As they ate their fish and chips Gina thought, as she had done the first time she’d come to Blackpool with James, of that long-ago day out here with her parents: how Dora had tried to make it nice for her and Ellen despite Philip’s refusal to enter into the holiday spirit. Funny, she never thought about her father much at all these days, though thoughts of Dora and Ellen would often flash into her mind: mainly of these past few months, since her father had gone, when all three of them had worked at the Hall. Gina wondered how Ellen was getting on now with the responsibility of the rose garden … That got her thinking of the times she’d walked around it with Coco, on his lead, trotting along beside her so trustingly …

‘Diana, do you have any brothers and sisters?’ asked Mavis. It was as if she’d picked up on Gina’s thoughts.

Gina pretended not to hear and looked away.

‘Right, when you’ve drunk your pop we could go to the Aquarium, Aviary and Menagerie, if you like, Mavis,’ she suggested brightly after a few moments.

‘Yes, please, Diana.’

It was as the bus back to St Annes pulled away south that Gina saw Bella Bertolli. Gina and Mavis were seated upstairs, near the front and on the seaward side so that Mavis could enjoy the view. There, on the Promenade, was the unmistakable figure of Bella in her fur coat, a dead racoon’s pelt fastened around her neck, despite this being an August day. Bella was talking to a weaselly-looking man in shabby clothes and the expression on her face was serious. Gina had never seen Bella outside the Tom and Tabby before, and in the harsh light of a summer afternoon she looked hard and sour, her glamour tawdry and false, her black hair shining bluish.

Gina shuffled down in her seat a little but there was no real danger of Bella noticing her on the top deck of the bus. As the bus gathered speed, Gina looked back over her shoulder and, as the figure of Bella receded, she decided she was right not to trust Bella to give her a fair price for the items still hidden in her room. The woman was no more to be trusted than James Stellion. In fact, she remembered, James didn’t really trust Bella either; he’d never told her who he really was in case she ended up blackmailing him.

Gina took a long hard look at herself as Mavis gazed in wonder out of the bus window. Were those really the kind of people she wanted to be involved with: James Stellion and Bella Bertolli? She wished … she wished she had done things differently – or some of them, at least. She really wished she hadn’t got the loot in a drawer in her room, still to get rid of.