Dorothy took a deep breath and opened her eyes. Her mouth was dry, and she knew from experience that there was little chance of her being able to get back to sleep. Pushing aside the sweat-soaked duvet she swung her legs to the floor and stood for a moment, naked in the dark, curling her toes in the thick pile of the bedside rug, luxuriating in the air-conditioned calm of her room. Reaching down, she snatched up a robe from where she had discarded it on the floor the previous night. She’d never been tidy as a teenager. Things hadn’t changed.

There was a rustle from the far side of the room and a black cat appeared, sauntering across the polished wooden floor towards her, its expression leaving Dorothy in no doubt that her exertions had woken it from its sleep.

‘Yeah, Sorin,’ muttered Dorothy. ‘Like you never have bad dreams …’

Sorin hopped up onto the bed, sniffing at the rumpled sheets disdainfully before curling up in a fold of the duvet. Dorothy gave him an affectionate rub behind the ear, then shrugged into her dressing gown, tied it and made her way down the stairs that led to the rest of her apartment.

As with every other morning, the view from her apartment lifted her spirits. The floor-to-ceiling windows, coupled with the fact that she was 18 storeys up, gave her an unparalleled view over London, and on a clear day she could see as far as the Chilterns. She always felt that early morning was the best time to see London. A scant few hours when the craziness of the clubbers and partygoers was over, and the different craziness of the morning commute had yet to begin.

In the summer she liked to watch as the first rays of the rising sun caught the spires of the churches and lit up the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, rising above the rooftops, making the grime-blackened stone shine as if glowing with an inner light. But this was January, and sunrise – if the sun did indeed manage to shed any light through the ponderous grey clouds – was still hours away. London would be dark for a good while yet.

Crossing to the window, she peered down at the ancient buildings that formed the Tower of London. Choosing this location for the headquarters of A Charitable Earth had amused Dorothy. She had been quite adamant about it when the building had been commissioned, despite the fact that there had been immediate and vociferous opposition to its construction.

She had known all too well what the basis for that opposition was, of course, and it had nothing to do with environmental concerns, or visual pollution, or any one of the other dozen or so reasons that had been put forward to try and impede the building’s construction.