I opted for a salt beef bagel and made my way back along the high street towards the office. Not many people could boast of a view like this from their workplace. The sea was brushing against the rocks in a mirror of turquoise and to the right, the harbour reached out like a gnarly hand towards a couple of creaking fishing boats.

Behind me, the multi-coloured fishermen’s cottages and eclectic array of shops were slung like a string of rainbow beads.

This sure beat being stuck on a train an hour each way every day, inhaling other people’s armpits.

“Ms Baxter?”

I turned around.

It was Mrs Cooke, an elderly lady I had interviewed recently. She had been swindled out of six hundred pounds by a dodgy landscape gardening company and had come to The Silver Ness News for help.

I followed up her story and thanks to the negative publicity and the attention my article attracted, Mrs Cooke was refunded the money these crooks had extracted from her, after claiming they had “recalculated the costs of pruning Mrs Cooke’s hedges and realised they had made an administrative error.”

“I just wanted to thank you so much for your help.”

“Oh, not at all Mrs Cooke,” I beamed, putting on a jokey voice. “Just doing my job.”

“No, you didn’t. You did far more than that. You were so very kind to me.” She leant in, clutching her wicker shopping basket. “I have written a letter of thanks to your editor, telling him how wonderful you are, but I’m sure he knows that already.”

I felt my cheeks zing with happiness and satisfaction. “Well, I hope he does but it won’t do any harm to remind him. Thank you.”

Mrs Cooke laughed and wandered off to inspect some new postcards outside the gift shop.

As I strolled back towards the office, an idea came to me. Maybe we could introduce a consumer complaints page for the local readers? Doug would often ask Frances and me to put forward any ideas we might have for the paper so that he could feed them back to Head Office.

The offices of The Silver Ness News were a whitewashed bevelled-window affair that used to be a pub that entertained the weary fishermen after their gruelling shifts out at sea during the early 1900s. It looked out from the high street and onto the moody vista of the beach.

As I drew closer, I noted that Doug’s black Hyundai was back and parked round the corner. Wow. If that had been a budget meeting, it had been a much quicker one than usual. They usually dragged on for a good couple of hours.

Doug would return, tie askew, complaining about people loving the sound of their own voices and refusing to stick to the timings on the agenda. Then he would always say he could murder a pint.