Sometimes she held her hands over her breasts, as if to protect them still; sometimes she thought she could smell garlic, there in the room again. The faint, muffled sound of the Sunday afternoon traffic from Park Lane sounded like an ominous earthquake gathering in the distance; far away the Serpentine glittered dangerously in the hot hot sunshine. Simone Taylor shook uncontrollably, wept, reconstructed the night, deconstructed it, built it up again, tears falling on her jacket.

She could not bear it, she would not be able to bear it.

And then, finally, she watched in a haze of pain and fear and dreams as her own arm stretched out to the telephone beside her. Clear and yet not clear about what she was doing, she very slowly lifted the receiver.

In the high, childlike voice that sat oddly on a woman of fifty-six she called the police.

7

‘I’ve got to meet a film producer,’ said Molly McKenzie, kissing Banjo’s tousled hair. He reached up from the bed, half-asleep, kissed her.

‘Good luck darling,’ he said and fell asleep again. Contrary to popular myth, a lot of film producers these days weren’t fat, Molly found; many didn’t even smoke cigars. Even the one who had tried to seduce her in a small flat off Wardour Street soon after she left the Drama Academy wasn’t fat. But he had smoked expensive cigars and to this day she remembered the faint smell of a cigar mixed with an aftershave called Brut and the pristine coldness of the place he had called his London Office. She had maintained a stony silence during the seduction attempt and laughed a lot with her friends afterwards at the thought of how much trouble she’d taken to dress.

She was being interviewed – she had thought, in those long-off innocent days – for a part in a new film; it would be her first film. She had washed her hair and spent hours on her make-up, and had discarded at least three dresses before settling on the green one with the wide belt and the taffeta underskirt; she brushed her long, dark hair a hundred times before pulling it into a ponytail. When she got there the cigar-smoking, aftershave-scented Producer, all alone, had offered her a drink and she’d asked for tea. He’d looked slightly disconcerted, rummaged about in the small clean kitchen.

‘Do you mind it black?’ he called finally.

She came out of the bathroom which contained a small clean yellow towel and an unused tube of toothpaste and answered, ‘Black will be fine.’ Then she said, ‘What’s that strange thing in the bathroom next to the toilet?’

The producer again had looked, she remembered, slightly disconcerted. ‘Well,’ he said, patting the sofa for her to sit beside him, ‘that’s to wash your pussy.’