Free After Hours by Jenny Oldfield

names right. But who’s to say he is who he claims he is? No, we gotta take this one step at a time.’
    Hettie frowned. ‘You ain’t heard him, Frances.’
    â€˜Exactly. I could kick myself. We missed him by five minutes. But you say he shows up here every Saturday?’
    â€˜Now the weather’s turned bad, yes.’
    Frances took a deep breath. ‘Right, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll wait a week. Then we’ll come back early in the evening and talk to him.’ She quietened Sadie’s protest. ‘A week ain’t long to wait after all these years. We don’t say nothing before then. Not a word.’
    â€˜But maybe we should warn Annie?’ Hettie had had more time to consider this option. ‘If it was me, I think I’d want to be the first to know, not the last.’
    Frances knitted her brows. ‘I don’t know, Ett. What difference does a week make, like I say?’
    â€˜And what about poor Annie? She’d be like a cat on hot bricks.’ Sadie imagined how their stepmother would feel. ‘Not knowing if it really is Wiggin or not. That don’t seem right.’
    So Hettie gave in. She saw that it was two to one, and she trusted Frances’s judgement most of all. ‘Next Saturday, then,’ she agreed.
    Frances and Sadie pulled on their gloves and tucked their collars up around their chins. They kissed Hettie on the cheek and she waved them goodbye, watching them brave the army of lost souls who had been locked out. Then she went back to her calling.

Chapter Six
    Now every tramp in the streets of Southwark seemed to pose a threat to the happiness and security of the Parsons family. Hettie’s description of ‘Wiggin’ as just over five feet tall, thin, bent by age, undermined by drink, a tiny, shambling figure of a man, could be taken to include many of the more hopeless cases taking shelter under the railway arches, staggering out to beg for a few small coins.
    More than once that week, gazing through the window of her chemist’s shop, beyond the bright purple, blue and red carboys on display there, Frances had cause to start and wonder. An old tramp would thrust his nose up to the window, tattered grey coat hanging wide, his body wrapped in woollen rags, his trousers shiny with grease and many sizes too big. Or she would be behind her counter, sorting loofahs and sponges to size before pricing them, when she would glance up at another of these fearful sights; rheumy-eyed, skin lined and engrained with dirt, holding out a skinny hand for a close of black draught to help ease his permanent hangover. Once, a man so scared her on her evening route home, as he lurched out of a derelict shop doorway and crumpled into a heap at her feet, that she rushed on and fled upstairs to the comfortable flat she shared with Billy. There she poured out the whole story of ‘Willie Wiggin’.
    Billy Wray was startled by the state his wife was in. He promised whatever help he could. They’d been married for six years, following a decent period of mourning for his first wife, Ada, and he was still devoted to Frances. Like most of the rest of the world, he put her on a pedestal, admiring her cleverness, her interest in goodcauses, always respecting her opinion. For her part, Frances trusted Billy with her life, often went to him for advice, and gave wholehearted support to the workers’ publications which Billy edited and composited from a back room of the Institute. He was a self-taught printer, having given over his newspaper stall on Duke Street to young Tommy O’Hagan, and he put his painstakingly acquired skill to work in support of the many new unions for shop and factory workers which were springing up in the East End. Now in his late forties, he had mellowed into a sinewy, spare-framed man; his fair hair had turned grey and thinned at the temples, but he was still very upright and smart.
    He greeted