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asked, glancing over at Sir William, who was deep into his conversation, noticing nothing, certainly not the way her eyes were playing with the younger man’s, certainly not the way her nubile body was half turning towards this new kid on the block.
    ‘Until the weekend,’ she said, smiling.
    He smiled back at her. ‘Good. I hope we’ll meet up again.’
    ‘We might,’ she said playfully.
    ‘I think we should.’
    ‘That’s very forward of you.’ Her eyes were dancing; she was enjoying this.
    ‘I am forward,’ he said, ‘in most things. My name’s Redmond, by the way.’
    ‘Are you a businessman?’ she asked him, entranced by his soft southern Irish accent.
    ‘Yes.’ It was true, more or less. He owned the streets of Battersea and a little pocket of Limehouse. He did business. Not legitimate business, but it was business anyway.
    ‘I’m here with—’
    ‘Sir William. I know.’
    Mira was silent for a moment, but her eyes spoke volumes. ‘Billy has a sleep after dinner,’ she said at last.
    ‘Does he?’
    ‘For an hour.’
    ‘You know what? A person could do a lot. In an hour.’
    ‘Yes. That’s true.’
    ‘What’s your name?’
    ‘Mira,’ she said. ‘Mira Cooper.’
    She flicked her leonine blonde mane and was off, streaking across the pool, her blood fizzing with excitement. Oh yes, she remembered everything. The good bits…and the bad.
    She’d told him all about herself, something she had never done before, not with any man. That she had once worked in a high-class brothel run by her friend Annie Carter—who’d been Annie Bailey then—in the West End of London. She told Redmond that, while they lay naked together in his sumptuous Cliveden suite.
    ‘I don’t want you seeing Billy again,’ he said as they lay back against the pillows, him lazily playing with her splendid breasts, her lightly caressing his flat, well-toned stomach. ‘Not after this week.’
    She turned her head, looked at his face. ‘He’ll be upset,’ she said.
    ‘Fuck him,’ he said.
    She grinned at that. Knelt up on the bed and straddled him.
    ‘I’d rather fuck you,’ she said, and bit his nipple quite hard.
    ‘Okay,’ he said, smiling up at her. ‘Do it.’

Chapter 6
    Annie was in church. She never went to church except for the usual stuff—funerals, christenings and weddings. Apart from those, she normally wouldn’t have been seen dead in such a place. She hadn’t been raised that way.
    Her mum, Connie Bailey, had never even sent her or her sister Ruthie to Sunday school. Other kids had attended, collected those neat little stamps with pictures of Jesus to stick in books and get a gold star, got those little raffia crosses from the vicar on Palm Sunday. Annie and Ruthie had spent Sundays wondering whether this was going to be the day when their mother finally up and died on them. Choked on vomit, drank herself into oblivion, take your pick. Their mother had been a drunk, and Dad was nothing but a faint memory.
    So, no church. No giving thanks to the Lord,because excuse me but what had there ever been to give thanks for, really? Annie and Max had been married in a no-fuss, no-frills ceremony in Majorca, and Layla had been christened there too. The Church of England, into which Annie had been born, was foreign to her.
    But now here she was.
    In church.
    And a choir was lifting the roof off, singing ‘Praise the Lord, hallelujah! ’ Twenty purple-clad black women were standing in front of the high altar, shafts of multicoloured sunlight illuminating them through the stained-glass window. They were moving rapturously to the beat. A dumpy, pop-eyed little man was at the organ, flapping one arm at the choir and mouthing along, obviously doubling up as choirmaster. The vicar was standing silently beside the lectern, listening and watching. The organ was belting out the backbeat, the beaming women giving it their all, the very rafters of the beautiful old building were vibrating with the power of the