denigrate Stuart Wall and Krystal Weedon, and Shirley found plenty of willing listeners in her immediate circle. What was more, it had transpired that the Wall boy had been the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother all along. He had confessed to his parents, and they had personally telephoned the victims of the boy's spite to apologize. The Ghost's identity had leaked swiftly into the wider community, and this, coupled with the knowledge that he had been jointly responsible for the drowning of a three-year-old child, made abuse of Stuart both a duty and a pleasure.
Shirley was more vehement in her comments than anybody. There was a savagery in her denunciations, each of them a little exorcism of the kinship and admiration she had felt for the Ghost, and a repudiation of that awful last post which nobody else, as yet, had admitted to seeing. The Walls had not telephoned Shirley to apologize, but she was constantly primed, in case the boy should mention it to his parents, or in case anybody should bring it up, to deliver a final crushing blow to Stuart's reputation.
'Oh yes, Howard and I know all about it,' she planned to say, with icy dignity, 'and it's my belief that the shock caused his heart attack.'
She had actually practised saying this aloud in the kitchen.
The question of whether Stuart Wall had really known something about her husband and Maureen was less urgent now, because Howard was patently incapable of shaming her in that way again, and perhaps never would be, and nobody seemed to be gossiping. And if the silence she offered Howard, when she was unavoidably alone with him, was tinged with a sense of grievance on both sides, she was able to face the prospect of his protracted incapacitation and absence from the house with more equanimity than she might have thought possible three weeks previously.
The doorbell rang and Shirley hurried to open it. Maureen was there, hobbling on ill-advised high heels, garish in bright aquamarine.
'Hello, dear, come in,' said Shirley. 'I'll get my bag.'
'They're saying people got up a collection,' said Maureen, brimful of gossip that Shirley had somehow missed, in her endless back and forward trips to the hospital. 'Don't ask me who. Anyway, I wouldn't have thought the family would want it right by the river, would you?'
(The dirty and foul-mouthed little boy, of whose existence few had been aware, and of whom nobody but his mother and sister had been especially fond, had undergone such a transformation in Pagford's collective mind by his drowning, that he was spoken of everywhere as a water baby, a cherub, a pure and gentle angel whom all would have embraced with love and compassion, if only they could have saved him.
But the needle and the flame had had no transformative effect upon Krystal's reputation; on the contrary, they had fixed her permanently in the mind of Old Pagford as a soulless creature whose pursuit of what the elderly liked to call kicks had led to the death of an innocent child.)
Shirley was pulling on her coat.
'You realize, I actually saw them that day?' she said, her cheeks turning pink. 'The boy bawling by one clump of bushes, and Krystal Weedon and Stuart Wall in another - '
'Did you? And were they really ...?' asked Maureen avidly.
'Oh yes,' said Shirley. 'Broad daylight. Open air. And the boy was right by the river when I saw him. A couple of steps and he'd have been in.'
Something in Maureen's expression stung her.
'I was hurrying,' said Shirley with asperity, 'because Howard had said he was feeling poorly and I was worried sick. I didn't want to go out at all, but Miles and Samantha had sent Lexie over - I think, if you want my honest opinion, they'd had a row - and then Lexie wanted to visit the cafe - I was absolutely distracted, and all I could think was, I must get back to Howard ... I didn't actually realize what I'd seen until much later ... and the dreadful thing,' said Shirley, her colour higher than ever, and returning again to her favourite refrain, 'is that if Krystal Weedon hadn't let that child wander off while she was having her fun in the bushes, the ambulance would have reached Howard so much more quickly. Because, you know, with two of them coming ... things got confu - '
'That's right,' said Maureen, interrupting as they moved out towards the car, because she had heard all this before.