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purred into life with a tickle of the key, revoltingly happy, like a dog being taken for a walk. Chris had remembered the stupid carrier bag, or at least tripped over it in the hall (he remembered how he’d violated it last night; in the brain-bleaching banality of early morning, he wondered why the hell it had seemed like such a big deal) and set his course accordingly.
    Jill lived in one of those interesting old industrial buildings converted into flats, right at the very top; she’d told him about it once, and it had turned out to be rather less interesting than he’d first thought. There was a glass-and-steel porch with a buzzer-box. He pressed her number, put the carrier down, and—
    Someone had eaten the biscuits. Chris frowned.
    Was I drunk last night? he wondered. Couldn’t remember; which argued that he had been, but the absence of hangover proved conclusively that he hadn’t. Karen, then. It was possible, she’d been known to get up in the middle of the night and eat things.
    Embarrassing, but too late to do anything about it now. Chris glanced at his watch; running late, needless to say. He really didn’t want to concede the moral high ground to the thin trainee by keeping her waiting. He hopped back into the car and put his foot down.
    She was there when he pulled in, the only living creature in the car park. He opened the door, and she got in.
    â€˜Sorry I’m late,’ he said, ‘only I had to—’
    â€˜â€™Salright.’
    Ah, he thought, yet another one who won’t let me finish a sentence. Just what I needed, really.
    She was red-haired and pale, with a nose and chin that looked as though they’d just emerged from a pencil sharpener, and she seemed to be huddling inside her clothes as though trying to minimise the contact between the hated fabric and her skin. Not that Chris could blame her; ten to one her mother had chosen the suit for her (first impressions are so important, dear; if that was how it had been, Mummy had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, though someone should have told her that not all impressions are good). It made the girl look like a prisoner of war, captured in some particularly bloody engagement between two opposing armies of chartered accountants. Well, Chris thought, fine: she doesn’t want to be here, I don’t want her here; in a reasonably logical world, we’d do a deal. I’d drop her off wherever she wanted to go, we’d both pretend she’d done the rounds with me, and both of us would have a marginally less excruciating day. But it doesn’t work like that, does it?
    â€˜So,’ he said cheerfully.
    The trainee was staring through the windscreen at some indefinite distant point.
    â€˜So,’ he repeated. ‘You’re Angela.’
    She didn’t look round, but maybe her mouth tightened just a little.
    â€˜I’m Chris,’ he ground on.
    â€˜Hello.’
    â€˜And you’re doing the graduate-intake initiative.’
    â€˜â€™Sright.’
    They tell you, practically from the cradle, that Man is a social animal, loneliness is a truly terrible thing, and humans can really only be happy in the company of their fellow creatures. Shocking, the way they’re allowed to lie to you like that. ‘That’s where the firm pays for your college tuition and stuff, and in return you come and work for us afterwards.’
    â€˜Mm.’
    Well, Chris thought, at least she’s not one of those terrible gabby females who won’t ever shut up. Indeed. Quite the bloody opposite. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess I’d better fill you in on what we’re going to be doing today. First we’ll be calling on Cotterells, they’re what we call a typical mum-and-dad independent; there’s quite a lot of them still, though the big foreign multiples are just starting to get established over here, Zauberwerke and Boutiques de Magie and Sorcery Source;