“Only because I learned them off you!” Helen roared with laughter.

Fortified by the wine, Lindsay gave Helen a succinct outline of recent events. “I’ll color in the picture when I’ve had a kip, okay?” she wound up.

“You just can’t keep away from it, can you?” Helen said. “We’re two of a kind, you and me. We can’t just sit on our hands when something needs sorting.”

“Mmm,” Lindsay grunted, reaching for the bottle and pouring a second glass. “So how’s the film business?” She needed to keep awake for Sophie’s phone call, and listening to Helen seemed a less taxing option than doing the talking herself.

“If I’m honest, Linds, it’s actually a bag of shit right now.”

“What’s the problem?” Lindsay slurred through a mixture of drink and exhaustion.

Kirsten groaned. “Don’t encourage her. We’ll be here all night and I need my beauty sleep.”

“If anyone needs their beauty sleep around here, gorgeous, it’s not you. The problem, Linds, is Guy. Well, it’s not really Guy as such, it’s Stella. You remember the set-up at Watergaw?”

Lindsay remembered. Helen and Guy had set up their independent film-making company three years earlier. Before that, Helen had worked in theater administration, then run her own casting agency, working for TV and film companies initially in Britain and later across Europe. Guy had been a TV director and producer first of current affairs and later of high-profile documentaries. Together they’d decided to create Watergaw Films to take advantage of new EU funding geared towards community groups who wanted to develop TV and film projects, both dramatic and documentary. “How could I forget?” she said. “Straight partnership, down the middle, you and Guy. Best buddies, known each other since school, both gay, both refugees from New Labour, both filled with the burning desire to make meaningful TV.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Helen said bitterly. She ran a hand through her mop of flaming red hair. “Turns out I was well wrong. On pretty much every count. I could just about live with the way he’s turned into the worst kind of exploitative capitalist, because I could always weigh in and get the balance straight again. But now he’s got that bitch Stella on board . . . I just don’t know how much more of his shit I can take.”

It had to be serious for Helen to be badmouthing another woman like that, Lindsay realized with a jolt. Normally first to the barricades when sisterhood came under threat, it took a lot for Helen even to admit a woman was in the wrong when there was an available male to be blamed. “Who’s Stella?” Lindsay asked as Kirsten moved behind Helen and started to massage the back of her neck and shoulders.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Helen purred, rolling her head back. “The bitch goddess from hell joined us about a year ago. We needed someone else on board with directorial experience, and she came highly recommended. Plus she had a bit of capital which we needed right then, so she bought in at twenty percent of the company. What was supposed to happen was that she would do the bread and butter stuff for Guy and work with me on projects where I was producer. What wasn’t supposed to happen was Guy rediscovering his lost heterosexuality and climbing into bed with the scheming little minx,” Helen said. Not even Kirsten’s massage was enough to subdue the anger in her voice.