She is nonchalant, as if hiding several pairs of stolen gloves might be an everyday habit. It surely is. In their brief quarter-hour together in the Holloway cell, Alice Dunning had not elaborated much on what happened to the lifted items. Harriet had been keener to know about Ruby, aware of the warder outside and the certainty that they would be interrupted at any moment. It was Jimmy who had told her that the women traded the items for money, rather than keep them for themselves. That they would use an intermediary – a fence – to do so.

Ruby has eaten every crumb. She eats at speed, not daintily – like someone who doesn’t know when she’ll eat again.

‘Would you like another one?’ Harriet says. ‘Or would you like mine? I really shouldn’t be eating cake.’ She pushes the plate across the table.

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, my mother thinks I’m growing fat,’ she says. ‘I have a wedding dress to fit into in the summer.’ She picks up the tongs from the sugar bowl and taps the prongs lightly together. ‘I’m not even supposed to put sugar in my tea – can you imagine?’

Ruby lifts her eyes from the cake. ‘Bloody hell.’

Harriet giggles. ‘Shush. You’ll have us thrown out.’

Ruby takes the tongs from her and drops a lump of sugar into her own cup – and another into Harriet’s.

‘You should never go without sugar if it’s on offer. Life needs sweetening.’

Ruby has very delicate hands. Long fingers and the nails – which had been full of dirt when Harriet met her in the lobby of Debenham and Freebody – are scrubbed clean. She wears a ring on her right hand – an opal surrounded by silver marcasite. Harriet wonders whether this is something she owns or whether it has been stolen. It’s pretty rather than expensive, and it suits her, somehow.

‘No, you’re quite right.’

‘Is he worth it? Worth going without a sugar lump for?’

Ralph. She has barely thought of him today. She twists the engagement ring, straightening it so the stone sits squarely on her finger. The diamonds twinkle at her and she thinks of his warm smile and the way his hair falls over his brow and how handsome he is when he laughs.

‘Yes, I suppose he is.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘Do you have a young man?’

‘No one I’d give up cakes for.’ She sounds weary of the world, or perhaps just of men.

‘What about Billy Walsh?’

Ruby sits up. ‘What do you know of Billy Walsh?’