Alice watched her. The girl wore a rain-soaked sagging straw hat and she turned this way and that, starting at every sound and occasionally wiping a sleeve over her nose. She waited, but how long she would wait depended on many things and some of them Alice could guess, others she could not. A train whistled distantly and approached the station and the girl cocked her head, and in another moment she and her bundle would be on the tracks beneath the oncoming train and both their miseries would be over.

But here, now, was Mrs Flowers emerging from the steam and the smoke and the shadows and offering her own particular brand of salvation. She called out to the girl, approached her and spoke again, sharply. Alice pressed herself into the shadows and heard nothing of the transaction. In a moment it was done, money and baby exchanged, the bundle wrapped tightly inside the older woman’s coat, and all of their destinies forever altered—the child’s, the girl’s, possibly Mrs Flower’s too, though this seemed less certain.

Mrs Flowers walked away at a rapid pace and did not look back and was at once swallowed up in the darkness and the smoke so that her brief presence had an unnatural and unreal quality to it, like a spectral visitation.

The girl, having handed her child over to a stranger, stood quite still with a hand pressed against her mouth. She walked blindly away and there seemed every likelihood her night would end beneath the wheels of a train; or, if not this night, then another.

But Alice Nimrod did not stay to observe it. She set off after the hurrying black figure of Mrs Flowers, skirting the puddles and leaping the overflowing gutters, startled by the speed at which the woman moved, and with a baby in her arms.

They left the station, heading eastwards along Devonshire Street and making a series of turns down ever narrower and darker laneways so that Alice, who had grown up in these streets, hardly knew where they were. When they had reached the darkest, the narrowest laneway at the heart of a maze of such places—a laneway so narrow you could touch both sides at once without even stretching, a place so foul that the pigs which roamed other Surry Hills laneways, rooting out and consuming its refuge and detritus, were here quite absent—Mrs Flowers reached her destination. She pushed at an unseen gate and was gone and she did not pause, not even for a moment, to look behind her, for Mrs Flowers did the work of the devil and so she had little to fear from mortal souls.

She had little to fear from Alice Nimrod, whose soul was of the most mortal kind and who was but a few yards behind and so reached the place a moment later.