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you have the most beautiful house. Everything is so perfect, so English. We have nothing like this in Germany. Please, I would love to see it all. Could you show me?’
    ‘Of course, my dear, I’d be delighted,’ said Mrs Black, all the tension and hardness now gone from her face. ‘I’m so glad we’ve sorted out that business with the gas hob. We can leave the boys to deal with the rest of it.’
    I should have been outraged. An intern had just contradicted me in front of a client and compromised the partnership’s design. But how could I be angry when she had so obviously charmed our most valuable clients?
    ‘Bloody hell, that’s a right little smasher you’ve got there,’ said Mr Black as the women left the room. ‘Didn’t know you had it in you, lad. Just make sure you keep me well informed if she’s planning to make any more visits, eh?’
    The weather had broken and the blue skies of a week earlier had given way to oppressive banks of black cloud marching in close formation over a bleak landscape of grey, brown and dull green. At lunch Mariana and I sat in the Discovery, ate sandwiches and shared a flask of coffee as the rain lashed down on the roof and ran in a single, unstinting torrent down the windscreen.
    ‘I am sorry I was so rude,’ Mariana said. ‘It was wrong of me. But I could see that Mrs Black was about to become unhappy. Then her husband, he would become unhappy and then … well, I thought I must act.’
    ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘You did well.’
    ‘You looked so sweet. I could see you were a little angry, but then I saw that you knew what I was doing, so I felt much better.’
    Somehow, coming from her, ‘sweet’ sounded better than it had done from any other woman.
    ‘The husband, though,’ said Mariana, grimacing. ‘Ugh! He is such a pig! Twice he tried to grab my ass.’
    ‘I don’t blame him,’ I said, almost as a reflex, the words bursting out of my mouth before I could stop them, hanging in the air between us as the voice in my head went, ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!’
    A knowing smile spread lazily across her face.
    ‘So you would like to grab my ass too?’
    Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I would have said no, no, of course not, heaven forbid. I am, by nature, a cautious man and I was also Mariana’s boss. The last thing I needed was accusations of sexual harassment from a young female employee. But there was a curl at the corner of her smile, a glint in her eye that hinted this was some kind of a test. And there was something else, too, some kind of connection, like a current flowing between us, an indefinable energy in the air. So I smiled back.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would.’ And before I could lose my new-found nerve I added, ‘Though I wouldn’t grab it, exactly. I would caress it, or stroke it …’
    Mariana laughed. ‘And spank it maybe?’
    Sod it, I thought, in for a penny … ‘Yes, if you pull another stunt like that one in the kitchen, that’s exactly what I’ll do …’
    A year later, almost to the day, we were man and wife.

7
     
    The noise went on all night: the shouted arguments of drunks and coppers, the slamming of doors and the ringing of unanswered telephones. I tried to shut it out, keeping my eyes closed and concentrating on what was going on in my own head. As I looked back at those early days with Mariana, what struck me most was the sheer improbability. Of all the offices in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine. What were the odds?
    In retrospect, the ease with which she fell into my hands raised all sorts of questions about her true motivations that I’d never really dared to ask myself before. But how did that connect to the corpse lying on my living-room floor – the cold, ash-grey body, lying in a carmine pool that kept flashing into my mind, unbidden, like rogue frames cut into the movie of my life? I wasn’t consciously thinking about Andy, but my subconscious wasn’t letting go of