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little country cottage, complete with beams, log fires and creeping clematis up the front wall.
    Mark slammed the phone down.
    ‘Hopeless. Fucking hopeless,’ he shouted dramatically. Maddie and Jazz looked at him as he wiped his hand over his eyes and over his head. ‘Woman had a brain the size of a split pea,’ he went on. ‘I’ve gotta get out of this place.’ And with that he strode out of the room, off for a fag no doubt.
    Mark had long since stopped intriguing Jazz. By now, she had him pretty well sussed. With his saucer-shaped, dazzlingly blue eyes, angular cheekbones and high forehead, he had obviously been a beautiful baby and child. Which explained why he compensated by being a total dickhead to work with. He used every macho trick in the book to hide the fact that he was actually a rather sweet bloke. He had worn his thick curly, golden hair - the sort of hair any self-respecting woman would have grown as long as possible and nurtured with loving care — cropped close to his head for as long as she’d known him. If he knew that it actually made him look more vulnerable, he would no doubt have grown it. And he moved his body - which, she guessed, had only shot up and broadened in his late teens, long after the insecurity had set in - with a studied aggression.
    Jazz’s desk was opposite Maddie’s; Mark sat in the far corner of the room facing them both. There was an empty desk opposite Miranda, but Mark had astutely chosen not to sit there when he joined almost a year ago. Jazz could see why. Miranda was about as interesting as varicose veins, although not quite as attractive. Over the past few months Jazz had begun to get the oddest feeling that she was being watched whenever things went quiet in Mark’s corner. And his bolshie outbursts had grown more and more unpredictable. She hoped to God he wasn’t starting to fancy her. She tried not to think about it. Just like she tried not to think about the depths to which her principles had sunk.
    When she’d started at Hoorah! it had been one of a dying breed, a magazine that was interested in the higher qualities of life; relationships that lasted instead of those that collapsed spectacularly, people who were an inspiration, not an example. Unfortunately the readers were leaving in their thousands. ‘Nice’ just wasn’t a seller any more. People wanted short, they wanted snappy, they wanted dirt. Agatha Miller was brought in as the new Editor and she changed everything. Hoorah! became Hoorah! the women’s magazine with a difference - the difference being that it had readers. The writing style went downmarket, the morals stooped, the storylines stooped lower still and the circulation hit the roof. Jazz found herself working on a trashy women’s magazine instead of the last remaining decent one.
    Agatha had brought with her a few colleagues from her previous magazine and Mark was one of them. Thankfully though, Agatha had liked Jazz’s column and hadn’t wanted it changed too much. Just a few more exclamation marks -known in the business as screamers — put in here and there to alert readers to the fact that they had just read a joke. Each screamer cut Jazz like a knife, but she was grateful that her column hadn’t been axed completely.
    ‘Oh look, another one bites the dust,’ said Maddie happily. She read out the first few paragraphs in the tabloid she was holding about another highly regarded columnist’s descent into infamy. His skeletons had finally struggled out of the cupboard after years of being locked away in the dark. It was always the same. After this gleeful character assassination, no one would ever read his criticisms of others, his comments on the world and his observations of human nature, without thinking, You’re a fine one to talk. However brilliant he was. And this one was brilliant.
    Jazz was eternally grateful that her personal life was so straightforward. She had a family that would make the Waltons look like the