‘That drunken bint can stop there,’ said Donny, taking Angel’s hand in his. ‘Come on. Time for bed.’

He dragged Angel into the bedroom he had once shared with Dora, and closed the door behind them.

89

Lenny Axelford was having a bad day. One of the big City banks had booked his entire club for a dinner dance tonight. There was a big name in the pop world lined up to rise through the middle stage to spotlights, applause, the works. It should have gone smoothly, but it didn’t. The mechanism that lifted the middle stage jammed in rehearsals and now Lenny was phoning around trying to source a new motor and nearly expiring with the stress of it all.

The manager was off sick, which meant that Lenny was shouldering more of the work because Tom Sibley the assistant manager was still wet behind the ears. The kid was fucking up big-scale at the moment, ordering the wrong stock, mishandling the staff – two cleaners had walked out and oh boy did a club need its cleaners – and the boy’s cousin, who the boy swore was an asset to any business, had failed to turn up for her interview today.

‘So where the fuck is she?’ he asked Tommy when three thirty rolled around and then a quarter to four, and then four, and he was kicking his heels, waiting to get out the door, and the damned woman was keeping him waiting. Lenny Axelford was never kept waiting.

‘She said she’d be here,’ said Tommy. ‘She promised.’

‘Well, she ain’t,’ said Lenny, and stood up, yanked on his coat. He pointed a finger at Tommy and said: ‘I’m off. Anything else crops up or if she shows up, you can sort it. Give her the job if you like, but I warn you, if she’s utterly fucking useless then it’s your arse on the line, you got that?’

Tommy nodded. He was wishing he had never even mentioned Angel’s name to Lenny. Lenny was already out of patience with him, and this might just push him right over the edge.

90

‘So where were you?’ asked a voice.

Angel snapped back to reality. She was behind the cake shop counter, and she’d just picked up – with her fingers! – a Swiss roll and put it in a bag for the customer. Then the manageress had torn her off a strip.

‘You use the tongs – always the tongs!’ she ranted.

Now there was another customer standing there, and the other girl who worked in the shop was smirking at Angel getting a telling-off, and she didn’t know where her head was right now. She tried to concentrate. Looked at the new customer, said: ‘Can I help you, sir?’ and then realized it was her cousin Tommy standing there. Or ‘Tom’, as he preferred to be called now he was an adult. He was looking pretty pissed off, too.

‘What?’ she said stupidly.

‘I said, where were you? Yesterday?’ He lowered his voice and waited for the manageress to move out of earshot into the back of the shop. ‘The interview at three?’