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herself taking a step back.
    ‘And what’re you doing back here?’ the woman mused to herself. ‘Rich lady like you? Look at that handbag. Cost a bloody fortune, didn’t it?’
    Deeley tried not to tighten her grip on the Fendi bag.
    A chilly wind rippled down the street. The woman nipped in the collar of her denim jacket with a claw-like hand, the cigarette still in the other, her head now tipped to one side.
    ‘You’re one of those sisters, aren’t you?’ she said eventually. ‘I was thinking about who’s been in number forty-two over the years. There’s some nasty scum there now, I can tell you. If you were thinking about ringing the bell, don’t. You’d be lucky to get out with the clothes on your back.’
    Deeley started to say something about needing to get back to catch a train, but the woman rode right over her as if she were deaf.
    ‘One of those sisters,’ she mused. ‘The three pretty ones. Too pretty for round here, we all thought. Kept yourselves to yourselves, didn’t you? You were living with Bill Duncan. Oh, I remember Bill Duncan all right. One day he was here, the next he wasn’t. No one ever knew where he went.’
    She fixed her eyes on Deeley. They were heavily lined with dark blue pencil, the only make-up she was wearing, and it had bled a little into her crow’s feet. She was by far the smaller of the two women, so skinny she could almost have been considered frail; but Deeley knew women like this, remembered them vividly. Very often they were the ones that ran things. The ones who sat in the pub, at the bar, who everyone looked to for decisions; an infinitesimal nod or shake of the head from a scrawny little chain-smoking woman like this could decide someone’s fate.
    ‘He tried to keep his hands clean, best he could, Bill Duncan,’ the woman said reflectively, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the previous one, throwing the still-lit butt into the middle of the road without looking to see if it might hit anyone, or anything. ‘But that’s not so easy round here, is it?’
    Now she did seem to expect a response. Deeley gulped, not knowing what to say.
    ‘I was really small then,’ she said. ‘I’m the youngest sister. I don’t remember much of anything.’
    ‘But you came back, didn’t you?’ the woman said sharply. ‘To have a sniff around your old place? What’s all that about, then?’
    Her eyes were sharp as tacks. Deeley knew, instinctively, that a lie would be spotted immediately.
    ‘I was out of the country for a long time,’ she said. ‘In America. I came back and saw my sisters and I got a bit nostalgic.’
    The woman snorted in derision, her eyes still boring into Deeley’s. ‘For this shithole?’ she said, sneering. ‘Pull the other one, lovey.’
    ‘For Bill,’ Deeley said simply, sticking to the truth. ‘He was really nice to me. Bill was always like a dad to me.’
    The woman’s plucked and pencilled eyebrows rose, corrugating her forehead into a deep tracery of lines that would have had any of Deeley’s old acquaintances in LA screaming in repulsion and hitting the speed-dial number for their Botox doctor.
    ‘Right,’ she commented, her voice so flat that Deeley couldn’t tell what she was thinking. ‘So you got no idea where he is, then, Bill? He had a soft spot for you three.’
    Deeley couldn’t read anything into this last statement. Was the woman making a sly comment on Bill’s abuse of Maxie? Or was she ignorant of it?
    Somehow it was hard to imagine this woman being ignorant of anything.
    ‘I live just down the road,’ the woman continued casually. ‘Used to know Bill quite well. He really took to your mum. Met her in our local. More fool him. She was a bad lot. Very pretty, but a bad lot.’
    Deeley shrugged; she couldn’t argue with that.
    ‘Dead now,’ the woman said, dragging on her cigarette as if it were her main source of nutrition, never taking her eyes from Deeley’s even as the thin grey coil of smoke rose