Consequently, very few people would have pegged her as the daughter of a man who made his living driving a lorry and delivering coal in Tunbridge Wells. A girl from a bleak council housing estate, who’d left school at fourteen and had fallen pregnant at the age of eighteen after being far too naïve and trusting.

Phyllis Raynor had worked very hard and very diligently to expunge both of these latter faults from her personality over the years. She had also taken several correspondence courses in order to prepare herself for a career as a secretary, as well as reading widely and well, to educate herself in the more social graces.

She’d been careful to cultivate friends who had no idea of her humble origins, learning from them the many tricks of the middle-class trade that came so naturally to them. She’d also listened and learned from the bosses in the many business offices she’d worked in, where office politics could be as vicious as any practised in Whitehall. And one of the many things she’d learned from her unknowingly helpful teachers was that people who succeeded in life didn’t indulge in theatrics, or allow any obstacle to deter them from their chosen path.

So she did not indulge in self-pity, as her younger self might have done. And she now had far more self-control than to let her anger have free rein. Instead, she sat on the bed, coolly and calmly, and forced herself to think. Just where had this latest turn of events left her? And how could she turn it to her advantage?

When she’d come to Oxford on New Year’s Eve she’d had a definite plan in mind. It had been a simple plan, but she didn’t think that she’d been overly optimistic in having great expectations that it would prove to be effective. It wasn’t as if she’d rushed things, or gone at things half-cocked. It had taken her a long time to finally track down her prey, and she hadn’t been about to let all that hard work come to nothing by letting impatience get the better of her. No, she’d watched, and waited, and made sure of the lie of the land before making her move. What’s more, she’d chosen her moment to strike for the optimum psychological advantage.

But no matter how well you checked out all the angles, and thought you’d set up everything perfectly, accounting for every possible permutation you could think of, there was just no accounting for bad luck, was there?

Dirty, rotten luck. She seemed to have had so much of it, all her life.

So was she going to go home with her tail between her legs, no better off than when she’d arrived? All because of Terrence bloody Parker?

No, she told herself firmly. She was not.