Mrs Clarke left the pile of recent English newspapers on the good doctor’s desk.

He smiled across at her. At least she thought he was smiling. It was hard to tell since that terrible incident. A burglar brutally attacked him in his own home, one lunchtime, a few months ago now. They left him for dead, but his nurse came looking for him and called an ambulance. The hospital doctors saved his life, but his once handsome face had not survived the attack. The left side was completely paralysed with one eye lost and permanently sewn shut. He wore a patch over it now and held a handkerchief in his hand to wipe the drool from the side of his mouth in which he had lost all feeling. Such a tragic shame. Mrs Clarke and a few of the other church ladies had stepped in to make sure Dr Black was looked after. Up in that big house, a man on his own, there was every danger his house would go to rack and ruin. After all, poor Dr Black was widowed and that ungrateful strap of a stepdaughter had run off to America and not bothered to come back to nurse the unfortunate man. After all he had done for her.

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘you are so very kind to think of me.’

The interfering old biddy owned the local newsagents and always brought the papers in for him, a day late, when she came in with her myriad of complaints du jour.

He only ever read The Irish Times, but it was handy to leave them there in the surgery for what patients he had left to pick over.

‘And I have something for you,’ he said, handing over her prescription. He reached across and she lingered, for a delicious moment, before pulling it from between his perfect, manicured fingers.

Always so charming. Such a gentleman. Even with half a face.

‘How is your lovely daughter?’ he asked. ‘Darina?’

‘Davina,’ she corrected.

‘Of course,’ he apologised. ‘How old is she now? She must be twelve? Thirteen?’

‘Fourteen. Oh, she’s quite well thank you, Dr Black.’

‘Quite the young lady by now, I’m sure. Is she still playing the piano?’

‘She is – although she’s getting very cheeky.’

He smiled, in that pitiful crooked way.

‘Oh, I know all about cheeky daughters…’

His one good eye, as blue as ever it was, glittered. He reached up with his handkerchief. Was he weeping with sorrow, or simply leaking? The poor man. Missing his daughter and no sight or sign of her since the robbery. It was heartbreaking.

‘I’ll bring her with me the next time I drop out to the house,’ she said. ‘She can play piano for you again.’

‘I would like that very much,’ he said.

The truth was that pretty, young Davina had objected the last time, saying she found the doctor creepy. Bridget had given her such a whack around the head.

‘The poor man can’t help being deformed. He’s had a terrible life and he misses his daughter. It’s not much to give him an afternoon of your time. It’s your Christian duty.’

Davina had made a face. She’d send Davina up there on her own the next time – that’s what she’d do!

When she had gone, Dorian checked his book. He had an hour until his next appointment. He had let his nurse go since the ‘burglary’. The surgery wasn’t busy enough to justify employing staff any more, but, truth be told, Dorian wanted to be rid of as many chattering women as he could in his everyday life. Dorian had enough money to never need to work again. He had woken in hospital with such terrible pain, and not just physical. The trauma of finding his face missing paled against the heartache of realising what Hanna had done to him. The shock of her betrayal. The brutality of her actions against him. He was mystified. How could she have done this to him? Had he not loved her? Given her everything she wanted? In the weeks that followed, Dorian wanted nothing more than to be left alone. He could have locked the doors of his large house and stayed within its walls forever. But, after a few weeks, when his body began to recover, Dorian realised that he was still a man and he had needs. Dorian’s need for love could only be fulfilled by the very young, and he understood this was unconventional, and frowned upon by the ignorant (which was most people). So, he had to exercise caution in getting his needs met. With the added complication of his ghoulish visage, he had also to be patient. Although he secured the pity of their mothers, daughters were not so easy to reach when you looked like the bogeyman under the bed. It would take time, but he would get there. He had to. He had to love again.

Dorian went back to work because he needed to be connected with the local community. He became more active as chairman of the board for the local convent where, ironically, his disfigured face earned him even more trust among the already ludicrously trusting nuns. But, he had yet to find himself another Hanna. On good days, he mourned her by thinking about what might have been. Dorian hoped he might be able to stay loving Hanna beyond her girlhood. He hoped that she might have been the woman who would satisfy him and make him like other men. Being with Hanna into her adulthood might have sated his desire for young flesh by tricking his mind into believing that she was forever young. She was so beautiful, it was hard to imagine her never being so. On bad days, he hated her for what she had done. Hurting him, destroying his face, leaving him for dead, but, mostly, leaving him to his own desires again. Forcing him into this situation of desiring what he could not have. Of being loveless and alone.

The injustice of her escape was infuriating. She was out there, somewhere, but Dorian could not get the police to help him find her because the world did not understand men like him. If she had been an old woman, like her mother, he could have done what he liked with her and it would have been nobody’s business but his own. If she had been a grown woman she would never have got away with what she had done. Instead of going along with the clumsy lie she left behind for him (the fake letter, the bungled burglary), he would have told the police the truth, that his young ‘wife’ was greedy and insubordinate, and had run away because she didn’t want to toe the line. The police would have helped him hunt her down then brought her home to justice.

Hanna had committed this crime against him and yet she would never be punished because of the small matter of her age.

He was angry with himself, too, for not seeing it coming. Hanna was an evil, conniving bitch. He should have been harder on her. She had deliberately and systematically stolen his heart, his money, his mother’s jewellery and the good looks that she knew he needed so badly to replace her. When he thought like that Dorian became so enraged that all he could do was replay the punishments of the past that he had given her, and end them with her slow, torturous death.

It was close enough to lunchtime to justify going home for a sandwich. Dorian had learned to fend for himself, somewhat, although his housekeeper had grudgingly come back, out of pity more than need. There was some cured beef, which he ordered from a delicatessen in Galway and a loaf of brown bread, which one of the church ladies had left for him in one of their insufferable charity baskets he was obliged to accept. How he hated those women, but Dorian had to be smart and play the long game. He had to earn the affection of the dry spinsters and their flabby, fecund sisters if he was to, eventually, enjoy the fresh beauty of their offspring.

As he was leaving the surgery he grabbed a Daily Mail from the top of Mrs Clarke’s pile and it fell to the floor, opening on a page that caught his eye. Leaning down he saw the headline: Who’s That Girl? He collapsed onto his knees beside it. Caked in makeup, wearing a blonde wide, legs akimbo in a short dress, Dorian saw immediately that it was Hanna.

She was in London. The little bitch had been in London, all this time.

Dorian sat for a moment, hardly able to believe she had dropped into his lap like this. Hanna was a model. Showing herself off to the world. He was the only one who used to enjoy her, now she belonged to everybody. The slut. Did she not think he would find her? Did she not know he read the English papers? Perhaps she was sending him a message. Who’s that girl? Inviting him to come and get her. Teasing him. Or – perhaps she thought he was dead.

Either way, Dorian wasted no time.

He carefully tore the cutting out of the paper, folded the edges of it neatly and placed it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

The following day he took a flight from Dublin to London where he booked himself into Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair.

After dropping his bags he took a taxi to the Daily Mail offices on Fleet Street where he asked to see Penelope Podmore, the woman who had written the ridiculous fashion article accompanying Hanna’s photographs.

He was not taken into a private office but left standing at the reception desk while someone went to get her. She was a lanky woman and her eyes opened wide in barely disguised alarm when she looked at his face, making her appear rather like an angry ostrich and inspiring Dorian to spitting-point hatred.

‘I’m her father,’ he said, trying to looking charming and pathetic at the same time. ‘Her mother and I are worried she’s been led astray so I have travelled over from Ireland to see her.’

Penelope looked at him, more coldly than most women looked on a poor cripple. She had considerable experience of men, and there was something in this one’s eyes that told her he was lying.

‘I have no idea who the girl is,’ she said. When he didn’t move she reasoned that it wasn’t her job to protect models. Alex could play the hero if he wanted. ‘You could try the photographer,’ she said and gave him Alex’s address.

Dorian took another taxi to an utterly inferior end of town called Fulham, where he knocked on the door of an ordinary house, unearthing a very seedy looking individual who, he surmised from appearance and name, was Jewish. Was Hanna sleeping with him? Probably.

‘I am so sorry to trouble you, but I am looking for my daughter.’

Dorian hunched his shoulders, apologetically, trying to make himself look as affable as he could. A harmless cripple in need of help. Suspecting she may have changed her name, Dorian handed the cutting straight to the photographer.

‘Where did you get my address?’ he asked.

‘A nice journalist, Ms Podmore, at the Daily Mail was kind enough to pass on your information. She said you might be able to help me where she couldn’t. I’m just trying to find my daughter.’

Dorian tried to keep his voice steady and his eyes soft, but he was fuming. Who the hell did these English bastards think they were? He was an educated man. A doctor. And yet they wouldn’t just give him what he wanted.

Alex had already had three rock and roll singers and a seedy film producer looking for Annie that week. Magazines were like catalogues for these men. They saw a pretty face and they fell in love. This guy did not look like he was in love with Annie. He looked like one creepy dude. And not just because his face was bent out of shape. Annie had told Alex her parents were dead. Whether that was true or not, and he had no reason to disbelieve her, this guy did not look like her father, no matter what he said. And if he was, Annie did not want to see him. That was certain.

‘What’s your daughter’s name?’ Alex said. ‘I work with a lot of models you know, they come and go.’

Dorian coughed. Rage burned up in him.

‘Hanna,’ he mumbled.

‘No,’ Alex said, ‘that’s definitely not a Hanna. Sorry I couldn’t help you.’ And he closed the door on the guy. Good for Penelope referring these creeps on to him. If he was going to keep Annie on side, he had to keep these weirdos at bay. The chick spooked easily enough as it was.

From out in the suburbs, Dorian had to walk for nearly half an hour, as far as the Kings Road, before he could get a taxi back into town.