Stephen stared into her face. It was white now, her eyes glittering with temper and also, he realised with a lift of his spirits, with fear, a veiled fear. This excited him. He liked frightening her.

‘You make me laugh, Donna, do you know that?’ he said spitefully. ‘You swan around in your expensive suits and your handmade shoes, and you drive around in your flash car, and it was my brother who gave it all to you - the house, the lot. Without him you’d have been stuck in a fucking semi, rattling around in it on your own because any other man would have dumped you quick smart when you couldn’t produce a child. My brother raised you when he married you and you could never see it. You looked down your nose at my mum, at my dad, at all of us - you stuck up fucking bitch!’

Donna’s eyes stared in shock as she listened to what he was saying. She watched him push Davey aside and storm round to get into the van. Wheelspinning the Transit, he screeched out on to the road and disappeared.

Donna put her fingers to her mouth as if warding off the sickness inside her stomach.

Davey looked at her haunted face and felt the familiar protectiveness well up inside him. She didn’t deserve that, she didn’t deserve any of what Georgio and his family were laying at her door. Donna was a woman to aspire to, if only that prat Georgio had realised it.

‘Come inside, love,’ he said into the stillness. ‘He’s a ponce, Stephen, always was. Don’t listen to him, he’s a fucking hypocrite.’

Donna looked at Davey and wiped a dry tongue across even dryer lips.

‘He hates me and yet I never knew it before.’

In a rare flash of insight Davey shook his head gently.

‘He don’t hate you, Donna, he wants you. He always did. That’s the crux of the problem.’

Picking up the last two boxes from the ground, he carried them back into the office. Donna followed him, crushed under the weight of everything that had happened in the last few minutes.

‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

Placing the boxes by the door, he went into the little kitchenette. Donna heard the water being turned on and the clatter of crockery. Pulling up the flap of the box nearest her, she looked inside. Her heart sank. It was full of three-inch floppy discs. She had taken all that flak over a few floppy discs.

Picking one up, she stared at it in wonderment. As Davey popped his head round the door she slipped the offending article into her pocket.

‘Don’t worry, Donna, he don’t mean the half of it.’