‘Yes. Yes, they did. Smiler’s all right, but Addy’s badly injured and Basset was killed – the pale man, with the cheekbones.’

‘Oh, Winnie …’ And the note of sympathy in her sister’s voice dislodged something in Winnie, so that she found herself weeping.

‘You were marvellous, you know,’ said Avril, struggling to her feet from the low bed. ‘I almost wish I could write the book again, now that I’ve actually seen you at work. You really were terrific.’

Genuine praise, untainted with Avril’s usual patronage; Winnie turned the words over in her head, like someone examining an unexpectedly valuable present. ‘Well, you did all right too,’ she said.

‘Did I?’ Avril looked delighted. ‘Well, I tried my best. But I was terribly proud of you. I wanted to tell everyone you were my little sister.’

‘That I was your what?’

‘Oh, don’t get cross, Twinnie. It’s just the way I think of you.’

‘I was born first – you really are the limit, Avril.’ She blew her nose, hard. ‘I’m going home. I’m back on tonight.’ She shooed her sister out of the Post and locked the door.

‘Bye, darling,’ said Avril, heading for the Tube and the Ministry of Information, looking as if she’d slept for twelve hours on satin pillows.

As Winnie walked back to the flat, thinking only of taking off her boots and falling on to the bed, she was stopped by three separate people offering her breakfast, and by a black-and-white cat which ran towards her as she passed the ruins of Falcon Road. She stooped to scratch its head and it butted its hard little nose into her palm. Winnie had seen it before, hanging around the derelict basement flat whose illegal occupant she had never managed to catch up with. Looking along the row, she realized that the shape of the terrace had changed since yesterday – the houses, already roofless from the previous V-2 to hit the sector, had collapsed inward, the lower storeys split by broad cracks. Last night’s rocket might have landed a quarter of a mile away, but here it had delivered the coup de grâce.

Winnie picked up the cat and walked uncertainly towards the flat she’d previously visited; was it the one with half a gate hanging from a single hinge, or its neighbour with the cream-stuccoed wall, peppered with old shrapnel wounds? The cat answered her question by wriggling from her arms and picking its way towards the latter. The stairs down to the basement entrance still showed evidence of having been cleared by the occupant, but the door itself had burst outward, and as Winnie descended she could see that what had happened at the pub had also happened here, and that the interior was now a dense wedge of ceilings and floorboards from the storeys above.

‘Don’t,’ she said to the cat, who was trying to insert its head between the layers. The whole place felt desperately unsafe, plaster dust trickling through the wreckage. Winnie took out her torch and shone it into some of the gaps in the strata; she glimpsed a section of bannister, a crushed lampshade with a purple silk fringe, a shoe, a row of wrought-iron coat-hooks. She turned the torch off and then, after a moment, turned it back on. She flicked the beam across the piled debris, found the shoe again, and this time leaned closer, her face pushing up against a splintered board. She could see it clearly now: it was a man’s shoe, the laces tied in a firm double bow. The sock was rucked around the ankle and above it she could see two or three inches of livid calf, the rest of the leg engulfed in rubble. She moved the torch away, and inserted her hand into the gap. The foot had stiffened and the calf was ice-cold.