Terry Parker headed into the noisy, crowded room of partygoers with an easy smile on his face. He had eyes only for the hostess, watching the moment she spotted him and came towards him at once, her eyes lighting up with gratifying pleasure.

‘Terry! I was beginning to worry you couldn’t make it! Is the weather still frightful? It was snowing again last time I looked. I hope you didn’t come in one of those death traps of yours,’ she teased.

Terry smiled. ‘I left the E-type Jag in the garage, I promise,’ he said. Which was true enough. ‘I brought a beast of a Riley instead. Old, ugly as sin, but heavy and reliable as a tank. Satisfied?’

‘Very,’ Millie said, taking his arm and leading him to the bar. On the record player Elvis Presley’s number-one hit ‘Return to Sender’ was playing at its loudest setting. ‘Have a drink. Do you want that latest cocktail, or a glass of my best port?’

*

Millie Vander’s resentful children were not the only ones watching the discreet lovers that night.

Patsy Arles also watched them avidly. At eighteen, Patsy looked perhaps slightly younger, a fact that often caused her serious resentment. She blamed it on her long, curly, ginger-blonde hair, but her heart-shaped face and big blue-grey eyes didn’t help. She often thought that she looked more like a puppy dog begging for treats than a mature, slinky femme fatale, intent on breaking hearts.

Her icons were the glamorous and often scandalous actresses of the golden Hollywood era – Myrna Loy, Rita Hayworth, and, of course, now Marilyn.

She’d left school three years before, where she’d always had a serious crush on Juliet Vander, who, at just one year older, seemed to the adoring Patsy to be the epitome of everything that she herself was not. Stunning black hair, flashing cat-green eyes, tiny shapely figure and a knowing way that seemed to radiate out, making everyone turn their heads to look at her as she walked past. Not only that, she had family money, a vinegar tongue that could reduce teenage boys to jelly at will, and a reputation for playing with fire. Not that she ever got caught out by the school authorities, of course.

Juliet was the girl everyone wanted to know and, of course, she didn’t look at you twice. Aloof, curiously friendless, Juliet was queen!