He clears his throat. ‘I’m letting you go, Miss Littlemore. Asking you to leave the Gazette.’

‘But I like it here.’ She hugs her handbag to her stomach. ‘I like my job. I need my job. Especially now.’

‘I don’t doubt that.’ He sighs. ‘But I’m sorry. Your father has asked me to send you home.’

‘My father did what?’

‘Your father has written to me asking me to let you go.’

‘But my job here is nothing to do with my father.’ Her voice rises a little.

He rubs his temple, cigarette still between his fingers. ‘It’s everything to do with your father. I was only obliged to give you work in the first place because Mr Littlemore is a friend of the proprietor.’

‘What?’

‘Your father. He spoke to the owner of this newspaper, and you came to see me, and I offered you some work. You didn’t know?’

He might as well have punched her. She slumps in the chair, winded.

‘You assumed that you were hired on your own merit and ability? You think that I put up with your erratic timekeeping, your late arrivals and your early departures, because I like what you write?’

She stares at him, still uncomprehending. Her father spoke to the proprietor. That is how she came to have this job. All the time she has been here, Mr Pickford has been indulging her – and indulging her father. And now her father wants her to leave. Gerald will say, to anyone who asks, that she is leaving to be free to marry Ralph, to support him while the whirl of scandal surrounds him. But she knows that this is the quiet, devastating consequence of what happened in Selfridges. So, she must leave. All the time she has hidden her engagement in this office, for fear that Mr Pickford would think her flighty or fickle, the sort of woman who would take on a job and leave after a few months, and yet he never took her seriously at all. He had been saddled with her.

‘You should go home, Harriet,’ he says, not unkindly. ‘Regardless of your father’s orders, your family needs you.’

She does not wish to go home.

He taps ash into the tray. ‘The Express and other newspapers will be watching to see how Mr Christie behaves. What he does, who he associates with. This story will blow over – stories always do – but scandal never quite disappears. People, readers, will want to be reassured that Mr Christie is, as he would like to appear, an honourable and upstanding member of society. A wife – or at least a fiancée – will help them to see that.’

‘And what if he isn’t an honourable man? What if he is exactly as the report describes him?’

Pickford stares at her, sucking the inside of his lower lip, before responding. ‘Then I wish you all the luck in the world.’