I shrug. ‘Yeah. I was surprised too, to be honest. I knew he could have a temper but … anyway, it reiterates to me that I’m doing the right thing. That we’re doing the right thing. I’d never be able to get away from him unless we do this.’

‘And you went to see Alice?’

‘Mmm-hmm. You’d have been impressed by my acting skills. I was near hysterical, confused, hating Antonio, hating myself. Look’ – I indicate the bruises on my arms – ‘I even gave my arms a bit of a pounding. Antonio did grab me, but not hard enough to leave a mark. So I helped it along a bit.’

Rick grins. ‘Nice one. I’ll go and do my bit at ten o’clock like we agreed.’

PART SEVEN

53

Lola

One day earlier

30 December 2021, 18:00

‘God that’s creepy,’ I say. Rick and I have been working on the papier mâché woman for some weeks now, a few minutes here and there whenever one of us can snatch the time. She is hidden in a store cupboard full of old wires and lightbulbs that he has access to and no one else is likely to bother with. We chuck a tarpaulin over it whenever we leave it just in case. We’re using an old mannequin nicked from the back room of one the clothes shops as a mould – there are loads of these things about and I can’t imagine why anyone would notice that it’s gone. The cupboard we are working in is stuffy and windowless but needs must. It’s almost impossible to get any privacy on board so this place is as good as any.

‘I still don’t see why we couldn’t simply put one of your dresses on the mannequin and chuck it overboard instead of faffing around with all this,’ Rick grumbles.

He’s frowning at the model rather than looking at me, so I roll my eyes. Fuck’s sake, he is such a thick pain in the arse. All this had better be worth it. It’s turning out to be a lot more effort than I’d envisaged and there’s only so much of his ‘company’ I can take.