GINA LEFT COALHOUSE Terrace and was glad to go. With a little luck she wouldn’t have to spend another night in such a wretched place, but she was eking out the money she’d stolen from the Hathersage sisters until she sold the rest of the loot, just in case there were any difficulties. She’d got rid of the nasty mourning brooch and the hatpin – where had the other hatpin got to? – at a pawnbroker’s in Preston the previous day, but she was finding it difficult to remember what she was supposed to be called and what her story was at each place. She’d left the notes she’d made at the back of her old exercise book at the Hall when she fled, and now she wished she’d brought them with her to remind her. Mostly it didn’t matter, but at one pawnbroker’s the man remembered her better than she remembered herself, and he became suspicious. That was when she decided to move on and try her luck in Blackburn. She recalled for certain that she was Mrs Travers at Sidney Simmonds’ shop.

The breakfast at Coalhouse Terrace had been as horrible as the room: congealed eggs like rubber, strangely grey underneath, accompanied by thin toast spread with a tiny spot of sour-tasting margarine. Being a country girl, Gina was used to good food. Even though there had never been any luxury at Highview Cottage – far from it; potatoes featured most days – the food always tasted wholesome and had been well cooked. Now she had an idea how really poor people lived, people who had lost hope and given up caring because they couldn’t afford to. When she’d gone back upstairs after breakfast to collect her things, she’d seen a rat running down the corridor. That explained the vile smell around the wardrobe in her room.

She’d tried to leave the squalid hotel without paying, tiptoeing down with her things, but the woman on the desk was too quick for her and Gina had handed over the money for her room and the inedible breakfast with ill grace.

She went out into the overcast late-August day. Rain threatened and she had no umbrella and didn’t fancy a soaking. She made her way to King William Street, where there were plenty of shops. By now it was spitting with rain. At a hardware shop she saw the inevitable bucket just inside the door for shoppers to put their wet umbrellas in, and she waited outside, pretending to look in at the window, until someone with an umbrella went into the shop. No sooner had the woman left her wet brolly in the bucket and turned away than Gina picked it out and was off down the road with it. Luckily for her it was not a distinctive colour, and within a few yards she was mingling with other shoppers holding black umbrellas.