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glamorous brunette. She was about ten or fifteen years older than Sophie; her hair was immaculate, freshly blow-dried and bouncy, her face unlined but with that suspicious hint of Botox waxiness. She was the stereotypical Chelsea housewife, except there was something exotic about her, an accent that Sophie couldn’t quite place.
    ‘It’s a bit embarrassing,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve never been on this one before.’
    ‘Don’t worry, it’s new,’ smiled Sophie.
    She knew the equipment backwards. Not just because she worked out here so often – it had been a condition of starting at Red Heart that she take a basic gym instructor’s certificate for occasions just like this.
    ‘It’s a rowing simulator – not like those old-fashioned straight-pull rowing machines; it works the exact muscles you use sculling or rowing. Here, hop on,’ she said, showing the woman how to operate the machine. ‘Can you feel that stretch along your quads?’ she asked as the woman pulled back on the virtual oars.
    ‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘I take it you work here?’
    ‘Yes. Sort of. Part time anyway.’
    ‘Well that’s perfect, because I’m actually looking for a personal trainer. I don’t suppose you’d be able to squeeze me in?’
    ‘No, I didn’t mean—’
    ‘I know, I’m too old to get a body as good as yours, but we can try, huh? How much do you charge?’
    Sophie stared at her. She was kidding, right?
    ‘Two hundred pounds an hour,’ she said. It was meant to come out as a joke, but the woman didn’t even blink.
    ‘Could you do Thursday?’
    ‘Thursday?’ Sophie looked at her, expecting her to start laughing, but the woman’s expression was serious.
    ‘I know it’s short notice, but I’m heading to the South of France and I need to get in shape for my bikini. Are you available?’
    The woman’s startling green eyes challenged her to say no. This was clearly someone not used to being turned down. Sophie hesitated. After all, she wasn’t strictly speaking a personal trainer, but it was the one thing she did know an awful lot about. And two hundred pounds an hour! A few sessions at that rate and she’d definitely be able to stay in the little Battersea flat, maybe even think about upgrading back to Chelsea.
    ‘Okay. Thursday it is.’ The words came out of Sophie’s mouth before she could stop them.
    ‘Excellent,’ said the woman. ‘Let me take your details.’
    Her Chanel quilt bag was hanging off the treadmill behind them. She reached inside and took out her diary.
    ‘I don’t even know your name,’ she said without looking up.
    ‘My name’s Sophie Ellis.’
    ‘I’m Lana,’ said the woman, scribbling in her book with a silver pencil. ‘Sophie, you’re a lifesaver. An absolute lifesaver.’
    And here I am thinking exactly the same thing , thought Sophie.

4
    With a pencil wedged between her teeth, Ruth scrolled through the news stories on her computer screen. She had five pages open, all from different news outlets reporting on the same event.
    Nodding to herself, she took the pencil and annotated the spidery flow chart in front of her with more circles and arrows, and when she had finished she tapped her knuckles against the desktop with satisfaction. She had been working on something all morning, trying to draw together a seemingly disconnected collection of names and events – and it all seemed to be coming together. Well, possibly. Of course, now she had to back up her theory: she needed documents, photographs, maybe even get an interview, someone on the record. But there was a story there. She could feel it.
    She sat back and took a sip of her now tepid coffee, thinking of her father. Art Boden had been a newspaperman too. Not a hotshot editor at the New York Times or the Washington Post – no Woodward and Bernstein fame for him – no, Art Boden had been the news editor on the fly-speck Greenville Chronicle , ‘a small-town paper for a small town’, as he had always put it.