She seemed quite proud of her flat, despite the horrendous mess. ‘Completely self-contained,’ she bragged, pulling back a curtain to display a tiny bathroom. ‘I’ve hardly ever managed to get a self-contained place before, you know, rents are that high. It’s been…well, sharing flats with real no-hopers, and sleazy old boarding houses where you could pick up God knows what from standing on the bath mat. This is only temporary, though. My boyfriend, when he gets…well, pretty soon he’ll be in a position to put down the deposit on our own proper house. I don’t know where yet, maybe a little place in the country. You could come and visit us, even though you never open your mouth to say more than two words strung together. Jas and me, we’ll keep chooks and grow all our own vegies and get an Old English Sheepdog and we’ll have a duck pond. I’m loopy about ducks. I used to have this fantastic pottery duck collection, only someone’s nicked it or I’ve lost it or something, I can’t remember exactly…Oh, strewth…it can’t be, is that the time? Someone’s pinched the whole morning off me! I’d better get my skates on now.’

Seymour said hastily, ‘Thanks for the coffee. And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hold you up.’ He was so accustomed to things being deemed his fault that the apology tumbled out as automatically as breathing.

‘I held myself up, and you don’t have to go,’ Angie said, surprised. ‘Hang around a bit. You’re a nice polite kid, not loud mouthed and sassy like those other little yobs who live round here. And I didn’t mean it about you being too quiet. I kind of like it, because I natter on so much. Tell you what, while I have a quick shower, why don’t you pick out some earrings for me to wear? They’re all in this box.’

While she was singing blithely in the shower, he tipped the collection of earrings on to the bedspread and sorted them into pairs. There were dozens of them—shells, moulded flowers, feathers, little animal shapes, silver dragonflies, swathes of sparkling multi-coloured stones. Using a couple of pink tissues from the box on Angie’s dressing-table, he lined the jewellery case and arranged all the paired earrings inside. The dressing-table wasn’t a proper one, just a small battered table with a propped-up mirror. Its surface was cluttered with cosmetics, cheap ornaments and magazines, and looked as though it hadn’t been tidied in weeks. Thelma, he thought, wouldn’t have tidied it, she would have dumped the whole lot straight into a rubbish bin.