Looking back on that particular encounter she felt ashamed that, even allowing for the fact that she was new to the job and still unsure of herself, she’d issued him with no more than a mild rebuke. It wouldn’t happen now. Not with Walker. Not with anybody. If she could relive that moment, she’d tell the sergeant, in no uncertain terms, that his comment revealed more about his own pig ignorance and blind prejudice than it did about the people on the estate – because while there were undoubtedly some real rough buggers living there, the vast majority of the inhabitants were ordinary, decent, hard-working people. Even so, as she approached the estate she felt her stomach knot into a tight and painful ball. But that was nothing to do with the people who lived there now – it was all tangled up with her own unhappy past. When they first arrive in England, Captain Arthur Jones, who married Monika’s mother amid the wreckage of war-torn Berlin, installs his family in a pleasant detached house on the other side of Whitebridge to the Pinchbeck Estate.
