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out that night so he could go to bed early. And then, he’d explain why he’d been up early, and they’d be having a conversation instead of a hostile interrogation.
    If there was a problem, he’d tell her then. And Ingrid had the strangest feeling in her gut that there was a problem.
    She had breakfast watching satellite news, the dogs at her feet hoping for scraps of wholemeal toast and honey.
    ‘I promise we’ll go for a walk soon,’ she told them.
    She normally loved Saturdays when she had no specific place to be; the luxury of knowing that her time was completely her own thrilled her. But today, she felt unsettled and couldn’t put her finger on exactly why. Keeping herself busy, that was the trick. When she’d walked the dogs, she tidied the kitchen with her usual energy, then went into her small study to make a list of emails and letters she had to write. Nothing from Ethan. She did her best to calm the anxiety she felt at no word from him. She worked methodically for an hour, then powered down the computer, ran upstairs and collected everything that needed to be dry cleaned. Finding a jacket of David’s, she sat down for a moment, thinking about him. Between him and Ethan, all she did was worry. No, she must be positive. Ethan was probably having the time of his life. And as for David … Marcella - that was it, she’d ring her best friend, Marcella.
    She went down to the hall phone, the one with the preprogrammed numbers on it, and brought up Marcella’s.
     
    It was an unlikely friendship - Ingrid Fitzgerald, whose interviewing technique exposed the inadequacies of the great and the good, and Marcella Schmidt, image guru, whose job was keeping those inadequacies from the public view. Marcella ran her own spin-doctoring company and taught politicians and captains of industry how to talk to the media. If a formerly babbling, foot-in-mouth minister showed up talking sense and wearing a decent suit instead of a shiny one, odds on he’d been given the Schmidt Treatment. And if a big company boss found himself on an industry think tank that covered him with glory, and made people forget that he’d been caught coming out of a lap-dancing club three sheets to the wind with his arms round two lithe dancers, he’d been Schmidted too. Marcella was brilliant at her job and she loved it. That’s why the two women had hit it off, Ingrid knew: shared passion. So what if Ingrid’s job was to find the cracks in the politicians Marcella had Teflon-coated, they worked in the same lions’ den.
    Ingrid knew that if she was photographed in flagrante in a hotel room with some glamorous captain of industry, Marcella would be the one she’d turn to. Not that such a thing would ever happen, but still. If shit ever hit Ingrid’s fan, she’d speed-dial Marcella Schmidt.
    ‘Hi, Marcella, it’s Ingrid,’ she said now when her friend picked up the phone. ‘How’s the luscious Ken Devlin?’ It was their running joke. Latin-looking god Devlin was television’s hottest young talk show host and one of Marcella’s big successes.
    ‘Can’t get enough of me.’ Marcella sighed as if she was worn out from his amorous attentions.
    ‘Still?’
    ‘Still. Wants to have wild sex with me into the middle of next week.’
    ‘Only next week? What about the week after?’
    ‘He doesn’t have the stamina for the week after,’ Marcella
    said with a grin in her voice. ‘Young men - can’t keep up with older women. That would be an interesting opinion piece for the papers: When your sexual peak and his don’t match.’
    ‘Only if you want to be humiliated forever for being a forty something woman writing about having sex with a younger man,’ said Ingrid. She saw that Marcella was kidding. ‘You know the rules: male silver fox and younger woman? Totally acceptable, and man gets slapped on the back by all his envious friends. Female silver fox and young man? Collective yeuch and everyone thinks either she’s paying him or he