Alice found the gate with her hands for the darkness was all-consuming and unforgiving. The gate was not latched; indeed, it was barely attached to its hinges at all so that, when she pushed it and slipped inside, it almost clattered to the ground.

Beyond was a space filled with dark shadows and unpleasant odours, a tiny yard, overgrown and piled high with whatever such places were piled high with. It backed onto the rear of a dwelling, which in this neighbourhood was a crumbling and single-storey worker’s cottage.

No light showed. Someone in one of the neighbouring cottages sang loudly and drunkenly and further away men’s voices were raised in dispute and something smashed, a bottle or a window. A bat flew overhead with a great flap of black leathery wings and Alice stifled a cry. Something scurried over her foot.

From the cottage there was no sound at all, no baby crying, nothing.

Alice waited, straining to hear, gathering her courage about her. There was a cesspit here; she felt the muck oozing beneath her feet and she wondered what else it was in this yard that emitted such unpleasant odours. A dead dog? Animal bones and butcher’s offal and other rubbish from the house, human and animal, which, if you lived among it long enough, you no longer noticed? But what if it was not the corpse of a dead dog?

She hammered on the door and prayed she would not die this night.

After a long moment the door opened a crack.

‘Who’s zere?’

It was a man’s voice. She had not anticipated this. Hoarse and rasping, and with it came a gust of stale tobacco, unwashed bodies, smoke and something that had been fried a long while ago and still lingered.

‘I want my baby back,’ said Alice.

She could see almost nothing of the man, for the interior of the cottage seemed darker even than the night, but at her words she sensed a quick movement of his head, a sucking of his teeth, the rustle of layers of coarse clothing. She sensed his astonishment.

‘Git outta here!’

‘I want my baby back,’ said Alice a second time.

‘No babies here. Gorn, scram!’

‘Yes, there is,’ Alice persisted, though she felt that something must give—her courage or her bladder. Her legs perhaps and her heart too. All seemed on the verge of collapse. ‘I gave it to Mrs Flowers Friday night and now I have followed her here with some other woman’s baby and I want mine back.’

At this the door opened abruptly and the man stumbled out, so that Alice stepped back with a gasp and threw out a hand to steady herself. She felt his breath on her face

‘Ain’t no Mrs Flowers here. Ain’t no babies here.’