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that a future was waiting for her, to which she would shortly be directed. Meanwhile she read new novels, watched TV, helped her mother feed the animals and cook, went walking across the hills to gaze in breathless pleasure at the landscape, the heather moorland and green valleys, the bony hills, the clouds tearing overhead.
    Sometimes she visited her sister in Carlisle, played with her little nephew and nieces, baby-sat while Hamish and Angela had an evening out. One day she took her parents with her. They had lunch with Angela and the children, and in the evening went to the local cinema to see
Back Streets
, a film about gangsters in Chicago, full of vice and drugs and murder. Mr and Mrs Erskine hated the film, wanted to leave half-way through, but although it was so violent it was witty and melancholy, full of insight, and Laura was deeply impressed by it.
    ‘Who made it, anyway?’ demanded her father, as they drove home afterwards, along dark, mostly empty roads through remote villages.
    ‘Sebastian Ferrese, Dad.’
    ‘Who? An Italian. Well, it figures – he’s probably in the Mafia,’ he said in disgust.
    ‘You can’t say it was ever boring! And although it was violent at times, it seemed true to life.’
    ‘Not my life.’ He snorted, which made her laugh. He was so absolutely right. The Chicago they had just been shown was light years from the world her parents inhabited, but Laura had been to America now and had recognised some aspects of its modern city life in the film.
    Her parents had never lived in a city. They worried about very different problems – sheep picking up one of the many diseases to which they were prone, ewes aborting if a dog got in among the flock and began chasing them, a sudden catastrophic drop in market prices, and the occasional scare about rustlers arriving with a lorry on a dark night, rounding up a whole flock and disappearing with them. The world Sebastian Ferrese’s film reflected was utterly foreign to them, and made them uneasy. But Laura had not only recognised in it something of the underbelly of London life: the grasp of human weakness, the forgiveness, the film’s wry elegiac tone had got right under her skin.
    Ten days later Bernie rang and asked her to come back to London at once. ‘Someone has asked to meet you.’
    ‘Who?’ she asked warily, hoping that she was not going to have a problem with one of the executives from the perfume house whose face she had become. It had happened to her before. Some men seemed to think that if you modelled for their firm you were available to them personally, and they weren’t above trying to blackmail or bully you into bed.
    ‘Sebastian Ferrese,’ Bernie said.
    Laura remembered thinking, Fate again. What else could it have been? Just when Sebastian was on her mind he turned up in her life. It had to be Fate; inevitable and inescapable.
    She stared out of the hotel window at the hot blue Venetian sky and shivered at other memories: his mouth buried in her neck, between her breasts, his hands moving …
    Behind her she heard a soft sound and turned in time to see a white envelope slide under the door.
    It was from him, she knew it. She bit her lower lip, stared at it as if it were a snake. Then she walked slowly across the room to pick it up. Her name was printed on the front in large capital letters.
    She tore open the envelope and found a sheet of hotel notepaper, covered in more printing.
    GET OUT OF VENICE, YOU BITCH, OR I’LL KILL YOU .

Chapter Two
    In his suite three floors higher, Sebastian Ferrese was standing by the window looking at the same view, absorbed in his thoughts. She had changed: he had known that from seeing her in the films she had made since they last met, but it was still a shock to realise that the sensitive, uncertain, gawkily beautiful girl he had met just four years ago had grown an outer gloss, an enamelled surface that had hardened to make her a guarded, remote woman. Four years ago she had had