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about the movie, which promises to be as popular in New York as in London. Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive are looking chic in yet more Armani. They must have some kind of deal going. Joe Yule is achingly gorgeous, as ever. He’s got Hottie Girlfriend with him this time and she’s clinging to himlike a limpet, wearing the smallest microdress I’ve ever seen to show off her perfect legs.
    Jenny’s legs, on the other hand, are nowhere to be seen. Pablo Dodo has decided that this time she is best served by a bubblegum-pink maxi-dress that skims her ankles after bulging around her boobs and hips. This is accessorized with flat sandals and a floaty boa thing that she’s hugging to herself like a life jacket.
    Joe Yule is ignoring her again. Jenny’s father, not surprisingly, is banned. HSCA are so busy being mobbed by journalists and photographers they don’t have time for her. She stands there alone, clutching her boa thing in the flashing lights, panicking.
    I glance across at Harry, who’s watching her through his fingers, as if he can hardly bear to look.
    No need to ask him what he thinks. And I decide not to share my thoughts, either. Because she reminds me of nothing so much as a giant, pink, miserable jellyfish. In a boa.

Chapter 9
    D on’t ever tell her I told you that,” I say menacingly.
    “I won’t, promise!” Edie splutters. Her voice is muffled by a bunch of purple and green things in cellophane.
    I’m deeply regretting sharing the jellyfish image with Edie. We were texting each other and I was trying to give the full impact of the sheer awfulness of the maxi-dress disaster. For an instant, I forgot that Edie’s cleverness and her reliability with embarrassing information are at opposite ends of the scale.
    But it’s too late now, and anyway, we’re busy. We’re in a grubby building just off Gloucester Road, standing on the staircase that leads up to Crow’s flat. Her auntie Florence wants to meet us.
    The smell is the thing I notice most of all. I think something must have died in the apartment downstairs. Possibly a mouse. Or maybe a family of them.
    “Perhaps on cold days it’s not so bad,” says Ediehopefully. She’s lucky. She’s holding the bunch of flowers we’ve brought with us and she can shove her face in them, like an Elizabethan lady with a nosegay.
    Crow says the invitation is to say thank you for the reading stuff and helping her out with the new fabrics. Edie suspects it’s to make sure we’re not a couple of sweatshop bosses or child kidnappers, and I think she’s probably right. So I’ve borrowed one of Edie’s skirts and a blouse-thing to look respectable. The skirt is hanging off me and the blouse-thing is straining over even my modest boobage, so they’re not having quite the effect I was after. I look more like a wild gypsy princess than a budding royal. Edie, as usual, looks as though she’s dressed for tea at the British Embassy.
    The door opens and a tall, elegant, but exhausted-looking woman lets us in. Edie offers her the flowers and she thanks us with a smile. I’m guessing she doesn’t get them on a regular basis.
    “I’m Florence,” she says. “Pleased to meet you.” We shake her hand.
    Inside there is a main room with a couple of doors leading off it. The kitchen is in one corner. Another corner has a low table and a couple of chairs and a stool, where we are motioned to sit.
    “Elizabeth!” the woman calls loudly, as if the soundmight have to carry down a couple of corridors. A door opens about a foot away and Crow appears. Apparently, Crow is Elizabeth. Confusing. Behind her, I can see a tiny room, hardly bigger than the bed, hung from floor to ceiling with knitwear and dresses in various stages of design. How Crow can even breathe among that lot, I can’t imagine.
    She comes through obediently and helps her aunt bring a couple of paper plates from the kitchen area. We’re treated to chips and cookies and cups of super-strong tea. I notice