‘And cheek.’ The girl glanced towards where the supervisor was pouring a glass of soda water for a customer and then lowered her voice. ‘She corrected one of the ladies.’

‘Corrected her on what?’

‘Geography.’

‘What aspect of geography?’

‘I don’t know. But we’re not supposed to contradict the ladies. I don’t ever,’ she added, complacently.

‘So do you know where I could find Ida?’

‘Wilson Road. She lives with relations. Her auntie takes in ironing.’ The tone was disparaging.

‘A useful service,’ said The Flea, rather crisply, forgetting for a second the need to be unobtrusive, remembering instead her own childhood: two steam-filled rooms, walls pearled with moisture, piles of folded linen which couldn’t ever be touched or even brushed against, so that she and her brother had learned to walk crab-wise, arms pressed to their sides. ‘Thank you,’ she added, turning away from the counter.

She knew Wilson Road well. ‘Black Alley’, it was called by the locals, the bricks thick with railway soot, the thrum of trains audible in the rooms at the front of the buildings, the ceaseless clatter and hum of the Euston Road at the back. ‘He can’t sleep if he can’t hear no traffic,’ one of her mothers had said of her baby. A nice, clean, healthy baby he’d been, in well-scrubbed quarters, while directly outside rats had rustled in a row of lidless bins. On that occasion, The Flea had threatened the landlord with a summons, and new lids had been quickly supplied; you could use the law against the landlords – you could demand a visit to a workshop, request gutters to be mended, walls to be whitewashed, windows to be unscrewed – but to enter a home you needed an invitation. And you never knew until the door was open whether you’d smell carbolic or sour milk, whether the mother would be able and energetic or a weary slattern with a row of ailing offspring, and, if the latter, you could never criticize – only hint, nudge, suggest, interleave tact with sympathy, otherwise you’d never get in again. You were a visitor, and visitors should always be polite.

‘Excuse me. I’m looking for a lady who takes in ironing. She might be called Mrs Pearse.’

The small boy sitting with his feet in the gutter and a kitten on his lap jerked his head towards a stairwell.

‘Top floor, Miss.’

The Flea was halfway up the stairs when a young girl of fourteen or fifteen came clattering down, a knotted bundle in her hand, a puffed purple smudge on her upper lip, auburn hair visible beneath a cheap beige felt.

‘Ida Pearse?’

The girl ducked her face towards the wall.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘My name’s Miss Lee. I heard about your nasty accident on the Heath and I called to see how you were.’

The girl flicked her a glance and then returned to her study of the brickwork. ‘What do you mean, you heard about it? Are you something to do with the police?’