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dear continued. ‘All they do is send the same form letter. Impossible to get anyone on the phone to listen, much less see you in person.’
    Morag bobbed her head, the smile pasted on her face. The fingers of her right hand tapped lightly, rhythmically, across the top of a folder. Arjun caught her eye and motioned for her to cut it out. She glowered, but stopped. She nodded at him to start shutting the office in the hope the woman would take the hint and finish up.
    ‘It is an unfortunate situation,’ Morag said to the scowling face on the other side of the desk. ‘But it is in the Council’s hands, not mine. I am sure that if you persist with them, you will get the satisfaction of an answer.’ She reflected, not for the first time, that it was just as well the contents of the surgery appointments were confidential. Not because of sensitive information, much the opposite. Anyone having to read through them would likely die of boredom.
    At least getting involved on the independence issue had resulted in one pay-off she’d hoped for: the front bench. Local concerns had slipped even further down her to-do list since being appointed Shadow Home Secretary. Morag checked her watch discreetly. If this didn’t wrap up soon, she would have no time left to visit the morgue before the train went.

 
     
     
    : 3 :
    ‘The lottery?’ Erykah said. ‘Since when do we play the lottery?’
    Erykah sat down on her bed – their bed – in the large room. Maybe she’d misheard. She waited for him to correct her. But he didn’t. ‘You never play the lottery,’ she said.
    Rab peeled off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. He extracted a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat from the back of his neck. ‘No, I . . . It was on a whim. I saw the Big Billions Lottery in the shop, and, well . . .’ He unfolded a newspaper to the page where the results were printed and laid it alongside the crumpled ticket next to her.
    ‘Big Billions? Never even heard of it.’ Erykah looked at the ticket and paper in turn. In a corner of a back page, in a small black-bordered advert, the winning numbers were printed. And they were the same ones as on the ticket she was holding. Matching six numbers from forty-nine was a one in fourteen million chance. You were more likely to get hit by an asteroid. Or struck by lightning. Playing the lottery was one of those things other people did. Desperate people. Not them.
    So this was what he had come to: a man loses his job and has to pay the bills somehow. By her calculations, he was probably getting down to the end of what little buffer he had. So he might pick up a ticket in desperation. Hoping against hope. When hope was all he had left.
    But while buying a ticket made some kind of sense, winning sure didn’t.
    ‘This is – this is real ?’ she said. ‘Twenty million jackpot?’ Rab nodded, dabbing sweat from his brow. She flipped through the paper, looking for a line or a page to let her know this was a wind-up, an anniversary prank. A specially printed edition of the paper, bought from a humour website. But there was nothing, because this was real. It was the same newspaper she had seen at the corner shop on her walk home from the boathouse.
    ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘If there was some kind of new lottery, wouldn’t there be adverts for it on all the time?’
    ‘I don’t really know,’ Rab admitted. ‘I think it’s run from the Isle of Man, or something. Anyway. It’s money. It’s a lot of money.’
    Twenty million pounds. Erykah felt a jolt of adrenaline that she recognised from being on the start line of a race. Her mouth went dry. It was both exciting and terrifying. She wanted to leave Rab. Scratch that, needed to leave. The charade of a marriage had gone on too long.
    But this. This .
    She remembered the money Mum scraped together to play the first National Lottery draw in the ’90s. Pound coins, shrapnel of change, to play her ‘lucky numbers’. Erykah