Gina circled the shop, looking at the displays of goods in pretty and expensive-looking packaging: soap in boxes, face powder in round cardboard tubs with satin bows decorating the lids, lipsticks in gold-coloured tubes. She looked to see where the sales assistants were. It all looked so tempting … Then she went over to the counter in front of a huge chest of glass-fronted drawers, each with a handwritten label above it in a tiny brass frame.

‘Good afternoon, miss. How may I help?’ asked the middle-aged man in a white coat, standing behind the polished wooden counter.

‘Good afternoon,’ replied Gina. ‘I’d like two boxes of the special rose soap that Mrs Stellion of Grindle Hall always buys, please.’

‘Of course,’ said the man, and went across the shop to fetch them from a shelf devoted to fancy soap.

‘And is this for Mrs Stellion herself?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Gina. ‘She asks that you charge it to her account, please.’

‘Of course, miss.’

The man wrapped the boxes in brown paper, which he tied with string and sealed with a paper sticker with the name of the shop printed on it in gold. He wrote out the bill in triplicate, then placed a copy of it and the parcel in a thick paper carrier bag and came round the counter to put it into Gina’s hands.

‘Thank you,’ said Gina, smiling politely. ‘Good afternoon.’

She left, the doorbell jingling merrily behind her. What a nice shop, she thought. She would not extract from her jacket pocket the lipstick she’d stolen until she got back to her rooms at the Hall. You never knew who was looking – or, in the case of the chemist’s shop, not looking.

Her errand for Mrs Stellion accomplished, Gina decided it was time to pay a visit to Mrs Thwaite.

She’d made a note of the address of Mrs Thwaite’s sister’s house from the letter she’d been asked to post the previous week: 17 Lloyd George Road. She had no idea where that could be, but Great Grindle was quite a small place, so it surely wasn’t far. She walked along Main Street, saw a newsagent’s shop and went in to ask.

The man behind the sweets counter gave her directions.

For a brief second Gina thought of helping herself to a tube of Smarties as she left, but she knew newsagents were constantly on the lookout for people filching the sweets so she smiled and went out empty-handed.

She walked down Main Street, passing houses both big and small towards the end, then turned left, walked along a few hundred yards, turned left again and found the road she wanted. Number 17 was on the right-hand side, a stone-built semi-detached house with a straight tiled path to the front door and a single bay window on the ground floor.