Then, changing the internal date to the following day, she moved to Stella’s personal desk and produced a second memo, acknowledging Guy’s to her and suggesting a couple of dodgy wrinkles of her own. Next, she changed the computer’s date to that of a couple of weeks after the end of filming on Thirty/Three. With constant reference to her notes, she constructed a long memo purporting to come from Stella to Guy, explaining in detail the subterfuges she had employed to disguise the crooked payments. It finished with a contemptuous reference to Helen, looking forward to a time when she and Guy could dump her from the partnership. Finally, after changing the internal date on the computer to the correct one, she printed out all three memos.

It took a little longer to make them look appropriately aged. A coffee mug ring here, a smudge of cigarette ash there. Here a curl at the corner, there a crease. Her pièce de résistance, Lindsay felt, was to copy a doodle she saw replicated a dozen times on Stella’s scratch pad, a five-pointed star with the central pentagon inked in. Then she put Guy’s into Stella’s desk drawer, towards the bottom of the pile of papers in there. She walked down the dim corridor to Guy’s office, where she deposited the fake memos from Stella among a stack of papers in a deep tray marked “To be filed when hell freezes over.”

Back at the computer, she used the system’s in-built retrieval system to recapture the forged EU letter about Helen’s grant which Stella had deleted the previous evening in her and Guy’s attempts to cover their tracks. Like most people, she had once thought deleting something was enough to erase it from the system for ever. Thanks to Meredith’s teaching, Lindsay now knew different.

Finally, she made a lengthy call. Just after midnight, Lindsay put the phone down. She had run the final details past Ellie, and been assured that what she had put in place was the perfect frame that would cheerfully convince any investigator from Customs and Excise or the Inland Revenue. One of the knock-on effects of new technology that usually worried her was how easy it had become to frame the innocent. It made a pleasant change to exploit it against the guilty. She stretched her back, thrusting her arms into the air and yawning like a basking lioness. The sooner she got back to a routine where she could run and work out, the better she’d feel.