The omnibus, wending its way around the fashionable streets, into which such vulgar vehicles were not allowed to go, arrived by devious routes at Victoria, where Carina got off.

By this time, she was fully in control of her emotions.

She walked quickly down Ebury Street, avoided a man, who came staggering from a public house, obviously intent on picking her up, and reached Eaton Square. From there it was only a short walk to her destination.

She arrived on the doorstep of Number 187, her cheeks glowing from the speed at which she had travelled and feeling somehow brighter than she had done before.

‘I will get the job, I will get it!’ she told herself beneath her breath. ‘I have to!”

She pulled the bell determinedly and heard it clang somewhere far away in the basement. She noted, as she did so, that the knocker on the door was dirty and in need of a clean and the doorstep itself had not been scrubbed recently.

Then, with a sudden start, she saw a card in the window propped against a dirty lace curtain – “Rooms to Let”.

‘There must be some mistake,’ she thought, and hastily searched her handbag for the card Mrs. Macey had given her.

Before she could find it, the door opened and a maid, in a dirty apron and a cap that slipped over one ear, stood there.

‘I-I think I must have come to the wrong place,” Carina said. “I was looking for 87.”

“That’s ’ere,” the maid answered laconically.

“But I was told to ask for Lady Lynche.”

The maid jerked her thumb towards the darkness of the passage behind her.

“’Er’s down there,” she said. “Be she expectin’ you?”

“I-I don’t think so,” Carina answered, moving into the house almost automatically and conscious, as she did so, of the pungent smell of onions and tobacco.

The maid closed the door behind her.

“I’ll go and find out if ’er’ll see you. What’s your name?”

“Miss – Miss Cla – ” Carina dragged back the name she was about to say – “Miss Warner,” and added hastily, “Miss Warner from Mrs. Macey’s Agency.”

“Oh, then they be expectin’ you if that’s who you are!” the maid answered. “I ’eard as ’ow the old girl ’ad gone there this mornin’. Come on!”

Bewildered beyond words, Carina did as she was told and followed the maid in her down-at-heel shuffling shoes along a scruffy passage towards the back of the house.

Stopping abruptly, the girl rapped sharply on a door and, without waiting for anyone to answer, opened it.

“’Ere she is,” she announced. “Someone from the Agency. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

She moved aside to let Carina pass into the room and then closed the door behind her with a noisy bang that seemed to vibrate round the walls.