The Sinking Admiral. Simon Brett

headache, or the sore patch inside her cheek, where her grinding teeth so often caught the soft flesh.

      Someone needed to save Tracy from herself, and her feckless parents weren’t likely to do it, so Greta had tried. She’d talked to Tracy in a quiet moment on the last camping trip, but the attempt had failed.

      Greta understood the difficulty without any trouble at all. Tracy was being driven to a quite unusual degree by her teenage hormones, or evolution, the selfish gene, or whatever you wanted to call it. All her instincts were telling her to polish up her charms and display them as clearly as she could until a suitable sperm donor picked her as his chosen receptacle. She had already got a reputation around Crabwell for being at it like a rabbit. But Tracy wasn’t a rabbit, or a praying mantis, or even a fur seal. She was a human being with seventy or eighty more years of life to come. If those years were to be remotely happy, she was going to have to learn to know herself, find fulfilling work of her own, and only then choose the mate with whom she could reproduce her genes.

      All Greta’s recommendations of keeping her options open, getting good enough results to gain access to a good university and so have the chance of an interesting career made Tracy laugh like the hyena she wasn’t. Greta could almost see the thought bubbles coming out of Tracy’s head about poor old bags and disappointed lesbians. She offered Tracy her copy of Gaudy Night, hoping that Dorothy L. Sayers’s demonstration of the importance of doing your own work and not confining yourself to life as someone else’s helpmeet might do the trick.

      She herself had found such succour in Sayers’s good sense when she’d been faced with an awful decision years and years ago that she couldn’t believe anyone would reject it. But that attempt had been a failure too. And it was after Tracy had spurned the novel that she’d made her silly threat. Silly but horrible.

      ‘If you tell anyone about me,’ she had said, ‘I’ll tell them all that you’re just jealous because I wouldn’t let you touch me.’

      No one in Crabwell would pay any attention. But if the sleazy man from the telly encouraged Tracy to say it on camera there could be real trouble. These days no one would – or should – ignore any suggestion of paedophilia, and the fact that there was no evidence could make everything worse. The police would have to be involved, and, as far as Greta could see from the various stories that had recently emerged in the news, they’d publicise her name and the accusation in the hope that other victims would come forward. She could be on police bail for years until they realised that there were no victims at all, and never had been, and that they’d been manipulated by a naughty little trollop, who needed to distract attention from her own carryings-on.

      Alice would hate it. Come to that, Greta would hate it too. And it could ruin their reputations and the careers to which they’d devoted everything.

      But that didn’t change the one crucial fact: someone had to rescue Tracy before she let her instincts dump her in a dead-end under-age relationship, perhaps with a baby, and no chance of using her brains or creativity, or anything else. And what future would that baby have?