Mary looked surprised.

‘Of course you do! The sensitive hunk! Christian. Your husband? Isn’t he your type?’

‘I have to go out for a bit, Mary.’

There was a beautiful child waiting in the reception area. No, not a child I saw on second look, but a very young woman, a young adult. She swept her long hair from her face and considered me with her huge brown eyes. Michael, our receptionist, mouthed a single word to me.

‘Intern.’

I nodded at the YA, who jumped to her feet. She was wearing some lacy, pink number that looked like a bridesmaid dress.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Skyla.’

‘You’re hired, Skyla,’ I said. ‘Mary will take care of you.’

Our office was at the end of a mews right on the edge of Islington. Once horses had been stabled here but now it was home to small digital start-ups like Angel Eyes. At least, that had been the theory ten years ago when this micro business centre was being blessed by the local council. But now the decline of the high street had reached our little mews. Half the offices were shut and one of the spaces had been leased to an old-school business, a second-hand record shop, The Vinyl Countdown.

An elderly hippy – Wiggy – gestured at me from the window, holding up a copy of Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine. Christian had been looking for a copy of the out-of-print Doors compilation for ages.

I gave Wiggy the thumbs up and kept walking until I reached the traffic crawling down Upper Street. Then I stopped, choking on the traffic fumes, suddenly feeling trapped, and I could not stop looking at the photographs on my phone. I did not know what to do. So I called the only person I could talk to. I called my best friend.

‘I think I’m in trouble,’ I told Ginger.

7

Tara

Ginger and I sat in a working man’s cafe on the Holloway Road, a place of uncomplicated coffee and just one kind of tea, and scaffolders wolfing down their fry-ups. We let our builder’s tea grow cold on the stained Formica table between us as Ginger scrolled through the photographs on my phone without comment. She was a tall, athletic woman with a wild red mane that she combed with her fingers, like a Valkyrie, if Valkyries grew up on Bondi beach.

She stared at the three images for a long time without speaking and then she briefly looked at me and bit her lower lip and looked away, staring out at the stalled traffic as if thinking of something else. I felt – I knew – I had let her down in some way that I could not explain. Ginger liked to play the big, bluff, plain-speaking Aussie girl cast adrift among the tight-lipped, cold-blooded English, but today she seemed lost for words.

When she finally looked at my face, I knew she saw it all.

‘What happened? I mean – God, Tara – I can see what happened. But – how could you? Not you, Tara. Not you and Christian.’ She stared at the phone, still getting used to the idea, shaking her head. ‘This makes no sense. What the hell happened over there?’