The slender receptionist stood up and then pushed the visitor book toward her. “Just sign in here.” She watched as Alice wrote her name, then beamed at her. “The library is on the lower ground floor. The stairs are on the left of the lift. And I’ll phone Elizabeth now and tell her you’re on your way down.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Not at all, Miss Cotton.”

It grew colder as she descended into the basement, smooth stone steps giving way to the black-and-white tiles of a wide empty corridor. There were multiple doorways; the closest one was fully open, light pooling on the floor, and Alice walked tentatively through into a narrower passageway. Here another entrance gave way to a deceptively large room that smelled of dust and paper, and had a long wooden counter at the front. There were bare brickwork walls with mosaics of rudimentary plaster, and a ceiling covered in a skeleton of pipework. Rack upon rack of metal shelving and closed cabinets ran parallel from the counter all the way to the far wall. The air was thicker here, an almost tomblike stillness with no sign of life apart from the shadows that flickered across the room as pedestrians passed on the glass bricks of the pavement overhead.

A woman appeared dressed in a WAAF uniform, her dark hair curling around her collar. “Miss Cotton?”

“Yes. Are you Elizabeth?”

The woman nodded, and Alice couldn’t help but stare; her eyes were so pale they were almost translucent. “I didn’t get time to change after my shift this morning,” she said in a south London accent as she glanced down shyly at her uniform.

“Oh, I see,” Alice replied. “Well, thank you for seeing me at such short notice.”

“That’s quite all right. It’s lucky you caught me, actually. I was just going on my lunch break.” She glanced at the large wall clock.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to hold you up.”

“It’s quite all right. How can I help?”

“I’m interested in the baby farmer articles by Olive Melville Brown.”

“Ah, yes.” The woman’s eyes widened. “Unbelievable, isn’t it, what some people will do? Taking advantage of the vulnerable in these precarious times.”

It seemed she was waiting for Alice to reply, but she could only nod and ask, “Do you have her stories on hand?”

“I do, actually. I file the articles under reporters’ names and in chronological order, so it should be easy enough to find what you’re looking for. Is that all you want?”

“I think so,” Alice said, encouraged. “For the time being, at least.”

She listened to the vibrations of traffic and indecipherable conversations from passersby as Elizabeth wrestled with the metal drawers, returning with a tray of newspapers. “Now, you take these through to the reading room next door, and I’ll come and see how you’re getting on when I return.”