Mick had searched high and low, delving into every nook and cranny, questioning more people than he could ever hope to remember. But Molly was nowhere to be found. Dear God in Heaven, he thought now, where else am I to look? Even the detective hired by the Tanners had fared no better than himself. But then London was a big place, bustling with people and covering many square miles. All the same, he felt as though he had covered every available inch. Certainly he had followed up on what Tilly had told him, enquiring at all the big hotels. Molly had been to none of them, ‘as far as we can recall’.

On the far side of the busy road, the uproar was so loud that it drew Mick’s attention. For a moment, he took little notice – there were always people shouting and yelling, competing with the costermongers and fighting amongst themselves! He began to turn away, to bring his mind back to his Molly. But then, as though the image in his mind had suddenly materialized, there she was! Her black hair more unkempt than the last time he had seen her, and her figure painfully thin, but it was Molly right enough! His heart leaped inside him. There was something wrong. She was being chased. Molly was in trouble. ‘MOLLY!’ His desperate cry cut above the noise. For a split second she half-turned. ‘Molly… Stay where you are!’ he yelled, running forward along the pavement and frantically seeking an opening where he might dash across the road to her.

Afraid that she had not seen him, Mick yelled again and again, ‘Molly! Stay there!’ Several times he made to run across the road, but was driven back by the many rushing carriages. Suddenly Molly was running in his direction, two men and a woman in pursuit. Mick could not be sure whether or not she had heard him. ‘Molly! Molly!’

When the horse and carriage careered alongside the kerb, the spin of a wheel catching Molly and flinging her across the pavement, Mick was momentarily paralysed. Then he surged forward, her name on his lips and a fervent prayer in his heart. ‘Dear God… don’t let her be dead. Don’t let her be dead.’

Molly was not dead, although when Mick gathered her into his arms she at first appeared lifeless. After a moment, when he sobbed her name over and over, his warm tears spilling on to her still, white face, she opened her eyes to murmur his name. ‘Mick… oh, Mick.’ Then a look of terror darkened her face as she struggled in his tight embrace. ‘My babies! He’s got my babies!’ The tears rolled down her face and her voice broke into sobs.

‘No, sweetheart. Your babies are safe.’ He would have added, ‘with Emma… their grandmother, your mother’, but Molly knew nothing of that. Not yet. He gently assured her that they were out of harm’s way, and so, thank God, was she. When Molly tearfully confessed how the authorities would hang her and make her children orphans because she had murdered a café owner by the name of Bill Craig, Mick softly laughed. The relief flooded her lovely face when he explained how the man was not ‘murdered’ because he himself had lately spoken to Bill Craig in the flesh.