All the time he spoke she was silent. She watched him, his hands moving unconsciously, face paling, growing grey and bleak. Body sagging in the big plush seat, he told her everything except the part where her twin cousins disposed of the Americans. He knew instinctively that was another part of the story he should keep from her. Like the parts where he played piano in cheap brothels to whores full of syphilis and cheap whisky. Some things were best left unsaid, even if they were the truth.

When he finished, Liselle stared at him for a short while. Her face held no hint of her thoughts at all. Her mind was like a closed book to him. Just as he wondered whether she was going to get up and walk out on him, away from him forever, she moved.

Kneeling in front of him she put up her sad, beautiful face. He saw what was inside her then, all the love and the need. She put her arms around his waist voluntarily, the first daughterly embrace. She put her forehead on to the rough broken hands he held in his lap and he felt the hot salty tears running over them. Awkwardly he gathered her to him, kissing the sweet-smelling hair, feeling his child for the first time, her delicate bones pulled against his heavy body.

Looking over her head as he held her, he felt his own tears then. For his daughter, for himself, and for Kerry. His beautiful Kerry who had taken everything he had to offer without a thought for herself or what her love could bring to her door. Yet he had brought her more trouble than she deserved. More trouble than she could ever have anticipated.

Yes, most of all he cried for his Kerry, the girl she had been, and the woman she had become. He had helped shape both, and he wasn’t proud of what he had created.

It had all started in that dirty room in Stepney. It ended here in a plush hotel in Mayfair.

His child knew it all, and still she wanted him.

Bernadette watched as Marcus walked out of the house in Hyde Park with the blonde. The girl, and she was only a girl, nineteen at the most, was tall and willowy, with thick heavy hair, cut in a page boy style, and startlingly long slim legs. Even wrapped up in a fur coat, Bernie knew she’d have big breasts. Bernie watched from a taxi as Marcus unlocked the passenger door of his car and the blonde caressed his arm as she spoke to him. Bernadette bit on her lip, feeling the rage building up inside her.