Back at their flat, the three girls celebrated That Girl’s success. Lara had finally relaxed after the adrenalin of the launch and, as the wine took over, felt the warm pull of home from her old friend.

‘Do you remember that time we climbed over the wall to the Bishop’s palace?’

‘Stealing apples and they were pure sour!’

‘We never got caught though.’

‘And the old sod glaring at you under the mitre during your confirmation then? I swear he recognised you.’

‘Stop! I pure bust myself laughing at it in the back of mass for weeks afterwards!’

Annie was amazed how Lara’s accent became more pronounced when she was talking to Noreen. They spoke in the same voice. Like real sisters.

She might have been jealous but in fact was simply a fascinated audience to their stories about teenage parties – skinny dipping in the stream at the back of Lara’s house, boys they liked, pranks they played – the fun to be had being young and carefree! It was something that Annie had never experienced, but in the delight of listening to these two entertaining friends, she felt happy and grateful to be experiencing it, now, through their telling.

Lara, too, was enjoying Noreen’s company. So much so that she forgot she was Matthew’s sister. But then that was the way it had always been. She had known and loved Noreen even before she and Matthew had fallen in love, aged fifteen. When Matthew’s name did come up that night, briefly and anecdotally, in the minor role he had played in some prank, Noreen was careful to shut it down.

Lara was grateful for her sensitivity, but at the same time could not help wondering if there was a special reason behind her doing that. Because, of course, a part of Lara wanted to know where he was and how he was doing. Did the priesthood suit him? Had he asked about her? Did he know that Noreen was coming to see her in London? Noreen volunteered nothing, which Lara read as polite discretion. Not a usual trait of Noreen’s, but it reflected how deeply she knew Lara felt her brother’s loss. Lara did not like to think Noreen felt sorry for her so she made a point of not asking and revealing herself as caring about him. Because, Lara had stopped caring. At least she thought she had. Hoped she had. And finally, was determined to have done.

‘You must stay here with us,’ she said, after it was way too late for Noreen to find anywhere else.

‘I fully intend to!’

‘For as long as you like.’

‘Of course!’

Annie flinched and hoped that Noreen didn’t notice. She was still nervous of meeting new people, especially people from Ireland, always fearful they would make some connection with her past. But she liked Noreen, and she loved how the ebullient Cork girl had shown her a different side of her beloved Lara. Reluctant to talk about herself, she had never asked Lara about her life and so knew very little about Lara up to now.

Late in the evening Noreen finally turned to Annie and said, ‘Look at us, babbling on. Tell us about you. Annie what? Where from? How, who, where etc?’

Annie gave her the brief information she had carefully rehearsed.

‘My name is Annie Austen. I’m an orphan. My mother was Irish – my father English. They died in a car crash. I was raised in a convent and I came to London a few months ago.’

Noreen smiled, waiting for her to continue. But she didn’t.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’ Annie smiled awkwardly, trying not to look nervous.

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes. That’s all there is.’

‘Right. Fair enough, so,’ Noreen said. ‘That’s you done; let’s get back to talking about us. Do you remember the time Buckly cycled across the bridge wall…’

Annie felt a surge of gratitude to Noreen for letting her off the hook. She was so much fun and Annie decided she liked her as much as she liked Lara.

When they had worn through their entire childhood Lara and Noreen agreed that the past was gone.

‘The future!’ Noreen said, raising a glass of Blue Nun.

‘The present!’ Lara chimed with a bottle of Cinzano.

Annie knew she was part of their present, pouring out their wine and bringing them food. She felt the privilege of new friendship warm her.

‘I’m here to stay,’ said Noreen. ‘I’m fed up with Carney. Too small. I want to spread my wings,’ she said flailing her arms around drunkenly. Annie laughed, and moved the Blue Nun bottle before she tipped it over. ‘I want adventure, excitement – MEN!’

‘You’ll find plenty of them in Chevrons,’ Lara assured her, ‘but not one decent one.’

‘Good. I’m fed up to the back teeth with decent men. I want some INDECENT ones!’

Then she looked over her glass directly at Lara and said, coquettishly, ‘Coleman seems very nice.’

Lara flinched. Did she mean for Noreen or her? Noreen was too drunk to notice her friend’s discomfort, but Annie did. Coleman liked Lara. She had seen it in the way he looked at her. Would they ever get together, she wondered. What would happen if they did? What would happen to her?

Lara changed the subject by looking at her watch.

‘Jesus Christ, it’s two o’clock in the morning. I have to get up in a few hours to open the new shop.’

‘I’ll sleep here.’ Noreen lay down, drunkenly, half-asleep already.

‘You can stay in my room,’ Annie said.

‘No,’ Lara said. ‘She’s my friend she should have my room. I’ll kip in the studio.’

‘Your friend is my friend,’ said Annie. ‘This is your apartment; you need your own space. Come on,’ she said looking across at lumpy Noreen, open mouthed and snoring on the sofa, ‘help me get her into bed.’

❊

Alex Cohen took the final print out of the fixer tray, clipped it onto the print line and sighed miserably. More pictures of some pointless party to add to his growing collection of rubbish work.

Alex had been trying to break into the fashion world for a year now, with no success. His erstwhile contemporaries, Donovan, Duffy and Bailey had it all sewn up. They had the models, the agency contacts, the press in their pockets and the talent. Alex badly wanted to join them, but loathe though he was to admit it there was still something missing from his work. He knew it lacked that special something, he just didn’t know what that something was, or how to get it. So while The Black Trinity (as his feted photographer mates had been named by Norman Parkinson) were busy being celebrities and socialising with actors, musicians and royalty, Alex was scrabbling around for features work at the Mail. The news editor had been sending him out to cover glamorous events (at which he always hoped he wouldn’t bump into one of the lads) and the closest he got to a fashion shoot in months was this boutique opening with Po-faced Podmore. As he picked the first of the dry prints to check over, he could not have felt more thoroughly miserable. The picture was, as he was expecting, a perfectly competent capturing of a girl in a minidress. The next one, two girls in minidresses standing next to a rack of clothes. Next, Penelope Podmore draped over some good-looking gangster in a suit. (It was her good side. That would guarantee him the next gig, whether he wanted it or not.) Three little-known pop singers drinking wine, the girl who owned the shop standing next to her shy, skinny friend then a print of the friend posing in front of a logo wall. Alex stopped. He looked at this last picture again. The girl had an expression on her face that he could not identify. She looked soft and vulnerable but there was something defiant – not in her eyes, but behind them. He tried to remember what she was like, but all he could drum up was that she was unremarkable. Shy. A reluctant model. Alex had to push her to move at all in the suit. But looking at her now he could see that this girl was astonishingly beautiful. Perfect, in fact. Large, doe-like eyes, long, thick auburn hair, a button nose, high cheekbones, a sharp chin, flawlessly symmetrical features. She could certainly give Jean Shrimpton a run for her money. Alex carried the picture into another room to check that his hunch was not simply some darkroom trick. As he looked at the picture under daylight, adrenalin began fixing through him. This picture had the thing that had been missing from his work. The girl in the picture was That Girl, alright. Alex carefully placed the picture of the girl in his satchel, then gathered up the other prints and threw them on the picture editor’s desk on his way out the door. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t be back here again.

❊

‘He’s dead. He’s dead.’ Five months later, that single thought still woke Annie up every morning. The words were still in her head but had she said them out loud? In a panic she looked down and saw that her new bed mate, Noreen, was still snoring. She had not thought about the danger of this happening when she offered to share her bed with Lara’s old friend. During the day, these days, she did not think of Dorian at all. When Irish Hanna became London Annie she forced herself to forget what had happened. Her happy life here, living and looking after Lara and her work at Fred’s helped her forge a new identity. But the truth of what she had done persisted. It revisited her while she slept and Annie woke up, every morning, filled with that same hellish dread of being caught out. And so, every day she re-ran the scenes in her head. Reassuring herself. Remembering. Annie learned how to lie to other people. Dorian taught her that. But she could not lie to herself.

She got out of bed and walked over to the window to look down onto the early morning quietness of the broad street. With a deep breath, she closed her eyes and took herself back to that day, five months ago in Ireland.

Dorian’s lifeless body. Lift his hand, check he’s dead. Blind panic. Suitcase. Desk. Running through the bog. All the way to Fred’s cafe and her new family. Although they would never be her family. Not truly. Because she was a liar. Lara had given her a life. The life of Annie Austen. It wasn’t her real life. Not as long as she had to reassure herself by remembering. With every passing day, she hoped to belong to it more. But hope, she learned long ago, in the days when she hoped the nuns, somebody, anybody, would come and rescue her from Dorian, was sometimes little more than an empty promise from a cruel God. Nonetheless, she had learned to live in the moment. And in this moment, she was in London and safe.

Annie opened her eyes and checked her watch. It was just gone six thirty. London was still asleep, but Annie’s early morning customers, the builders from the nearby World’s End building site, would be in before eight looking for their fried breakfasts.

She looked over to check that Noreen was still asleep. She was snoring. She smiled and went downstairs. Debris from last night’s reunion was on the coffee table. Overflowing ashtray, three empty bottles of Blue Nun and an empty platter that had once contained sandwiches left over from the party. Noreen had polished off the lot exclaiming in her loud, somewhat drunken voice that they were, ‘Delicious! The best sandwiches I have ever eaten!’

As Annie cleared away the table she smiled to herself. She had not just one friend now, in Lara, but two. She liked Noreen instantly. There was a warmth and an openness about her that was irresistible. Annie knew that sometimes she came across to other people as awkward and secretive. She could never be totally free and always had to be guarded in what she said, because of what had happened. Being around Noreen’s chatty indiscretion was like a breath of fresh air to her.

As Annie stepped out into the dewy, early morning air to walk the few hundred yards down the Kings Road to work, she was feeling, she was surprised to note, happy. Like an ordinary girl, on an ordinary day, going to work. She was Annie Austen and she had a new friend. Another small triumph. Another piece to add to the jigsaw of her new, invented life. One day, perhaps, there would be enough pieces to make it real.

Fred’s cafe was busy that morning. She barely sat down before eleven. As she had already done four hours, Giuliana, her boss, told her that she could go home for a couple of hours and come back for the early evening shift if she wanted.

As she was leaving she bumped into a young man coming in. She recognised him and, assuming he must be a customer, she smiled and said, ‘Hi.’

‘It’s you,’ he said. She was suddenly gripped with panic. He knew her. Who was he?

‘I’m Alex,’ he said. ‘From last night? The party? I took your picture for the paper.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes. I remember now.’ She smiled.

God – she had an amazing smile. Hell – she was the most beautiful thing on the planet. This was unbelievable. A poor waitress working in a cafe and he was discovering her. Right here. Right now. Standing in front of him was the new Shrimpton. Shrimp? Hell – this girl was LOBSTER! Every model in town would be wiping down cafe tables once this kid hit the scene. Bailey would be a has-been shooting Jewish weddings in Hendon. How had he not seen this last night? HOW? He was snapping this chick up and out of here, right now, in case Duffy came wandering down the Kings Road and decided he wanted a bacon butty for his lunch.

‘I want you to take a look at this,’ Alex said, taking the print out of his bag and laying it on the table.

Annie looked at the picture. It was her at the party last night. Her hand was on her hip and she was staring at the camera. She remembered him asking her to ‘put your hand on your hip love – strike a pose’ and feeling uncomfortable and silly. But she did not look silly in this picture. She looked like the girls in the magazines. She looked London cool. Was that really her?

‘It’s very nice,’ she said. But Annie felt excited. Slightly giddy.

‘It’s more than nice, darling. It’s bloody fantastic! I want you to model for me.’

Annie laughed. ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. She was flattered but there was no way. ‘It’s just not me.’

‘Don’t be daft, girl. Can’t you see from the picture? You’ve got “it”.’

Annie laughed and looked at the picture again. In front of her was the girl she wanted to be. Confident, smiling – eyes sparkling. The picture looked more alive than she felt. Alex could see from her interest that he nearly had her. He just had to close the deal.

‘Come on, love. You are That Girl. Trust me. Let me make you a star. You’ll make a fortune.’

Trust me. Let me do this thing. That’s what Dorian said when her mother was sick. Hanna crept up on Annie and reminded her she didn’t need a fortune. She had all the money she had stolen from Dorian, and his mother’s jewellery, hidden in a locked case under her bed. The apron she had not been able to burn. With no access to a fire, she had left it in there. She felt sick at the thought of it. She looked at the picture again. That girl wasn’t her. Not at all. Don’t tempt fate, Hanna. Somebody might see you. Somebody knows. Keep a low profile. Keep yourself hidden.

‘I’m afraid there’s no way,’ Annie said. Her face was hard and determined.

‘Come on love,’ said Alex, genuinely surprised. What girl turned down the chance to be a model? She must be kidding, leading him on.

As she walked out she turned to the diminutive photographer and, looking down on him said, ‘I am not your love.’ She said it with such venomous disdain that Alex felt as if he had been slapped sharply across the face.

God – but she was gorgeous. He simply had to get her in front of that camera again.