I was halfway through a self-righteous account of my morning’s work when I realized, too late as usual, that she was winding me up. I stuck my tongue out at her and dropped a micro-cassette on her desk. It contained my verbal report of the last couple of days. “Here’s a little something to keep you from getting too bored,” I said. “Anything I should know about?”

Shelley shook her head, and the beads she has plaited into her hair rattled. I wondered, not for the first time, how she could bear the noise first thing in the morning. But then, since Shelley’s mission in life is keeping her two teenage kids out of trouble, I don’t think there are too many mornings when she wakes with a hangover. There are times when I could hate Shelley.

Mostly I find myself in her debt. She is the most efficient secretary I have ever encountered. She’s a 35-year-old divorcée who somehow manages to look like a fashion plate in spite of the pittance we pay her. She’s just under five feet tall, and so slim and fragile-looking that she makes even me feel like the Incredible Hulk. I’ve been to her cramped little two-up, two-down and in spite of living with a pair of teenagers, the house is spotlessly clean and almost unnaturally tidy. However, Richard has pointed out to me more than once that I am a subscriber to the irregular verb theory of language—“I have high standards, you are fussy, she is obsessive.”

She picked up the cassette and slotted it into her own player. “I’ll have it for you later this afternoon,” she said.

“Thanks. Copy in Bill’s system as well as mine, please. Is he free?”

She glanced at the lights on her PBX. “Looks like it.”

I crossed the office in four strides and knocked on Bill’s door. His deep voice growled, “Come in.” As I shut the door behind me, he looked up from the screen of his turbo-charged IBM compatible and grunted, “Give me a minute, Kate.” Bill likes things turbo-charged. Everything from his Saab 9000 convertible to his sex life.

There was a fierce frown of concentration on his face as he scanned the screen, tapping the occasional key. No matter how often I watch Bill at his computers, I still feel a sense of incongruity. He really doesn’t look like a computer boffin or a private investigator. He’s six foot three inches tall and resembles a shaggy blond bear. His hair and beard are shaggy, his eyebrows are shaggy over his ice blue eyes, and when he smiles his white teeth look alarmingly like the ones that are all the better to eat you with. He’s a one-man EU. I still haven’t got the hang of his ancestry, except that I know his grandparents were, severally, Danish, Dutch,