Victor turned first and grinned. He gathered books from house clearances or other sources, and there, on the scratched-up counter, next to a sheaf of bills secured by a paperweight, a pile of tattered paperbacks signified his latest haul.

‘Ah, Connie,’ said her father, smiling. ‘See what Victor has brought us.’

Her father was dressed in his usual waistcoat and white shirt, his face adorned by a pair of half-glasses, hair greying and needing a trim. Connie’s chest tightened. She should tell him to go to the barbers. He never did anything for himself unless she pushed him, which both irritated and pleased her.

Now he held up a volume of poetry by Emily Dickinson. Connie took it with a tingle of anticipation and noticed with surprise that the rest of the books were by female authors too: Sylvia Plath, Shirley Jackson, Virginia Woolf.

‘What do you think?’ said her father eagerly.

She smiled, touching the spines. Oh, to be one of these women, to let her thoughts run and slide on every page. She’d wanted to be a writer for as long as she could remember, scribbling stories at an early age. Her parents had read them and taken her ambition seriously, nodding gravely, offering advice. She still wrote, but her ideas were small, her settings confined to south London. She wished she could travel the world and feed her imagination, that she could go to exotic places like Marrakesh and Cairo and absorb the sights and the smells and the sounds. Next door in the second-hand shop, a Remington typewriter had been in the window for months. Gleaming, black and silver and compact. One day she would buy it. She imagined herself clacking away at the keys on a train headed for Venice, shooting back the carriage with a ding.

‘They’re perfect,’ she said, averting her eyes from Victor’s grin.

Victor was twenty-five. Good-looking, light-eyed, smooth-skinned with tawny coloured hair, it was his mouth that spoiled the effect, with lips that were over-red, always damp. They parted when he looked at her, showing pointed teeth like a wolf’s. Today he wore an ugly green and orange checked jacket, yet he still managed to look slick. Slick. That was the word to describe Victor. Or sleazy. Even though he was the best-read person she knew – apart from her father. Now he leered at her in the way he always did, his gaze travelling over her body. She crossed her arms to cover her chest, regretting her short yellow dress.

‘Can you guess who owned these books?’ said her father, waving A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in front of her eyes.

Connie smiled. ‘No. Who?’

‘A suffragette, or at least a relation to a suffragette and a very famous one at that. Have you heard of Emily Davison, the lady who died on the track at the Epsom Derby?’

‘Of course!’ Connie replied.