Alice Halfyard was delighted. “Oh, do you like her? She’s my absolute favorite. Such an intelligent expression—for a shepherdess.”

“And the detail,” Jean added, peering at the miniature smocking on the bodice and the tiny covered buttons, marveling that so much industry should have been expended in dressing a mere toy. Her own clothes were never this well made.

“I dare say you think I’m a silly old woman, playing with her dolls,” Alice said.

“Not at all,” Jean replied, though this was more or less what she did think. “It’s quite a collection—you could open a museum.”

“I keep saying I’m not going to buy any more, but then I pass a secondhand shop and see one looking neglected and I can’t help myself. Do you collect anything yourself?”

“Not really,” Jean replied, remembering with sudden disquiet her drawer of unused “treasures.”

“Well, if you’re a newspaper reporter you collect stories, I suppose,” said Alice.

“That’s a nice way of looking at it,” Jean said.

Next time she wrote up the Magistrates’ Court Reports she would think of herself as a curator of people’s stories. Beatrice Casemore of Frant Avenue, Sidcup, who pleaded guilty to stealing a pair of gloves worth two shillings, eleven pence from Dawson & Co., Drapers. Roland Crabb who was fined ten shillings for keeping a dog without a license. These were her dolls.

“The story I’m collecting at the moment,” she added, feeling that the conversation had neatly arrived at its proper destination, “is about a patient who was at St. Cecilia’s while you were head nurse there. If true, it’s rather remarkable.”

Alice put down the doll she had been holding and gave Jean the benefit of her attentive, probing gaze. The blue of her eyes was made brighter by a yellowish tinge to the white, not unlike the color of the doll’s porcelain face.

“Go on.”

“I wonder if you remember a girl called Gretchen Tilbury, I mean Edel, as she was then.”

“I remember all my patients,” Alice said, “so yes, I do remember Gretchen very well. A lovely girl. She suffered dreadfully from rheumatoid arthritis; she was in constant pain, poor thing.”

“Would you call her a truthful kind of person?”

Alice needed no time to reflect. “Yes, I would. I wouldn’t necessarily say that about all the girls at St. Cecilia’s during my time, but Gretchen was what you’d call a good girl.”

“Did she ever leave the clinic for any reason during her stay?”

“Oh good heavens no. She barely left the bed. It took two nurses to get her up and onto the commode. She really could hardly move.”

“I suppose if I told you the dates she was a patient you’d be able to confirm them?”

“Not from memory,” Alice replied. “But I have my diaries of the years I worked there.”

This was promising—better than Jean had expected.

“You kept a diary the whole time?”

“Not a personal diary. Just a record of the working day—who was admitted or discharged, who had what treatment. If the boiler broke down. That kind of thing.”