Scheming little bitch! She’d better not bother to attend Boysie’s funeral because, baby or no baby, Briony would take great pleasure in slapping her face for her.

Kerry sat alone on a small stool, hands around a glass of vodka, her face bereft of make-up and expression. Liselle sat beside her, kneeling on the floor, sad and quiet.

The men, Marcus and Tommy, were closeted in Bernadette’s kitchen. The daily woman and the cook had not turned up for work, which surprised no one. Photographers and reporters were camped outside on the pavement like vultures.

Mariah had turned up dressed in her loudest clothes and plastered with make-up and had stood out on Bemadette’s drive for a full twenty minutes while they took photos and she answered questions. ,

‘No,’ she had said, ‘I can’t believe any of the things the papers are saying about the twins. They were hard-working businessmen who gave a great deal of money to charity.’

One reporter had asked cheekily if it was true she had been a celebrated prostitute in her day. Mariah had answered him just as cheekily.

‘If you’ve got five crisp new twenty-pound notes, son, you can find out!’

This had gone out on the nine o’clock news to the merriment of the whole East End population.

The Cavanagh trial was going to be big business for the newspapers and television. The twins had somehow captured the imagination of the whole country, and the newspaper headline GOODNIGHT LADY was everywhere Briony looked. Her past was dragged up and embroidered so she looked like some kind of monster. Even Joshua O’Malley had been found and had sold his story to the News of the World, saying how his sons were brought up by Briony Cavanagh because she had threatened to kill him unless he gave them over to her. This had caused another sensation. Briony was made to look like Lucrezia Borgia.

The photograph taken outside St Vincent’s on the day of the twins’ christening all those years ago appeared regularly in the papers, Jonathan la Billiere, herself and all the family smiling out at the world. Who would have thought then that those two innocent little children would one day cause all this?

The worst thought of all, though, was the thought of Benedict reading it all. Reading about her being a madam, a whoremaster. The papers made her sound so hard, so evil, even though many of her girls had in fact come forward to say that she had looked after them extremely well. That story did not appear. It wasn’t what the papers wanted to hear.