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counterclaim between crisp bag manufacturers, or more specifically between a crisp bag manufacturer and the company that manufactured the machines that manufactured crisp bags, had caused Danny to begin taking anti-depressants. Another, involving suing the Bulgarian Government for reneging on promised subsidies for a hydro-electric power station, forced him to miss his grandmother’s funeral. Danny spent approximately ten per cent of every working day looking at job sites on the Internet.
    Albert was waiting in his office. He was sitting in Danny’s seat, clicking out a length of lead from a plastic pencil, one of several that peered out of the handkerchief pocket of his jacket. He’d walked past Adam’s office and witnessed Danny nodding sagely as Adam stitched him up. Rollson had been returning from the stationery stores in the basement with a new haul. He visited them every few days to check out any new pens, pencils or interesting objects that might have arrived and hadn’t been listed on the intranet stationery ordering facility.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘I’m in serious trouble.’
    ‘What on?’
    ‘Takeover of Ulster Water. One of Scott’s old cases.’
    ‘The due diligence on that’s huge . You are fucked mate, truly.’
    ‘I need a trainee on it.’
    ‘You might get the lovely Ellen.’
    ‘Fat frigging chance. Come on, get out of my seat.’
     
    The lovely Ellen. Danny and Albert had been having lunch about two months ago when they agreed on a girl. This was noteworthy because it was rare, rare enough to havenever happened before. Though neither liked a specific type (aside from Albert’s self-hating weakness for sloans, pearls, turned-up collars) each would say about the target of the other’s amorous (read lewd) remarks, that she was too tall, too small, too fat, too thin, too loud, too quiet and so on. Albert had pointed her out to Danny in the canteen. She had been expertly gathering tomatoes at the salad bar with two primitive wooden utensils, the sort that look like souvenirs from a holiday in Tonga. She was wonderful. They agreed on Ellen. Everyone agreed on Ellen. Albert knew who she was, of course, and which office she was sitting in. Danny had since looked her up at least five times on the intranet to see her picture: those almond eyes levelly staring the camera down.
    Ellen was a trainee on the ninth floor in the Banking Litigation department. Danny worked on the tenth floor in the Corporate group. That morning, after his meeting with Adam, and a leisurely dander to Starbucks, he sent out a sequence of increasingly desperate e-mails to the entire Litigation department. There were two positive responses. One from a meat-headed trainee called Bradley who wore a variety of different shades of pastel shirts, all Ralph Lauren, with the sleeves rolled up to display massive pale forearms, like shanks of lamb in a butcher’s window. Bradley’s offer of help, evidently compelled by his trainer, was so loaded with qualifications, and his work of such low quality anyway, that Danny was about to send out a seventh request, addressed only to the senior associates, begging them to allow their trainee to assist him, when Albert’s uncommon optimism came uncommonly good.
    Ellen Powell was about to qualify into the Employmentdepartment and had been doodling the last seat of her training contract away downstairs on the ninth floor, avoiding work as much as she could and sneaking out the building by way of the catering lift at 6 p.m. Her trainer had gone on secondment and when Ellen returned from reading the newspapers in the library on the fourteenth floor, she had thirty e-mails in her inbox. After reading through Danny’s six requests, and checking Danny’s picture out on the intranet, Ellen e-mailed him offering to help. It had just pinged into Danny’s inbox when she appeared in his doorway. She was standing very straight: a tall, black girl wearing a black trouser suit and a double-cuffed blue and white