Bridget nodded, but Flo said, ‘No, we’ll come to the door with you and wait inside if we can while you talk to Ellie. Any funny business and I’ll threaten the blighters with this.’ She brought a cut-throat razor out of the pocket of her skirt, and as Ruby and Bridget’s eyes widened, she said, ‘It’s me da’s. He don’t know I’ve got it, but I thought a bit of protection wouldn’t do us no harm.’

Ruby’s heart was thumping so hard it hurt. The street was like all the ones by the riverside, dirty and filthy, and there was a dead rat lying in the gutter along with other debris. A few yards away a group of children were playing on the greasy pavement. Their clothes were ragged and dirty and their feet were bare, and one of the little girls was sitting with a snotty-nosed baby on her lap, jogging it up and down when it cried. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years old herself, her small frame thin and wasted and her fair hair lank and matted, but she still smiled and talked to the baby and even as Ruby watched dropped a kiss on its tiny forehead.

This was poverty such as Ruby had never seen. For a moment she thought of her childhood home and her mother. They hadn’t had two pennies to rub together when she was growing up, but her mam had always seen to it that their stomachs were full, their clothes were clean and their shoes were mended the minute they developed holes in the soles; and she’d fought a determined and successful war against the body lice and nits some of the bairns brought to school too.

A pang of sudden and acute homesickness assailed her and she found herself longing for a lost time, a time when she was a carefree child and her mam was the centre of her secure and happy world and everything was in its right place. Fear was gripping her, fear of what she would find when she knocked on the door of the house in front of her and also fear of Daniel himself, and she hated it, hated being afraid. The awareness of how she felt brought her chin rising and straightened her shoulders as her fighting spirit sprang up. Daniel Bell was scum and she wouldn’t let him intimidate her, not while she had breath in her body. As for Ellie, she would do everything within her means to get her friend away from here.

She moved forward, Bridget and Flo falling into step behind her, and when she reached the flaking, battered front door of the house she grasped the brass knocker and banged hard twice. The door was opened almost immediately by a small fat man whose smile died on seeing the three girls.