I remembered an early conversation with Greg, when we were getting to know each other and obsessed with every detail about each other’s life. I’d teased him about being an accountant. Wasn’t it just about adding up columns of numbers and filling in forms? He’d laughed. It wasn’t like that at all, not with the clients he had. It was a mixture of being a psychiatrist and a magician, a hostage negotiator and a bomb-disposal expert, with a bit of form filling at the end.

“Beth’s not handling this very well,” said Frances. “The thing about Beth, who, incidentally, has not arrived yet, is that she’s very young, very decorative and very confident. You can take her anywhere and she seems very busy all the time but at the end of a day it’s never particularly easy to work out exactly what she’s done. She’s good at events. The clients are very keen on her. The male ones, I mean. It’s to do with her being twenty-two. And her breasts.”

“They’re very nice.”

“Well, breasts don’t get the VAT done. And Christmas is coming at us like a train. Gwen, are you sure I can’t give you a job? Or a three-month contract to get us through this?”

I shook my head and tried to think of what Greg used to say about situations like this. “What you really need,” I said, “is to know exactly where you are just now. What you owe, what you’re owed, what you’ve got, and what your plans are. We can sort that out in a couple of days and then you’ll be fine again.”

“I wanted to be an artist,” said Frances, “and when I met Milena, it was all going to be fun. We liked going to parties, we liked having parties, so why not do it as a living? And I could be an artist on the side. It didn’t turn out like that. You know how you never properly enjoy your own party? You always worry that the drink’s going to run out or that someone’s not happy? It’s like that all the time.”

“Was it like that for Milena?” I asked.

“No,” said Frances, with a sad smile. “Milena didn’t let the details get her down.”

“The details are my job now,” I said. “At least for the next few days.”