From bestselling author Jackie French comes a compelling book about the choices we make and the chances we never dreamed we'd be given.
1931. The height of the Depression, Sydney, New South Wales
They were diamonds: beautiful, sparkling and irresistible.
Nice girls do not accept employment from infamous Tilly Devine, the brothel owner with jewels on her fingers and a pistol in her handbag. All of Sydney knows her as the queen of crime, ruling an empire of bootleg whisky and gambling clubs, and rumour has it she's quick to pull the trigger on anyone who crosses her - including her husband.
Yet, destitute after her mother's death, Constance McKie realises she has three choices: starve, jump over The Gap, or enter a life no respectable girl would dare consider. When Tilly Devine offers her a role as one of her 'diamonds', Connie finds that perhaps she's not the girl she thought she was.
A diamond's role is complex, demanding, usually glamorous and entirely secret, and kept far away from Tilly's world of gang wars, bribery and blackmail. But when murder is suspected in the mansion that becomes her home, Connie soon learns that it's not only diamonds that are tougher than steel.
Sydney, 1931
Surry Hills smelled of boiled nappies, coal smoke from the jam factory, and despair. Constance McKie sat on a kitchen chair on the cracked concrete footpath outside the cottage where she and Mum had lived for seven years, watching the bailiff’s men carry out the tattered remnants of her life.
The narrow bed she’d shared with Mum; a commode; wooden fruit boxes that stored their clothes; even the silver frame that had held the photo of Mum and Dad’s wedding day. The photo itself hid between her camisole and dress.
It wasn’t much of a cottage: four small rooms, with mould in the ceiling and rats in the walls, and a tide of cockroaches at night that scuttled back into the cracks whenever Connie turned the light on. It had a dunny down the back, a bathtub hung on a hook and a ‘garden’ of thistles and broken concrete that stank of cat urine.
Connie glanced back again at the tiny woman leaning on the grimy factory wall across the street. Tilly Devine, the gangster Queen of Woolloomooloo, was watching Connie yet again, as she’d studied her on and off for the past three weeks. Tilly was thirty perhaps, though her dark eyes seemed older, watchful as a hawk.
All of Sydney knew Tilly Devine from the newspapers: the ex-prostitute with half the police force and most politicians bribed and in her pocket. Tilly Devine dealt in bodies, booze and blackmail. The combination made her almost untouchable.
Why would anyone — especially a woman with demanding ‘business’ interests like Tilly Devine — waste hours in the fumes of Surry Hills, watching a young woman far too thin for beauty, with no useful skills in Tilly’s world of sly grog and crime?
Whenever Tilly wasn’t there a man had taken her place, neatly dressed in an expensive suit which couldn’t disguise the fighter’s thick neck and shoulders and the snake eyes of a thug. He’d even followed Connie to the chemist shop and back again.
Tilly herself was back this morning, in a well-cut serge skirt and jacket, pearls around her neck and jewelled rings on every finger, but still looking like the Cockney sparrow she’d once been. Her neat handbag probably held a small pistol and a photo of a politician dressed in black stockings.
The men carried out the final oddments: a rusty bucket, the shells Connie had collected in that far-off sunlit life at Lobster Bay, and the last bottle of laudanum, still with a teaspoon’s worth of liquid left.
The laudanum had eased Mum’s pain a bit. Mum’s headaches and periods of blankness had begun a few weeks after Dad’s funeral. They’d sold everything to move to Sydney for medical help. Connie would study law at university.
But even Sydney’s doctors couldn’t help the agony of brain cancer. Doctors and morphia injections were expensive, and university fees impossible. The cheaper laudanum’s mixture of morphia and alcohol allowed Mum some sleep, at least till the end. Mum had screamed for hours the night she died, before falling into sleep or coma. Connie dozed next to her, woken only by a midnight knife fight outside their front door.
Seven years in Surry Hills had taught her to stay in the back of the house when rival gangs fought. Knife fights usually only hurt the participants. Bullets too easily went astray.
She woke again as the dawn siren called the workers to the jam factory. Mum’s body had been cold, but smiling, still holding Connie’s hand.
Two men in boots, blue singlets, and army trousers cut off at the knee hauled the bed into the back of the truck, with two blankets, two pillows and four sheets, grey like all linen washed in Surry Hills, where smoke hung day and night. Connie suddenly noticed a pool of congealed blood at her feet from last night’s fight. She moved her shoes away.
She’d had two lives in her twenty-four years: hope and happiness, growing up in Lobster Bay, going on house calls with Dad in his beloved Morris Minor, watching him palpate a cat for lumps, or stitch up a wound from a dog fight. The next life was poverty and pain, but there’d been joy, too, caring for Mum, singing the old songs, reciting poems to each other, reading Mum their books from Lobster Bay till one by one each book was pawned. They’d only had each other at the end.
I need food and sleep, she thought. She had no way to get either. She must build another life. With what? Shreds of newspaper blowing in the wind, broken bottles? Even her nails were cracked, her shoes tied up with string.
The goods made such a small heap in the truck. So little to show for three people’s lives.
The bailiff loomed over her, his massive shoulders like a Hereford bull’s. His boots trod in the blood. Connie wondered if he’d noticed. ‘Where’s your kitchen table and the rest of the chairs?’
‘Pawned,’ said Connie, wondering why she couldn’t cry, couldn’t scream at these men removing the shreds of her life. ‘I’ve got the tickets if you want to redeem them,’ she added mechanically. She fumbled in the pocket of her apron — she’d put it on automatically this morning, as she did every morning, but over her best ‘Sunday’ dress today, with her only pair of shoes, her least darned stockings, two pairs of shabby knickers and a camisole, plus the faded hat and gloves any respectable girl must wear in public.
Connie handed him the crumpled tickets, then glanced at Tilly again. Tilly gave a faint nod, but didn’t move.
Mr Rutledge sometimes gave Connie his newspaper after he’d done the crossword. Tilly Devine occupied the front page almost every week. Gang warfare had erupted across the city: Tilly’s men carved out territories, knifing or shooting anyone who got in their way, especially those employed by Tilly’s only rival, Kate Leigh. The few gangland murderers who were arrested were always acquitted, even when everyone in a crowded club had seen the shooting or stabbing. Witnesses who talked ended up in concrete boots at the bottom of the harbour. Last night’s knife fight wouldn’t even rate a paragraph on page six: a small affair, maybe not even anyone dead.
Connie had never crossed the road to ask Tilly why she scrutinised her, partly from exhaustion but also because nice girls didn’t speak to Tilly Devine. But Mr Rutledge followed Tilly’s career with the obsession of a man with gas-scarred lungs left no life beyond his war pension, his daughter-in-law’s thin stews and charity.
Connie had leafed through his old newspapers, destined for dunny paper, as soon as she realised she was being watched. Tilly Devine had been arrested many times for whoring, obscene language, offensive behaviour and slashing a man with a razor. She’d even spent a stretch in prison.
A recent article suggested Tilly had used her prison time to plan and make contacts. She’d emerged to found an empire. A woman could legally run a brothel in New South Wales. A man could not. Slum property was cheap. Tilly Devine had saved money ever since she’d first walked the streets at twelve, soon earning high prices for her services.
Tilly Devine and her henchmen now controlled Sydney’s most sought-after nightclubs, sly grog shops, exclusive betting rings and brothels, her genius for organisation and legendary loyalty to her ‘girls’ soon eclipsing Kate Leigh. Tilly had been shot at many times. Her Maroubra home had been the site of at least one gun battle. The men who chauffeured Tilly drove cars with bullet-proof glass, and carried pistols and knuckle-dusters.
Tilly Devine’s business genius made her rich. Her kindness kept her girls loyal. Blackmail, bribery, guns and swiftly wielded flick knives kept her safe.
Maybe Tilly Devine assumed Connie wouldn’t be respectable for long. Connie had considered that too in the past few weeks.
Prostitution was a sin, and illegal. Nor did it sound like a career where a woman lasted long. But it might soon have been the only way to buy laudanum for Mum. A one-pound widow’s pension didn’t go far. They’d long since used up their savings and the money from selling Dad’s veterinary practice. With a third of Australia’s men out of work since the Crash of 1929, there were few jobs for women. Almost none paid a wage you could live on.
Connie watched the working girls limping home on their high heels at dawn when she went down the back to empty the night’s chamber pots — ‘doorway’ girls because they lurked in doorways, whispering inducements to any likely man who passed. The smoky daylight showed smudged lipstick on swollen lips, pale faces, black eyes and bruises. Most doorway girls were eventually claimed by a pimp, offering protection but taking most of her money instead, and bashing her when there wasn’t enough.
The daughter of a vet knew enough about what bit went where to be a doorway girl.
‘Be happy, darling,’ Mum had whispered to her. Live for both of us, Connie had read in one of the letters Dad wrote to Mum in case he didn’t survive the War. But Dad had miraculously come home safe. He’d been killed when a horse whose hoof he’d been trimming had kicked him in the chest, blood bubbling from the ruptured lung the surgeons couldn’t save. Their house behind the veterinary clinic was mortgaged: Dad had tried to recreate the comfortable life Mum had lost when her upper-class English family cast her off for marrying an Irish Catholic.
The bailiff shook his ox-like head at the pawn tickets. ‘Keep ’em,’ he said with rough sympathy. ‘Doubt they’re worth tuppence.’
Connie nodded. Mr Rutledge’s son had done her a favour by taking the chairs and table. People were as kind as they could afford to be. That wasn’t much, in Surry Hills.
The bailiff hesitated. ‘What you gunna do now?’
Connie shrugged. She had two shillings and tenpence hidden in her shoe, which might keep her for two nights in a hostel, except the hostels were full. None of the local factories wanted more staff. She couldn’t even become a nun in two days. She hadn’t attended Mass in over a year: Mum couldn’t be left for long.
They’d lived on day-old bread, rat-trap cheese and porridge with no milk or sugar. Neighbours sometimes brought soup. A few women had even come to the funeral, but each made it clear that their own tiny cottages already housed too many relatives. Their doors were shut today. The shabby curtains were closed so they could pretend no one was home if Connie came knocking. No one could afford another mouth to feed in return for housework and childcare. A widower with kids sent them to relatives or an orphanage. There was no room in the hovels of Surry Hills, where even the rats ate their young, for a girl who wasn’t family.
Mum now lay in a pauper’s grave, unmarked except for a bunch of dandelion flowers and a rose quickly plucked from across a fence. A yellow rose. Mum had loved yellow roses best.
The bailiff coughed. ‘Got any relatives?’ He spat bloody mucus onto the road.
Lung damage from the War, thought Connie vaguely, or tuberculosis. ‘No relatives,’ she said numbly.
The bailiff tried to look as comforting as a Hereford bull could manage. ‘You could try the Salvos,’ he suggested. ‘And there’s the soup kitchen …’
‘Thank you,’ said Connie briefly. Three times more homeless than the hostel could house queued each night. Families waited hours in line for a bowl of stew and a hunk of bread at the soup kitchen. Connie had stood there herself for meals till Mum grew too weak to leave.
All over Australia women knocked at kitchen doors, offering to do housework and look after kids in return for a bed and meals. Men asked to sleep in the shed in return for gardening or chopping wood. Unemployed men walked, slept under bridges, stole clothes from washing lines and potatoes from vegetable gardens, or ‘ jumped the rattler’, hoping an illegal trip on a goods train would take them somewhere there was work and food and shelter.
Few men found refuge, much less compassion: police everywhere ordered them out of town at nightfall.
The homeless walked. And many died.
The bailiff hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, girlie,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t like doin’ this. But jobs don’t grow on trees. I got me own family to support.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Connie wearily. Maybe if she ate she’d feel something, though she was beyond hunger now. She’d had the last of the bread and cheese last night. There’d been mouse droppings in the rolled oats.
There weren’t even susso rations for unemployed women.
‘Sorry, miss,’ the bailiff said roughly. He tipped his cap to her.
Connie watched as his two workers bolted shut the back of the truck. The vehicle rumbled down the street, smoke from its exhaust pipe adding more grey to the grimy flour of Surry Hills air, narrowly missing a wandering swollen-bellied baby dressed in a torn singlet and nothing else.
Connie realised he had left her the chair. She wanted to laugh, but if she laughed she’d cry too. A lady doesn’t cry in public. I have the clothes on my back, the gloves on my hands, two shillings and tenpence, and a kitchen chair, she thought.
She had three choices. Which did she have the courage to make?
She could walk to The Gap, where those unable to live any longer could jump over the cliff. The waves would wash away her body. No more anguish for Connie McKie. She could join the line for the soup kitchen opening at six tonight. A meal might give her strength to find a charity to take her in for the night, and when that failed — as it would fail — she’d join the homeless crowds who slept on the grass in the Domain, hoping the sheer numbers could keep them safe.
Tomorrow she might wash her face and hands in the David Jones lavatory, buy a day-old bread roll and begin the hunt for a job, her chances of success diminishing as her dress became dirtier, her hair more greasy.
More likely she’d be found in an alley by the dustmen, bashed to stop her screaming: just one more pauper’s funeral.
This left the third choice: the woman across the road, small, undistinguished except for the jewels and expensive clothes, still patiently blowing smoke rings with a thin cigarette. Any doorway girl would jump at the chance to work for Tilly Devine. No one hurt Tilly Devine’s girls. Her brothels even employed doctors.
Connie had been pretty enough, with long dark brown hair she hadn’t had time or money to cut, but she was skeletal and smelled of liniment. How could a worn young woman who’d never even kissed a boy interest a crime queen?
Time to decide, thought Connie, her gloved hands still neatly in her lap. Walk downhill to the Salvos? Or uphill to The Gap, where clean white froth and cold waves wiped out hunger and hopelessness forever? Or cross the road to Tilly Devine?
She stood to cross the road. Mr Rutledge, who was no fool, had whispered across the fence that Tilly’s girls might make twenty pounds a week, when the average wage for a man was two or three pounds, and a woman earned four shillings. She might even find a respectable job in a few months’ time.
Her feet didn’t move. Even a few nights’ degradation would colour every loving memory of the past, and poison future love as well. She was too worn in soul and body to smile at a man, much less attempt to pleasure him.
Which left suicide, a mortal sin. Heaven would be shut to her. Maybe God would understand.
She turned left and towards The Gap. It would be over soon.
‘Constance McKie?’ The call came from across the road. The third alternative had realised Connie had made a decision. Rumour said Tilly Devine could read a woman as easily as she read the warrants for her arrest — though she now never stayed in prison long, or out of Australia a few months back when they’d tried to deport her back to England. Connie waited as Tilly stubbed out her cigarette on the footpath and walked towards her.
Tilly Devine looked up at Connie and grinned. ‘Made up your mind, duckie?’
‘Yes,’ said Connie quietly. Sleep, she thought. Cool, clean fresh waves. Maybe even eternal peace.
‘Heading to The Gap?’
‘How did you know?’
‘You’d be surprised what I know, duckie. How about I offer you a job instead?’
‘No. Thank you,’ Connie said politely.
‘I can get you good money. You’ll be secure for life, signed up with me.’
Curiosity uncurled in a tiny corner. ‘Why me? I’m nothing special.’
‘What if I said you were?’
‘How?’
Tilly laughed, showing dark gaps at the back of her teeth. ‘How many twenty-four-year-old virgins you think there are in Surry Hills?’
‘More than you think.’
‘I know all there is to know ’bout girls round here. There’s virgins enough, I grant you, and pretty ones. How about if I asked how many twenty-four-year-old virgins spoke with a posh accent ’cause their ma was an English toff? How many know to wear shoes darker than their hems, have some book learning and ain’t squeamish about folks who are sick or been cut up badly in the War? I bet you even know not to eat butter straight from the dish. I only learned that meself a year ago.’
Connie blinked at her, trying to believe this conversation was real. ‘Mrs Devine, all I have left is integrity. I can’t degrade love for money.’
‘I’m not suggesting you become a street walker, duckie. I got more irons in the fire than that. What if I said this job got no sex, no sin and no coppers? It’s even legal.’ Tilly shook her head with its dark bobbed hair. Large rubies clashed with even bigger emeralds on her cloche hat. ‘A job that’ll make more money than you’ve ever dreamed.’
‘Doing what?’ asked Connie. Was this a trick to get her inside a brothel? Mrs Rutledge said girls who went into brothels sometimes never came out.
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out. I need to check if you qualify first.’
‘You mean examine me to see if I really am a virgin?’
Tilly laughed. ‘Duckie, I knew that the minute I laid eyes on you. No. I need to check your other skills.’
Hope began to rise like a feather in a breeze. ‘I can sew, cook, clean a house, and nurse the sick. I can even shoe a horse or file a dog’s claws — ’
‘You won’t need those where you’re going. Maybe a bit o’ nursing, but there’ll be others paid to do it. If you qualify.’
‘What do I need to qualify? I’ve done my leaving certificate.’
‘That won’t be any use either.’ Tilly considered. ‘Well, not much. Can’t tell you what the job is yet. I don’t want you pretending to be someone you’re not.’
‘What if I don’t … qualify?’
‘The Gap’s not going anywhere. And maybe you’ll find a brothel’s not as bad as you think — not one o’ mine anyhow. Soft beds, sheets and towels boiled, coppers paid off, and anyone who leaves a mark on one o’ my girls gets thrown out with a scar on his face and his trousers round his ankles.’
Tilly laughed at Connie’s expression. ‘I’m joking, duckie. You’d never make a whore. Too much steel inside you. You need to bend to men’s whims and fancies to be a decent prossie. If you don’t fit this job I’ll find you a nice respectable receptionist job, though you’d make more dosh as a call girl. But I think you’ll qualify.’
‘Why?’
‘Someone told me about you and your ma, oh, about six months ago. So I came to see for meself. I liked what I saw.’ Tilly’s voice had never lost its working-class London accent. ‘Got a tip-off a few weeks ago your ma wasn’t going to last long. Most girls would have dumped her on the hospital doorstep yonks ago. I watched you two through the window. Never once saw you without a smile for her. You cried a few times, out the back,’ Tilly added, ‘but never where your ma could see you.’
Curiosity wisped through the grey. ‘You need someone who… smiles?’
Tilly’s deceptively gentle glance turned to stone. ‘Just told you I can’t have you pretending to be what I want. You’ll be told when you need to know.’
‘Why not now?’ Connie demanded. A little strength seemed to have passed from this tiny figure to herself.
‘Because I need to know you can keep your trap shut, too. That you won’t say a word about me or me business to the coppers, your new best friend or the bloke who sits next to you in the tearooms and just happens to be a journalist. Break that rule and you’ll end up with a scar from ear to chin. Understand?’
‘Yes.’ This wasn’t happening. She was fifteen again, and it was her birthday, and she’d run out to the dining room to open her presents with Mum and Dad. There’d be a cream sponge birthday cake at teatime.
She couldn’t enter Tilly Devine’s world. She couldn’t!
All at once the street whirled around her: Tilly’s face, Mum’s screams, the smog that left your skin greasy, the grinding poverty that made a smile as rare as daffodils in Surry Hills. Connie suddenly found Tilly’s arm under her shoulders, keeping her upright. ‘When did you last eat?’
Connie tried to focus. ‘Last night. Bread and cheese.’
‘And afore that?’
Connie shrugged.
‘Leave the apron on the chair and come with me,’ Tilly ordered.
‘Where?’ Connie moved slightly away.
‘To a decent meal, a wash, forty winks on a bed, and no one else in it either, with a quid in your pocket tomorrow if you decide you don’t want nothing to do with me.’
She couldn’t say yes. She hadn’t the energy to refuse. A meal would be … good, she thought vaguely. She might think clearly after food. Maybe there were more choices. Perhaps there really was a receptionist’s position. She managed to focus again. ‘This job — you promise it’s not a sin, and legal?’
‘Oh, it’s legal all right, and no sin on your part. Not all of it pleasant, but most will be peaches an’ cream. Come on. I don’t want folks seein’ us together.’
Connie found herself walking around the corner with Sydney’s most notorious madam, while the neighbours who still had curtains peered from behind them.
When she looked back a final time, the chair and its apron had vanished.
From bestselling author Jackie French comes a compelling book about the choices we make and the chances we never dreamed we'd be given.
Publication Date: 30th June 2026