It was a jarring sentence to say out loud, an inversion of their natural relationship. Meghan wasn’t there so that Sal could help her with stuff. Sal wasn’t going to start being PA to her own PA. And yet here she was, in the doorway for the third time now, the hat-trick as Dec would say, glancing between the floor and Sal’s phone in her left hand. The overall effect of all this pantomime discretion far more distracting than if she’d just bloody come out and said whatever it was when she first walked in.

‘So, there’s a message you – I think you’d want to deal with it?’ said Meghan.

‘To do with what?’ It came out brusquer than Sal intended. But this wasn’t good. The journo was doodling, again, and Sal knew he was enjoying this, the human angle, the comic relief. He’d end up putting this in his piece, the prick. ‘Chiltern – famed for being in charge of her time – is visibly rattled when her assistant …’

Meghan hesitated.

‘Give me a clue at least, darl,’ said Sal, working hard to keep her tone humorous.

‘Your brother’s about to kill himself?’ said Meghan.

5

BERLIN, 01:27

MICHAELA ADLER

Michaela Adler’s phone was in her handbag. The incoming text lit the whole interior of the bag for a second, like a torch in a tent, but she didn’t read it straight away. I need to turn off some of my notifications, she told herself, once again. All her chat threads, Facebook, the pushy running app which still piped up every couple of days – ‘let’s go run! The best time is right now!’ Phillip didn’t like it when she was glancing at it all the time. Even though it was very often gallery business. And even though, as she liked to point out, ‘People do tend to do things by text sometimes, because it’s not 1995.’

Phillip was only four years older than her, just like James had been, but he enjoyed his caricature as a grumpy old man; played up to it with a certain glee. He feigned ignorance of Justin Bieber’s life and work, however many times the name came up; he went to the local government office to register to vote, even though you could do it in five minutes on the internet. He visited Facebook no more than once a week, which in this day and age meant you might as well be living on a desert island.

In this place, they probably were the oldest people. Phillip with his thick-rimmed Tom Ford specs slightly misted over in the warmth of the club. Michaela in a dress she would describe as pretty revealing, but which by the standards of the 18-year-olds here might as well be a spacesuit.