‘Yes.’ Harriet cannot quite catch the meaning of this comment, but it jars with her. She does not wish to deal with Ruby in such a prickly mood so close to the shop counter – and the watchful assistant – so tucks a hand under Ruby’s arm to draw her away.

‘Get off me,’ Ruby growls at her.

She drops her. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t want –’

‘I don’t care what you want.’

Something must have happened. Or else Harriet has interrupted her in the midst of a hoisting spree. Women of all ages, shopping, browsing, trying on jewellery at the counters, pass around them. She lowers her voice, conscious that she should not draw attention to their conversation.

‘What is it, Ruby? What’s wrong? Are you in trouble of some sort? Tell me.’

Ruby regards her with disdain. ‘Why, so you can write about that and all? Put it in your newspaper?’

‘Why do you keep talking about the newspaper?’ Harriet frowns, struggling to understand.

And then she knows.

Ruby watches the realisation dawn.

‘Oh!’ Harriet breathes. ‘The article.’

Ruby does not respond. The look on her face is sour.

‘The piece I wrote. I wrote about you. Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re cross with me? Are you cross?’

‘Cross?’ Ruby is incredulous at such a word. She folds her arms, but her fists are clenched hard, as if she is fighting to contain emotion. ‘Do you have any idea what damage you caused me?’ The voice is hard and bitter, and it fills Harriet with such dismay that she wants to sob – right in the middle of Selfridges.

Alice Dunning had sat on the bed in her cell at Holloway and told Harriet what happened to those who broke the rules of the Forty Thieves. You don’t keep your stolen goods. You share everything with the group. You don’t betray your friends. You don’t speak to the police. Alice had ventured the information not because Harriet had paid her so handsomely, but because she believed she was safe. No one in Holloway knew that Harriet was a reporter. No one would connect Alice with Harriet’s article. She had been so proud of her cleverness in how she had protected Alice. Without a thought to the consequences that might come of focusing the article on Ruby.

‘Damage?’ She swallows the lump in her throat and puts a hand to her pearl necklace, remembering. Alice had told her about the brutality of the Forty Thieves. And if they believed it was Ruby who had shared the information, shared the methods and tricks that she had treated so lightly in her article, then Ruby will have been ostracised, at the very least. ‘Did they hurt you?’ she asks in a whisper, not wanting to hear the answer.