She turned, disinterested, impatient. She just wanted to get home and get high. The bloke was big, with a squashed nose and an immaculate suit. It was Sammy.

Milly twitched her arm free.

‘You want to show me what’s in your bag?’ he said.

‘What?’ She couldn’t believe it. She was Charlie Stone’s daughter, and this bastard was interrogating her?

‘You heard. You’re in a rush to leave, the night’s young. So, what’s in the bag?’

‘Mind your own bloody business,’ said Milly.

‘Miss Stone, your welfare is my business,’ he said, and grabbed the bag.

Milly pulled it away from him.

Sammy grabbed it back. The bag shot open and its contents spilled out onto the pavement. In the light of the streetlamps and the club neons, there it was among the other detritus: the packet with the pills inside.

‘Shit!’ said Milly, and started gathering up her belongings. Sammy grabbed the packet.

‘I’ll keep this,’ he said.

‘Give it to me.’

‘No.’

‘I said, give it to me,’ she hissed, teeth clenched with fury.

‘You don’t want to start on this junk,’ said Sammy. ‘Didn’t last time teach you anything? Who sold it to you? That tart with the black hair? Was it her?’

‘What if it was?’ The pills were nothing, anyway. Just a sweetener. The crack was the stuff, the real stuff.

‘Christ alive, what are you playing at? You can’t do this.’

Milly drew herself up to her full height. ‘I told you. It’s none of your business.’ Having said that, she stormed over the pavement and hailed a cab. She got into it, red-faced, humiliated, deprived of the only pleasure that she could have hoped for, and went home.

123

Every day, Jack would go out working around the yard, making small repairs and feeding the livestock. And every day, late in the afternoon, he would go out with a towel on his shoulder and come back an hour later. As summer was fading and the grass was getting thin, twice a day he fed fresh hay to the horses.

‘Come out and see them,’ he said to Belle. ‘You won’t see anybody around here for miles. And I’ll be with you.’

‘No,’ she said, nervous, remembering Nipper at the door. ‘That’s OK.’