It had never been Stephen’s plan to become an accountant. When he had left school, he had every intention of going on to art college, having a greater aptitude towards all things creative than to any one thing in the academic field. But his overpowering father had bullied him into altering course, telling him that he expected his only son to take on the eventual running of his own business, and that accountancy was the best grounding with which to accomplish this successfully.

With not one iota of enthusiasm for the work, Stephen had scraped a lowly pass in his final accountancy exams, and consequently had only managed to find employment with the small West Hampstead practice. Every morning, he struggled to get himself out of bed, knowing that the day had little to offer him other than indescribable boredom. But now, as he scrutinized the Talworth file, he began to see a means of escape. He just had to manipulate it correctly.

He laid aside the file that day and went on to sort out the affairs of a self-employed jobbing plumber from Hackney. Then, that night, he took it home and began to put together a proposal for the designer. After a week of working well into the small hours of the morning, he devised a business plan that broadened the parameters of Rebecca Talworth’s work into lucrative sidelines, whilst still granting her complete autonomy over designs and products. The control of expenditure and cash flow, however, was to be placed firmly in the hands of a financial director.

It took him five times of asking to arrange a meeting with Rebecca, something which confirmed in his mind that she was fully aware of the fact that her glitzy, jet-setting world was about to crumble around her feet. He was never put off by her complete refusal to speak to him on the telephone, because every time the line went dead, he became more assured that she had little option other than to accept his plan.

They met in her small mews house off Exhibition Road exactly three weeks after he had made his initial attempt to contact her. He handled the meeting with care, always putting across the harder points for her to accept with a generous massaging of her obviously extensive ego. Within an hour, he had struck the deal and was shown to the front door by a smiling, almost ebullient Rebecca Talworth. He left her waving on the doorstep and walked away down the narrow cobbled lane as the newly appointed financial director of Rebecca Talworth Design Ltd., a position that carried a healthy salary increment on the fulfillment of each of his proposed targets. By the time that he had emerged onto Exhibition Road, he had called the chartered accountancy practice in West Hampstead and told them that he was leaving without notice.