stapleton, sizes up the smartly dressed aging woman and tries to amuse his group of peers by snobbishly sneering, "Oh. I want a proper teapot like madam-f'kin' la-di-da over there."

      "Cut it out, Ron," says Krysta, the fifteen-year-old love of his live, sensing Minnie's discomfort, but Stapleton's narcotic-addled brain blanks out his girlfriend as he continues to mock.

      "Oh. Why don't you lick my f'kin boots?"

      "Ron…" warns Krysta and he eases off.

      "Aw'right; aw'right. Leave it out, girl; you ain't me muvver. Just get me some water will ya. I'm skint."

      In London, in the elegant reception suite at the Berkeley Hotel on the south bank of the Thames, the father of the bride, Detective Chief Inspector David Bliss of London's Metropolitan Police, is about to make a similar request on behalf of Daphne Lovelace.

      "I brought my own tea bag. It's Keemun — the Queen's favourite," Daphne explains conspiratorially as she squirrels it out of her bag while they wait for the remainder of the guests to arrive. "Would you mind asking one of the waiters to fetch me a pot of freshly boiled water and a nice china cup?"

      "You can't do that here," explains Bliss, but her expression clearly says she can, and will, so he changes tack and starts, "There's champagne…" but he gets nowhere as Daphne fiercely points to her watch.

      "It's four o'clock in the afternoon, David."

      "Oh. Right," he says, and then collides with his previous boss, now his son-in-law, as he makes his way to the bar.

      "David. A word…" Peter Bryan begins as he drags Bliss aside and drops his tone. "Did you see Edwards at the church?"

      "No. Don't worry, son. I don't think he showed up," laughs Bliss, knowing that while a general invitation went out to all the senior officers at the station, everyone was praying that Chief Superintendent Edwards would send his apologies. However, Edwards hasn't offered an apology — ever. He is an officer, with Brylcreemed hair and burnished boots, still marching in the past, who, on a good day, might apologize for being surrounded by incompetent idiots. He is a man whose pin-stuck effigy hangs in many junior officers' lockers. And he's a man who has stood on the gallows more than once, yet has always managed to somehow slip the noose and sling it around his accuser's neck just as the lever was pulled.

      "Thank Christ…" says Bryan, fearing that Edward's presence would curdle the champagne. Then he gives Bliss a quizzical look. "Hey! What's with the ‘son' thing?"

      "Serves you right for marrying my daughter, Detective Chief Inspector."

      "You can cut that out, too, Dave," Bryan replies with mock shirtiness as he stalks off. "And don't expect me to call you ‘Dad,' either."

      "One pot of tea without the tea, please," Bliss orders nonchalantly as he turns to the barman, and he watches with amusement as the young man tries to work out whether or not he might be dangerous.

      In Westchester, Minnie has scurried from the café, leaving the teapot half full, and is pushing on towards her goal when a Georgian mansion at the bottom end of the High Street solidly blocks her path. Westchester's old general hospital was her birthplace, at a time when few families could afford the luxury of a doctor-attended birth, but Minnie stops briefly and considers detouring to avoid painful recollections of the soot-encrusted stone building. There are no joy-filled births for her; only deaths. First her younger brother who never made it out of the aediculated front doors; solid lacquered doors fiercely barred with a sign declaring, "All accidents, admissions and enquiries must use side entrance." The double front doors were always kept well oiled, but were for the exclusive use of the Matron, together with consultant surgeons (not the riff-raff of general practitioners and interns) and mothers, with their perfect little newborns, who were ushered out through them and encouraged to pose for photos with the beaming sisters and nurses — like car builders touting their latest model to the press.

      "They might let you into the world through the front door," the crusty ambulance driver had explained as he'd rushed Minnie's dying mother to the side entrance. "But Gawd help anyone who tries to get out through there."

      Minnie's mother had been followed to the side door by various aunts, uncles

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