Pauline drew herself erect, finding some reserves of inner strength to combat Lindsay. “You’re damn right it was an accident. Now, are you going to listen, or are you just going to interrupt with smartass remarks every other sentence?”

Lindsay held her hands up. “Okay. I’ll listen. But I reserve the right to disbelieve every word.”

“Feel free. Just before he was elected general secretary of the JU, Tom Jack sexually harassed me,” Pauline said in a curiously empty voice. “Not once, but a few times. A couple of times it was just verbal, but on two occasions, it got physical. The second time, if another member of staff hadn’t come in, I think it might have got out of hand. Anyway, after that second occasion, I told him that if he ever laid a finger on me again or made a sexual innuendo in my hearing, I would take out a formal complaint against him. He couldn’t afford the risk of that, so he backed off. It ended the hassle, but it left me feeling like shit. Every time I saw him, I got the taste of bile in my mouth. That’s how I started with this stuff.”

She rummaged in the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a packet of chewing gum. She unwrapped a piece and slipped it into her mouth. “When the redundancies were announced, it brought all the anger back to me. It was like I’d been turned into an object all over again, something him and his cronies could throw on the scrap heap. I felt like I’d got nothing left to lose, so I decided to get my own back on the lot of them. One day, a couple of weeks before conference, I was photocopying a whole pile of amendments to motions and I came up with the idea of Conference Chronicle. I thought at least I could make Union Jack and his sleazy sidekicks look like the bunch of wankers they really are.”

“You certainly succeeded,” Lindsay said drily. “Pity you had to take me with them.”

Pauline pulled a face. “It was just bad luck that it was your room it happened in.”

“So what did happen?”