I feel for these girls, these women, these young men, and their lives, and almost understand their transparent yearning to find paid work in the West, their eagerness to spend twenty-four hours on a bus to Victoria coach station, spinning out a small bottle of water and one ham sandwich, in order to wash my family’s underwear. But still. I am determined not to repeat my Ana mistake. I open about thirty more emails, my eyes are beginning to hurt, and the children are asking ‘When’s tea?’ and then, I click one with the address, [email protected].

Hi my name is Ry, I am a 25 yr old Australian male, I have recently arrived in London and am currently living in Notting Hill.

I have 1 year experience with an active little boy, 8 and a girl 6.

I hold a UK drivers license, Valid First Aid Certificate and CRB check. I am a non smoker, very active in sports and hobbies. I play football, tennis, cricket and surf regularly in Australia, and I write and play my own songs (I enclose a download of three sample tracks from my first album).
Hope to hear from you soon.

Life is finally looking up. I send Ry an email back by return and, despite Mirabel’s dark warnings about people on the web, tell him we have a deal.

Rose

Ned is standing in a headmasterly way by his desk in his study, looking greyer and thinner than I remembered, as if he too is in need of a good holiday. Whenever there is footfall outside, in the passageways that lead off to the billiard room or the green baize door, his eyes flicker. In case Lulu comes in. There’s only one person that Ned Bryanston has ever been frightened of, even more than his mother, and he’s married to her. It’s often the way. Husbands and wives, even attractive ones, are often yoked together not by love or lust, but by fear and loathing.

His stance confirms me in my suspicion that I have been summoned, rather too late, for my formal dressing-down. I am braced for the worst. A few days after we got back from skiing, Ceci found another note from Jesse Marlon.

It was in my dressing-table drawer. The girl is going slightly Goth or punk – though Ceci’s term is ‘emo’ – and she says she was looking for an eyeliner sharpener, to sharpen her black eyeliner.

I’m not sure I believe her but, be that as it may, she was clearly hunting high and low, because the note was right at the back, underneath a flat leather box from Phillips in New Bond Street that contained my diamond necklace. Ceci laid it carefully on Pierre’s desk in the studio, just by the Dictionary of Medical Symptoms, where he would be bound to see it.