‘So long as you’re happy, doll,’ he always said. ‘The minute you’re not, you let me know.’

So what the hell do we need seven bedrooms for? she often wondered.

But Lenny liked to do everything big-style. He wanted this house to lord it over his mates. He often took them all down to the snooker room in the basement and played long into the night, showed them the latest flicks in the cinema room and delighted in beating them out on the tennis court.

Lenny liked to impress all his friends with his fast cars and his glitzy lifestyle, and Angel thought that he liked to impress with her, too. He always chose her clothes – damned expensive clothes, always designer, and when she put them on she often thought of Annie Carter at Holland Park on the night of Donny’s death, and remembered thinking that she would never be able to afford garments like those the woman wore. Yet here she was, and she could afford them.

Lenny loved dressing Angel. He got a real kick out of his friends admiring her. They called her ‘the Empress’, because she was so regal, so beautiful and serene and reserved, effortlessly playing hostess when Lenny entertained, always presenting them with the most spectacular meals, taking great care to lavish hospitality on their guests.

‘You got yourself a good one there, mate,’ they said.

Angel thought that she’d got a good one, too.

All right, she didn’t really love Lenny. He had shown up when she was in crisis, and she’d drifted into a relationship with him more out of gratitude than anything else. She knew that he was dodgy as fuck. He was always up and down to the loft, storing things away, she didn’t know what and frankly she didn’t want to know. Ignorance where Lenny was concerned was probably bliss. But she liked him and smiled at his excesses, of which there were many. He cared for her, and she reciprocated. She was planning a big party for him for his fortieth.

He was going to love it.

She was still friendly with her cousin Tom, who still worked for Lenny and had graduated to club manager now. Tom was one of the mates Lenny loved to have round at weekends. One summer night, Tom and Angel were standing alone out on the lavishly lit patio, while the rest of the gang were in the super-size sitting room howling and roaring at something on the massive telly.

‘Christ, who’d believe it, eh?’ Tom said, clinking his glass of Moët et Chandon against hers. ‘Little Angel O’Brien, living it up like this.’

‘It’s Angel Axelford,’ she reminded him, looking up at the stars and thinking of her mother. Dora would have loved this. Regular as clockwork, once a fortnight, Angel still went to the graveyard, had a chat and laid flowers on her mother’s grave. Someone else was doing the same thing on alternate weeks, they had been for years. At first it had bothered her, she had wondered who this mysterious person was, but now it had become a habit with her, discarding the other person’s dead flowers, replacing them with fresh.