Jobs are scarce. The men who returned from the war have moved back into the factories and shops and offices and reclaimed their jobs. The women who kept those jobs warm for them have returned to laundering, serving in small shops and crossing the river at dawn to char in homes and offices in the City. Women like Daisy, suddenly in need of work, are discovering that many jobs are taken. And employers don’t want to hire a woman whose husband is a burglar with a knife. Who knows what she would make off with? They certainly won’t hire her if they know of her association with the Forties. She is tainted, as well as penniless.

‘I thought I’d ask Grace if there’s any work at the warehouse.’

Edith says nothing. She knows that Grace will be reluctant to take on another worker, even out of charity. And she won’t give up her own place, not even for Daisy.

The Crown continues to fill with people. Men wearing their better suits for party night mill around, still discussing the boxing match and the fight that came after it. Snatches of conversation rise and fall – talk of the coppers and their coshes, who is in the cells and, most importantly of all, how the Clerkenwell lads received the thrashing they deserved. The Elephants might be depleted in number, by one or two, but they have restored the honour of the Borough and their reputation among the London gangs. There are cheers, roars, laughs swirling into the air with the tobacco smoke.

Ruby knows that this world is fading. The people here cling onto a past that has slipped away with the war. Twenty, thirty years ago, the Elephants were mighty in this part of London. Now, they are scrappy thieves and crooked bookmakers. They run the betting at the racetrack and the dog track, but others like Billy Kimber and the men from Birmingham are moving in, and the real money – the real influence – is to be had where the rich men play.

She looks over at Billy, joshing and joking with the others. This is what he’s doing – he and Frederick Moss are trying to lead the others into modernity. Dragging them by the nose. Moss and Billy are forging alliances with bigger players, elbowing aside Kimber’s Brummagems, building up the Elephants’ reputation in new ways. Moss is shrewd – almost as shrewd as Annie Richmond. He knows that the men who operate in Peter Lazenby’s circle will be far better protected than those working with the gang leaders like Kimber, for all their knife-wielding bravado. Billy Walsh has been sent in to deal and negotiate because he’s fought alongside these men in France, and he’s earned their respect.