Curled up on the four-poster bed in the master bedroom of The Standlings, Molly swallowed a mouthful of brandy and grimaced. She just couldn’t concentrate on the late-night movie she was watching – even the fifty-inch plasma screen couldn’t make it more interesting. She sighed and took another sip. The last fortnight had been hell. The humiliation of having to clear her desk at Midas had been bad enough, but then she had been forced to face a week of complete paranoia, terrified that Marcus would smell a rat. Thankfully he seemed to buy her excuse that she wasn’t enjoying the job and would much rather get on with the renovations at The Standlings. But Molly was missing London. Working in Piccadilly had given her so much freedom – to meet Alex, go shopping or see friends for lunch on her Midas expense account. She had once boasted about ‘the manor’ but, now it was all she had, she felt trapped and suffocated. Just then, Molly’s mobile chirped. She didn’t want the distraction, but Marcus was away on business and would expect her to answer. She put down the brandy and flipped it open.
‘Hey there …’ she purred.
‘Is that you, Molly?’ asked a woman’s voice, its tone soft and apologetic. ‘I’m sorry for calling, especially so late. But you hadn’t replied to my letters and I wasn’t sure if you’d received them.’
‘How did you get my number?’ asked Molly, instantly recognizing the voice and sitting up straight.
‘I called – what’s it called? – the Midas Corporation. I saw you in the papers and it said you worked there. That’s how I knew where to send the letters. Anyway, I told them who I was and said it was very important I speak to you.’
‘You haven’t got my phone number for a reason,’ said Molly coldly.
There was the sound of soft sobbing down the line. Molly sat there listening, her eyes drifting to the window. It was pitch-black outside and she could see her reflection in the glass, her face shadowed and sinister. She looked like a ghost.
‘Okay, so I got the letters,’ said Molly, irritation in her voice.
‘Did you read them?’
‘Yes, Janet,’ said Molly numbly. ‘I read them.’
‘Well, it’s got worse, Molly, it’s worse than when I last wrote. Your father. I think he’s going to die.’
Molly Sinclair had wanted to escape her small village on the outskirts of Newcastle for as long as she could remember. At sixteen she was already tall, beautiful and precocious; a lazy student, she had little desire to do well in the classroom, knowing that her fortune lay in her face and her body. There were no shortage of men in Newcastle’s Bigg Market queuing up to buy her drink. One told her he was a photographer and offered to get her started as a model. At the ‘studio’, a small bedsit in Fenham, the man told her to take off her clothes and lie down on a bed draped with black chiffon. When he’d gone to fetch his film, she’d smashed his camera onto the floor, then run. Did he think she was stupid? She wasn’t going to be exploited by anyone.
Molly’s luck had changed on her seventeenth birthday. Her new boyfriend, an oil-rigger stationed in the North Sea, couldn’t get to the shops to buy a present, so had sent her £500 cash.
‘I’m going to London,’ she had told her father and stepmother the moment she opened the envelope.
They hadn’t shared Molly’s vision. ‘What’s so special about London?’ her stepmother Janet had demanded angrily. ‘It’s not paved with gold, you know.’
She’d show them, she thought, boarding a train for St Pancras.
Molly had a plan: she had read The Face and Blitz magazine religiously and she knew that Chelsea and Soho were where all the beautiful people hung out. Trying on a pair of PVC pants in Seditionaries, the famous shop on the King’s Road owned by Malcolm McLaren, Molly had been approached by a glamorous woman who wanted to know if she was a model. This time, the photographer was real, and within six months Molly had bookings for Harper’s & Queen and Cosmopolitan magazines, a commercial for a cosmetics company and catwalk shows for the top fashion houses. Molly was part of a new era of girls, the next generation from Marie Helvin and Jerry Hall, and her status brought her wealth, fame and fun. She lived in a house in Edith Grove with two other models, Michelle and Lulu, both slightly older and both protective of Molly when she confided in them about her upbringing: the death of her mother, her father’s neglect of his only daughter when he’d remarried ‘that bitch Janet’. Molly had hinted at domestic violence and abuse, and Michelle and Lulu took her out on the town to help her forget. They spent night after night in The Wag Club and the Limelight, or being wined and dined by rich men at Langan’s. Sucked into her new glamorous jet-set world, she forgot Ken and Janet even existed; when people asked, she told them her family was dead. Sometimes she even believed it.
Then, six weeks ago, the first letter had arrived for her at the Midas Corporation. In scratchy black ink, Janet had told her that Ken was ill, having suffered a minor stroke. The second said that hospital investigations had revealed weaknesses in his heart that could spark off an aneurism at any time. She’d hadn’t bothered reading the third letter; she had simply folded them all up and put them at the back of Marcus’s wardrobe. She had tried hard to forget about them, but at night when The Standlings was very dark and the floorboards creaked, the sight of the wardrobe had begun to trouble her, as if there were ghosts banging inside.
‘I’m sorry to hear about it, Janet,’ she said finally, knotting her hand in a fist. ‘But I don’t see what all this has got to do with me.’
‘Molly! How can you …? Don’t you care? Don’t you want to see your father?’ said Janet, her voice becoming angry. ‘He’s having open-heart surgery. We’re hoping he’s going to be strong enough for it, but he … well, he needs it. Without it, doctors say he will only have a few months.’
Molly shook her head. What was all this to her? Why was this woman bothering her again after all these years? She dug her nails into the bedspread, feeling angry for being disturbed and angry with herself for feeling bothered at the news.
‘Are you going to come home, Molly? He still doesn’t know what he did to upset you, or why you won’t see the family …’
Molly was silent.
‘But none of that matters now,’ said Janet. ‘It’s time for us to be together. Maybe for one last time.’
‘We’re not really a family any more though, are we?’ said Molly, closing her eyes as she said it. ‘I don’t belong there, I never have done.’
‘This is ridiculous, Molly. He’s your father. Your father!’
‘Janet. Please don’t bother me again.’
‘Listen, he’s in Newcastle Infirmary. The operation is a week tomorrow and—’
Molly didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. She dropped the phone, went over to the wardrobe to retrieve Janet’s letters, tearing them into pieces before she flushed them down the en-suite toilet.