“That’s exactly what I’m saying. So you get someone like Catriona Polson coming along and not only swallowing up an old, established firm like Paul Firestone but also moving into the kind of naff but flash offices that Saatchi and Saatchi wouldn’t sniff at. So I thought we could maybe look at these super-agents, and of course, I thought, Clive’s the man. So take somebody like Catriona Polson. How did she go from a three-woman operation in Holborn to head honcho of Polson and Firestone?” Kirsten listened for a moment, then abruptly tipped forward and started scribbling on a scratch pad by the phone, dumping her cigarette in the flower vase on the desk. Now Lindsay knew how the carnations had died. She watched Kirsten take notes, interjecting the occasional, “Yeah,” or, “Well, there’s a surprise.” In spite of the sweat and the pressure, she couldn’t help feeling a faint pang of nostalgia for the journalistic trade she’d left behind her. Moments like this, when the adrenaline was pumping and there was the unmistakable sense of a hunch paying off, were simply not available in teaching.

Eventually, Kirsten’s writing hand started to slow and she shifted in her seat, reaching into her desk drawer for another cigarette. “Clive, I owe you one,” she sighed through a cloud of smoke, then replaced the handset. Kirsten grinned up at Lindsay, who found herself wondering just how it was that Helen managed to attract stunning women who also possessed brains and a sense of humor. Sophie and Kirsten were the two who had lasted longest, but they were far from the only ones. “Bingo,” Kirsten growled happily.

“You going to tell me or do I have to hang you out of the window by the ankles and threaten to drop you?” Lindsay asked, sliding off the window-sill and into the chair.

“Sounds like fun, but I haven’t got time for all that sophisticated foreplay,” Kirsten said. “I’ll cut to the chase.”

“I was right, then? There is something dodgy at Polson and Firestone?”

“Well, not dodgy so much as stretched. When she ‘discovered’ Penny, she was literally a one-woman show. It was Penny’s success that created her business and brought other writers beating a path to her door. Her business grew and she took on a couple of assistants, but she needed to expand, and the lesson everybody learned in the eighties was that the quickest way to do that was to swallow somebody else, preferably somebody bigger than you.”

“The reverse takeover?”