‘Thanks a lot, Joy. You look rotten, too,’ he’d said.

In this time, her jobs had multiplied. She’d ferried bits of gear to pawnbrokers in town and further out: new hopsack coats and suits of gabardine he’d taken from a warehouse, leather watch straps, silver napkin rings and carriage clocks. He’d got her carting boxes to the scrapyard on the bus, with sawn-off copper tubing and some pewter pipe-bends he’d ripped out of walls. They were measly, desperate jobs he must’ve done to ease a burden on himself. Someone had been hounding him, she’d known that much, but she’d not asked for names. By then, she hadn’t cared about his troubles. Worse, she hadn’t thought Mal Duggan’s plight would end up being her own. She’d held the money for him in a biscuit tin below the sink. Three times, she’d woken up and found it empty on the kitchen counter. There’d been signs and plenty of them, but she hadn’t heeded any.

Tonight, the Portsmouth Road was bright with freight. There was nothing but a thin white line between her and the other lane, and she was trying not to wonder what it might be like to plough straight through it, into the onrushing traffic. It was safer now to pick up speed. She even put the radio on, high volume, twisting at the dial until she landed on an unfamiliar tune. A fella with a soft, sweet voice, the sort that could bewitch you if it sang you nothing but the pools results. It soothed her for a good few minutes. He was singing about lavender and kings and queens. She waited for his name to be announced, but didn’t hear it clearly. Was it Burr Lives? Pearl Ives? Shame. She would’ve liked to buy his record. It was decent medicine. She drove until the signal weakened, crackled out, and she lost patience tuning in for something different.

The headscarf’s knot was rubbing now below her chin. She pulled it off. Her watch was stuck on ten to nine. It wasn’t such a complicated route: one road going north-east until Merton, when she’d have to concentrate a little more and check the map. She didn’t want to make a wrong turn and wind up in London’s belly. Slim odds that she’d ever find her way back out. The city was too dense for her, unreasonable and murky. She preferred its outer edges. All the towns and suburbs. Greenery without the bleakness of the farmland. Neighbours you could call upon, who didn’t know your business.

It was getting near to Christmas and, below the gutterings of ordinary houses up ahead, folk had green and red festoons hung out, with dangling clumps of mistletoe above their porches. There were holly wreaths on their front doors and stars made out of foil that twinkled with approaching lights. As pretty as it was, she couldn’t raise a festive mood. At Leventree, the Mayhoods had arranged a good-sized fir. She’d watched her brother dress it up with paper chains and glassy ornaments, a dumb grin on his face; Mr Mayhood had put candles on the mantelpieces in the dining room and parlour, sprigs of leaves and berries at their bases; Florence had draped bunting up the stairs – a truly merry evening that had been. Since then, they’d all been busy with the competition work while she’d sat painting shadows at her board and asking if there wasn’t something else she could be doing. ‘You’re being useful as things are,’ Mr Mayhood had insisted. ‘You’re refining your technique,’ Florence had said. But they were mollycoddling her and she well knew it. They were keeping her away from the important jobs, because she was a liability. All that she was good for now was this. Being a crook. Mal’s young accomplice. The dumb pigeon he could train to carry things he didn’t want to mucky his hands with. If she wanted better for herself, she’d have to find it far away from him, from here.