Annie slips her arm through Freddy’s, and he smiles fondly at her. The men shuffle to make room for her to stand in the group.

Ruby catches Billy’s eye as he drags on his cigarette and blows a whirl of smoke to the ceiling. She can anticipate the night ahead, and even the thought of it sends a sensation rushing down her body that makes her shift in her seat.

3

3

Saturday, early evening

In the reporters’ hall of the Kensington Gazette, Harriet Littlemore rubs her right eyebrow and reads over the words one more time. She tugs the sheet of paper from the black Remington typewriter and lays it over another immaculately typed page on the table. She might be thought a slow worker, but she can, she knows, reliably type a clean page. She takes a sip of her tea and straightens her aching back. From somewhere down the street, far beyond the grimy windows, a clock chimes five.

Unusually, the room is quiet enough to enable her to hear the clock. It is Saturday, and the reporters – the men whose raucous voices normally fill this space – have already disappeared to the public house next door. Their words have been slotted into the lead columns of the linotype machines that live under the building and are even now being disgorged onto vast rolls of paper. The noise of the printing room will be deafening – she knows because she was once allowed to see it – but here, two floors above, it is only a distant rumble, and she is barely disturbed. The Gazette, an evening newspaper, will be landing on doormats in Kensington and Chelsea within the hour. The reporters have nothing to do, apart from gather stories, until Monday. And no one wants to gather stories on Saturday evening when there is beer to be drunk.

Harriet is alone, hunched over her cramped desk, typing up her copy. It is not, of course, her desk. It is James Curran’s desk and is still always referred to as such. But James Curran no longer has need of it; he lies scattered in a thousand pieces somewhere over the Belgian countryside.