‘Yeah. Sure I have.’

‘Write it down. Hurry up.’

Lenny was always telling Tom to hurry up. Lenny did everything at a hundred miles an hour; he was like a Dervish, whirling around, issuing orders, somehow tugging the whole enterprise along behind him. But he had a volcanic temper, and he’d had yet another hard day because the manager hadn’t been sick at all, he’d been out job hunting, and he’d just phoned in and resigned.

Tom quickly went to the desk, wrote Angel’s address down, and handed the slip of paper to Lenny. Lenny glanced at it. ‘Christ! Not exactly the best part of town, is it.’

‘No, but she’s a good girl. A hard worker,’ said Tom.

‘She’s got some front, I’ll say that for her.’ Lenny put the paper in his coat pocket. ‘See you at nine,’ he said, and went.

94

Angel could barely take it in. She didn’t want to. She had clung on to the hope that one day all this would get better, that she and Dora would be free of this place and of him. But instead, Dora had checked out of it, given up.

The doctor, a skinny middle-aged man wearing half-moon specs, came to sign the death certificate. He called Angel to one side in the lounge and said: ‘M’dear – those marks on your mother’s legs. You know about them?’

Angel froze. Of course she’d seen the marks on Dora’s thighs: they looked, she’d always thought, like tiny cuts and burns. And she thought that Donny had put them there, to punish Dora for some transgression or other. It was the sort of thing he would do. She knew that all too well, now.

‘I knew, yes. She used to do it to herself. With a razor blade. Or cigarettes,’ said Angel. She wouldn’t dare implicate Donny.

‘Oh, I see.’ The man’s eyes were kind. ‘I had to ask.’

‘Of course,’ said Angel.

It’s my fault, she thought.

It had to be. Dora had been in thrall to ‘Uncle’ Donny, she had adored him even though he treated her like dirt. And when he had turned his attention to her own daughter, it was the final straw. Angel knew it. And Dora had killed herself over it, sunk too deeply in despair to fight on.

My fault.

The ambulance people came and took her mother’s body away, and then she went to the phone box and called Donny at the station to tell him what had happened. He said he’d be there in the evening. She didn’t bother to phone the cake shop, if they fired her then fuck them, she didn’t care. Her mother was dead.

And then at five o’clock there was a knock on the flat door and she opened it to find a man standing there. A rock-god type of man, tall, tanned, blond-haired and tight-lipped with suppressed fury. For a long moment they stood there, staring at each other.

‘You Angel?’ he asked.

‘Who wants to know?’ Christ, was this the landlord chasing up rent Donny had neglected to pay? If there was one single thing more she didn’t need today, it was this.