He’d never seen her before but as soon as Paul clapped his eyes on the girl, he felt attracted to her. She was perfect. He paused. Too perfect? He took in her long slim legs and curvaceous behind and smiled inwardly. There was no such thing as too perfect. She wasn’t his usual type with her short, bobbed hair but those cheekbones! They could cut glass. He guessed she had Slavic roots somewhere. Despite her cheap clothing, she had an air of superiority about her that was magnified even further by the crummy backdrop of her surroundings.

Amongst the chaos that was the youth centre on a Friday night in one of the roughest areas of Manchester, Slavic Girl stood out. It wasn’t just her beauty. Paul sieved through his mind looking for the right word; he liked to be precise about these things. Composed? Graceful? Proud? No. None of those were quite right. Elegant. That was it. She had an elegance about her and he supressed a sneer of lust as he quickly turned away and walked to the office to dump his bag.

‘Hey, Paul.’

Gloria barely looked up from behind the desk, a slash of pink lipstick across her mouth, which had smudged onto her teeth. She refused to use a computer, so the small office was always filled with boxes and piles of paperwork. She couldn’t navigate the internet, but she had a unique ability to find any document in seconds. An impressive feat when you considered just how many boxes there were.

Gloria had run the centre as long as Paul had been there and it was Gloria who had founded and got the funding for it years ago. Gloria, in her own words, was a scrubber who had married well. She’d grown up on a council estate that was so rocked with drugs even the police had given up, but somehow she had managed to slip through the net.

She’d been working in a café as a waitress when the man, who would become her husband just months later, had seen her and apparently fallen in love at first sight. The fact that she’d refused to go out with him only fuelled his longing. Eventually, she’d agreed and once they were married Gloria used some of his money to set up youth centres around Manchester. It was a well-known story, probably embellished over the years, and Paul had heard that she’d counselled hundreds of kids off the streets and into her youth clubs.