The grey-coated store detective meets her halfway and the two of them jostle one another in the centre of the floor, to the fascination of everyone who stands watching. Alice is wrestled to the ground and the woman sits on her. She starts shrieking and swearing – the woman is on her bad hip, pressing it into the hard floor. People are shocked that a well-dressed woman might know such words, let alone use them at volume.

Someone has called the police. They push their way through the customers to reach Alice. One of them appears to recognise her and greets her like an old friend: he tells her to calm down and shut up before hauling her up from the floor. The man who had been next to the handkerchiefs has scooped them up from where they fell and has brought them to the police. He offers to tell them what he saw. Says that she thumped him in the chest.

The store walker opens Alice’s coat and, like a magician plucking rabbits from a hat, pulls out bottles of perfume, swansdown powder puffs, packets of hairnets and several boxes of assorted cosmetics. The goods keep emerging, to the entertainment of the gathering crowd.

Ruby groans and rolls herself away from the pillar. She slinks away like a cat, unseen by the police, the store detective or the girl from Hartleys, and leaves quietly through the main door.

Poor Alice.

At least if she ends up in Holloway, she’ll have some time away from George.

That thought cheers Ruby. She pushes open her new sky blue umbrella to keep the drizzle from her hat.

12

12

Thursday evening

Maggs nurses her pint of brown stout, trying to cup it in hands that won’t keep still. Alice was her friend, as well as a member of her cell. She won’t say it, but she feels responsible for her arrest.

They sit around a table in the Crown and talk about nothing in particular. No one wants to speak about Alice; no one wants to upset Maggs.

‘It’s quiet in here tonight.’ Grace Bartlett picks at a blister in the varnish of the tabletop as she surveys the saloon. ‘Not many of the men about.’

‘There won’t be.’ Maggs looks up from her drink, her eyes heavy and red-rimmed. ‘Alf told me they’re going to the fight. They’re getting themselves ready.’

The boxing match that they have been talking about for days is taking place tonight. Ruby knows that the Elephants will be arming themselves for the inevitable skirmish. Maggs knows it, too, but for a woman who has no problem with fighting – as long as she’s the one throwing the punches, twisting the arms and causing the actual bodily harm – Maggs is surprisingly protective of her husband. It’s not only the loss of Alice that’s playing on her mind.