‘I warned you!’ Mrs Flynn had said unhelpfully, when Alice had come to her the morning after, still shaken and with a scratch on her throat where the man’s knife had nicked her. But she had sat the girl down and administered a nip of gin, watching silently as Alice swallowed it and choked a little.

‘You must go to the police,’ Mrs Flynn declared with a conviction admirable in someone who, not ten days earlier, had stood in this same kitchen and laughed at the notion the law might protect them.

‘No!’ Alice cried, jumping up so that the chair crashed to the floor. ‘It is ’cause of the police that things have got to where they have.’

Mrs Flynn gave her a look that suggested this was an interpretation of events to which she did not subscribe, but Mrs Flynn did not know all the facts. And Mrs Flynn had not known Milli. There would be no police.

‘Then what is to be done, Alice? What is to be done?’ And Mrs Flynn went off shaking her head.

What was to be done? Alice did not know and she went through her day and into the next day believing the baby already dead, steeling herself to believe that this was the best thing—for the baby, for everyone. But it is a terrible thing to deaden your own heart and sometimes the heart will not be deadened.

‘I shall go back to the house. Perhaps it is not too late,’ she announced finally, on the Friday morning, and she stood in the middle of the kitchen in defiance of Mrs Flynn as though the older woman might try to prevent her, when in fact there was no one who cared enough about Alice Nimrod to prevent her walking into danger or to offer comfort when she did.

But Mrs Flynn was concerned, for the household routine was threatened.

‘Now?’ she said, astonished. It was the middle of the day. She had never heard of such a thing. But Mrs Flynn, perhaps remembering the revolutionary corsets and seeing that the world was no longer a place she knew, sighed. ‘Go then. If the mistress asks where you are I shall think of something to tell her.’

And so Alice had gone.

And in the daylight she hardly recognised the place. She picked her way along the narrow and cluttered lane through the refuse of a dozen households and the rats did not scurry away at her approach and a dog, rabid and diseased, worried at her heels.

But selecting one dilapidated gate from the many such gates hanging limply from their broken hinges in a wall of crumbling brickwork was no simple matter.