The Royals Collection. Rebecca Winters

‘Tell me what happened, Lily,’ he urged her gently. ‘Tell me about him…Anton.’

       Lily looked at him, as though properly registering his presence for the first time. ‘I can’t,’ she answered him. ‘You wouldn’t understand. You think I’m a liar.’

       Her words struck like a blow against his conscience.

       ‘I will understand and I will believe you,’ he promised her, adding quietly, ‘You said it was your father who introduced you to him?’

       ‘Yes. Anton owns one of the magazines that used to commission my father. He used to come to my father’s studio.’

       ‘And that was where you met him?’

       ‘Yes. I didn’t like him right from the start. There was something about him.’ Lily closed her eyes, but she couldn’t blot out the memories and the images she didn’t want to see. ‘He knew that I didn’t like him. I could tell. It amused him. He enjoyed…he liked frightening me. And I was afraid of him. He made me afraid of him. Just by looking at me sometimes. I used to have nightmares about him looking at me.’

       Marco swallowed down on the angry pity her words had produced.

       ‘What about your parents? Your mother…?’

       ‘My mother was dead by then, and my stepmother had left my father, taking Rick with her. I was at boarding school, so most of the time I was…I didn’t have to see him. It was just during the school holidays, when I was staying with my father.’

       ‘Didn’t you tell him how you felt?’

       ‘I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have understood. My father… Well, you heard Melanie. He never really wanted children.’

       Maybe not, but having had them surely he must have accepted that it was his duty as a father to protect his child? Marco thought grimly, but he didn’t want to upset Lily even more by saying so.

       As though she sensed what he was thinking, and his criticism of her father, she told him quickly, ‘They were friends—and not just that. My father worked for Anton. As you know, my father was a photographer. He worked for several upmarket magazines, doing modelling shoots. He and the people he mixed with were very cutting edge. They lived a certain kind of lifestyle. I suppose the best way to sum it up is to say that it was a…a sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle.’

       ‘And Anton also lived that lifestyle?’

       ‘Yes. He was—still is, I suppose—a very wealthy man. A very important man in the fashion world. His magazine is hugely influential. Being commissioned to photograph fashion shoots for it was an accolade. It could make or break a photographer. My father lived for his work. It gave him the kind of high that other people get from drugs. He was very creative, a genius in his field, and he would get angry and impatient with people who got in the way of him fulfilling his talent.’

       ‘Meaning that he didn’t have much time for those close to him?’ Marco guessed.

       ‘My stepmother was better at dealing with him than my mother, but even she lost patience with him in the end. Rick, my half-brother, worships the memory of our father and wants to follow in his footsteps—but of course he never really knew him properly.’

       ‘Unlike you. So, Anton and your father were friends?’

       ‘Yes. I remember the summer I was fourteen he seemed to be at the studio all the time. When Dad wasn’t there he’d ask to take some…some nude shots of me, and I refused. I remember Dad being furious with me when I tried to tell him.’

       ‘Why? What did he say?’

       ‘He refused to believe me—accused me of attention-seeking. Being just like my mother. It was a horrible holiday. Dad refused to speak to me, and then just before I went back to school my stepmother told me that she was divorcing him. I liked her. I still do. She was kind to me—that’s why I feel I owe it to her to keep an eye on Rick, as well, of course, as because he’s my half-brother. She’s remarried now, and she lives in California. She’s always inviting me out to stay but I haven’t managed it as yet.

       ‘Rick always says that it isn’t fair that Dad taught me to use a camera but died before he could teach him. I couldn’t have not learned, really. Well, I couldn’t have had him for a father and not learned how to take a photograph. I always preferred to photograph things, though, not people. It felt safer, somehow. The camera catches things that the naked eye doesn’t always, you see. My mother…. Well, in some of the last photographs of her I think you can see how desperate she was, how alone she felt. I wish I’d been able to help her.

       ‘Anyway, after that whenever I came home from school for the holidays Anton always seemed to be there, at the studio, and I noticed…’ She paused.

       This was so difficult.

       ‘You noticed?’ Marco repeated, his voice so devoid of emotion that its calmness steadied her.

       She still couldn’t look at him, though, so she went to stand in front of the window as she told him in a low voice, ‘I noticed that the models my father was being asked to photograph for Anton’s magazine were getting younger and younger. That wasn’t entirely unusual for the time. The modelling world was changing, and the demand was for younger girls. But Anton’s magazine seemed to use more of them than anyone else. There was one girl—Anna. She was so pretty, so very pretty, and young—only fifteen. I really liked her. She wasn’t like the other models. She was still at school, like me, but I was at boarding school in the country and she was at a London day-school. Her mother was a dancer and her parents were divorced too. Her father didn’t approve of her modelling. She told me that her agent said she thought she’d be doing a Vogue cover by the end of the year, only she didn’t.’

       Her voice became suspended. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t… It was so awful, so horrible.’

       ‘What happened, Lily?’

       Marco suspected he knew what she was going to say, and he was appalled.

       ‘It’s the reason I still hate going in helicoptors—because we travelled to the shoot in one that day.’ She shuddered at the thought. ‘I still feel so guilty because I never said anything,’ she told him in a ragged voice, turning round from the window to look at him, her face ravaged by her emotions.

       Marco knew all about guilt, and how it ate away at a person. He went to her, wanting to reach out and hold her, but he was held back by his own demons. They told him that if he held her now he would be making a commitment that would bind him to her for ever, and that was a risk he must not take.

       He saw Lily’s shoulders lift as she breathed in, taking the kind of breath that someone facing an enormous physical challenge needed to take.

       ‘Anna said that Anton had raped her and she thought she was pregnant. She said that Anton had been coming to the studio to see her, and he’d sent my father away on some pretext so they’d be alone together. She cried when she told me. She said it had been awful and that she was afraid to tell her mother.’

       Lily took another deep breath to steady herself.

       ‘That was the day before I was going back to school. I never saw her again. When I asked my father about her he said that Anton had told him she’d stopped modelling because she’d fallen down the stairs to her mother’s flat and broken her leg. I wrote to her, but she never wrote back to me. Her mother wrote instead, saying that Anna had gone to live with her father and her stepmother.’

       Her voice broke, and Marco could only guess at what she was feeling.

       ‘That was at half-term,’ she told him. ‘At the start of the Christmas holiday Anton was still always there at the studio.’ Her voice grew stronger. ‘And then one day, after he and my father had gone out to lunch together, Anton came back but my father didn’t.’

       Lily swallowed hard.

       ‘It was everything I’d dreaded, but