She downloaded the relevant files on to her blank disks and closed down her terminal with twenty minutes to spare, which she passed on to a grateful youth who’d been hanging around looking wistfully at her and her fellow netheads. A quick glance at her watch told her she’d better get a move on, so she walked back to Leicester Square tube and endured the stifling and stale wind of the Northern Line tunnels until a train groaned into the station to jolt her to Camden Town.

Helen closed the door of her office behind Lindsay, who caught the look of surprise on her secretary’s face. “It’s not that I don’t trust her,” Helen said defensively, seeing Lindsay’s raised eyebrows. “It’s just that I don’t actually trust anybody in here as of last night. Isn’t that the pits? As if it’s not bad enough that they’ve done what they’ve done, they’ve got me so paranoid I think everybody’s in it with them. Toerags.” As she spoke, she unwrapped a series of soft ciabatta rolls with a variety of fillings. They looked like a row of mismatched children’s slippers arranged on a plate.

“Serious sandwiches,” Lindsay commented, settling herself in the canvas director’s chair facing Helen.

“They probably go through the books as stationery supplies,” Helen said sourly, opening a small executive fridge and taking out a couple of bottles of alcoholic lemonade and uncapping them. “So what’s new?”

“I had this idea of how we can screw Stella and Guy,” Lindsay said simply. A wide grin split Helen’s face. “Now I remember why I like you so much,” she said.

“What you do here at Watergaw, you work quite closely with ethnic minority groups, am I right?”

“That’s supposed to be our brief, yeah. Couldn’t you tell from the women in those delightful films we saw last night?” Helen asked savagely, grabbing a sandwich and biting into it as if it were Stella’s head she was snapping off.

“So would I be right in thinking that means you film abroad from time to time?”

Helen nodded, managing to look puzzled even with a mouthful of sandwich.

“Is there anywhere that Guy and Stella have been on a joint project, relatively recently?”