I stared at his broad, white-shirted back, experiencing a combination of mild indignation at his rather curt rejection of my invitation, and resentment that he had apparently been discussing me with Alison. The fact that his current clipped manner wasn’t at all typical of his interactions with Luke and Roger – his male work colleagues – did nothing to quell my fledgling feelings of negativity towards him.

I frowned down at him, only a reluctance to hand over a fiver to Ruby preventing me from throwing in the towel just yet.

I cleared my throat for a second time, prompting him to drop his wrap from a height of several inches onto his desk before turning, with renewed and undisguised weariness, to face me once again.

‘Sorry,’ he said, running a hand through his wet hair and then shaking the drips onto the floor, ‘I didn’t realise there was more.’ He looked up at me resignedly from under heavy brows.

‘Won’t keep you a moment,’ I said, with forced cheeriness. ‘I just wanted to remind you that Ruby leaves us for her new job next Friday. Hopefully you can find a gap in your schedule to come along to her leaving drinks. It’d be great if we were all there to say goodbye.’

I continued to smile, whilst noting that he appeared increasingly tense. At the best of times, his build made him look like a man in danger of being strangled by his own work shirt. But now, at the mention of drinks with his colleagues, he seemed to expand somehow, like Bruce Banner about to transition into The Hulk.

He eyed me unblinkingly for a second or two and then, without comment, picked up the remains of his wrap, replaced it in the precariously soggy paper bag and stood up, causing me to take a step backwards.

‘Thanks for the reminder. I’ve a lot on but, yeah – thanks for the reminder,’ he repeated, in an accent which now had just a hint of Danny Dyer about it.

I looked steadily up at him, refusing to acknowledge his width and height advantage. I didn’t know what the newly adopted, tough-guy tone was all about, but I had encountered enough ridiculous displays of workplace machismo in the past that if he was attempting one now, it wasn’t going to faze me.

I folded my arms and nodded, but didn’t reply.

He looked pleasingly uncertain for a moment and then reached for his coffee cup, holding it up. ‘They’ve given me a flat white, instead of a cappuccino,’ he said darkly, now quite unmistakably channelling EastEnders and dropping consonants like confetti at a wedding. ‘I’m gonna have to go back to Costa.’

I smiled acceptingly, genuinely amused by his bizarre, mockney-based attempt to assert himself. ‘Cor blimey,’ I said casually, ‘that’s a shime.’