She made it forty minutes before her relentless fumbling caused it to burst. Once it had, she couldn’t stop poking at it, unable to look away from the shameful eruption. Soon it was bleeding, and she didn’t know if that was better or worse. She daubed the throbbing red mark with antiseptic, and phoned work to take the day off.

“I . . . my mum is . . . I’ve got to go and . . . It’s my mum, you see.”

“What’s the matter with your mum?”

“Nothing, nothing. I mean, not nothing. She’s had—The doctor called and said I had to go and see her.”

“If it’s nothing then why . . . ?”

“You know she had a stroke, I mean, a few months ago. It’s to do with that. They wouldn’t tell me much over the phone.”

“You’ve got the Moores at 3 p.m.”

“Right. Yes. Could James . . . ? I mean, I can send him the file – it’s . . . and the keys are . . . shit, the keys are . . . Look, maybe I can drop by on the way to uh . . . to my mum . . . ”

She felt a little bad using her mum as an excuse, but only for a moment. Parents understood these sorts of things; they knew what mattered and what didn’t. Karen Meads wouldn’t have minded Harmony using her name in vain, as long as it was for the right thing.

On the other end of the line, Graham was unconvinced. “We need you back first thing tomorrow, and you’re working a Saturday for me.”

“Yeah, OK . . . yeah.”

Harmony hung up and sat alone, staring into the small square mirror on the wall by the bed. Her well-proportioned, cosy one-bedroom apartment, as she would have described it to any sucker foolish enough to rent, was at the top of an extension on the back of a family house in Streatham, which had been converted some fifteen years ago into six convenient, well-appointed flats for the modern professional. The wallpaper was faded red; the carpet was string and blue fluff. It cost more per week than her old place in Reading had for a month, and she wasn’t sure if the black mould in the bathroom had been killed by the chlorine spray, or just bleached a faded grey.

She thought back to her conversation with Graham and wondered how she’d get keys to James without anyone at the office seeing her face. She felt like a foolish child, her lie ridiculous and easily exposed. Harmony Meads wasn’t usually stuck for words. It was as if this single offending rupture in her flesh had robbed her of her gifts of speech, an arrow to her Achilles heel. She knew she should get up, get moving, find some way of solving this, and for nearly seven minutes she leaned in close, prodding and squeezing at the rim of the offending mark, and was horrified when, having doused it in antiseptic and the pharmacist’s cream, her poking produced a tiny curl of white gunk from beneath her flesh. It looked like cream cheese, or old mayonnaise. The soft substance was less than two millimetres in length, but held close to her face she could have sworn it was gigantic, the first sign of something alien, unnatural, a dead maggot of fat growing beneath her skin.