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Xandros froze

CHAPTER ONE

ROSALIE SIGHED, CROUCHING down beside her bucket of soapy water, a heavy-duty scourer in her rubber-gloved hand, and poured bleach over the disgusting, greasy, trodden-in gunk on the cheap vinyl floor in front of the equally disgusting grease-splattered cooker

The rest of the kitchen was just as disgusting Whoever had rented this house had been a pig The whole place was filthy, fro as well But it had to be done

She sighed again Her rent was due, and she also liked to eat

She felt a familiar emotion burn in her

One day I won’t be doing this! One day I won’t be cleaning up other people’s filth and dirt! One day I won’t be living in a total dive and paying a fortune for the privilege! One day I won’t have a wardrobe consisting of clothes fro on beans on toast

One day she wouldn’t be poor any more

It was a poverty she’d grown up with Her single ued by lifelong ill health, and Rosalie had been her carer both as a child and into her twenties She had never been able to make a life of her own It had just been her and her poor, frailin a shabby council flat in the East End of London

As for her father—he didn’t even know she existed Herover the one all too brief romance in her sad life

‘I knew hi here in London on a construction site Then I found I was pregnant, but he’d already left the country I wrote to the construction company, to tell him you were on the way, but they couldn’t have been able to trace him because I didn’t hear back’

And she never had either Rosalie had written hie All she and her mother had had was each other

Rosalie’s face shadowed And now she did not even have her mother Her poor unhappydisease in the chill grip of last winter With her death Rosalie had lost the council flat and lost the disability and carer’s benefits she and her ained her freedom

Grieve though she did for her mother, she knew that finally, at twenty-six, she could belatedly start toof herself Get qualifications, the ability to better herself, and escape from the poverty trap and the bleak, unlovely streets of her rundown part of the East End

She sighed oncethe sht in the ood hour’s work on the kitchen before she could lock up, hand the key in to the agency, then get back to her poky bedsit and her crucial, all-important studies