"What's the deal, Cal?" Sophie asked him.

"Eve is in your office right now," he said. "She got your leads file and your Rolodex. Somehow she's got your PC password-" Sophie opened her mouth to holler, but hearing her sharp intake of breath, Cal cut her off before she could utter a word. "Don't shout at me, I don't know how she got it-because it definitely wouldn't have been anything obvious like-oh, I don't know-your name, would it?"

Sophie, who did suffer from a lack of imagination when it came to passwords, in fact pretty much anything, clamped her mouth shut.

"Anyway," Cal continued quickly. "She says that Gillian has asked her to help you out by keeping on top of things while you are away, being all noble and saintly. I tried to stop her, but she said if I had a problem, speak to Gillian. Well, what could I do? If Gillian says it's okay for her to be in there, then-it's okay, right?"

"No, she's using that as an excuse to raid my clients list and take credit for all of my ideas," Sophie said matter-of-factly. She wouldn't have done the same thing in Eve's position, but she would have wished she had the balls and total lack of conscience to do it.

"Probably," Cal said. "Lisa did try to stop her going in, but she called Lisa a...let me see, oh yes, a 'fat blubbering pointless rusty old bike,' and Lisa started to cry, and well, you can guess the rest." Cal paused. "I think you'd better come down," he said.

"I'm on my way," Sophie said, and she hung up the phone. She looked at the girls, who had taken up their newly habitual position on the sofa in their pajamas watching a soap opera with expressions of fascinated horror.

"Right, spit spot, come on, girls-double-quick we're going out." The girls' heads jerked in her direction as if they were puppies who'd been told it was walk time.

"Out! Out! Out!" Izzy hopped off the sofa with joy. "Oooh, good. Am I going to wear my fairy dress?"

Sophie shook her head; the fairy dress had gone in the garbage bin and was probably even now being buried in a concrete container in the middle of the North Sea.

"I know," Sophie said, remembering something that the dog book had said about using distraction. "Let's have a race. We'll go and look in your suitcase, and whoever gets dressed the quickest wins a fabulous prize!" Both girls leaped up in anticipation, as if Sophie was about the throw a stick for them to fetch. "Ready, steady, go!" she shouted.

And that was how, twenty-seven minutes later, the three girls emerged from the flat blinking in the daylight, one dressed in jeans and a slightly grubby pink Calvin Klein T-shirt and fleece jacket (Sophie), one dressed as a ballerina-pirate fusion complete with eye patch and musical wand and topped off with a sweater and a poncho (Izzy), and one wearing a rainbow-striped hand-knitted sweater that was at least ten sizes too big for her and fell off one shoulder to reveal the graying lace of an aged T-shirt and came down to just below her knees, where her Angelina Ballerina Wellington boots began. All topped off by a lurid pink down jacket.

"Are those wellies comfortable to walk in?" Sophie asked Bella, wondering what her chances were of a bus coming anytime in the next four hours.

Bella furrowed a brow at her. "I wasn't thinking about comfort, Aunty Sophie. I was thinking about speed. I wanted to win the prize!"

Sophie admired her competitive spirit and felt a pang of guilt since technically there was no prize, but as they were all out of the house now, she supposed she could take the girls to the Broadgate branch of H+M right after she had been to the office and confronted the Lady Macbeth of party planning. "And I did win."

"You didn't win, I won!" Izzy shouted as they boarded the 149 bus.

"I won," Bella shouted back.

"I won!" Izzy insisted.

"I won!" Bella repeated.

"I won!" Sophie shouted them both down so that they, the bus driver, and the six or so passengers already on the bottom deck of the bus stopped talking and looked at her. Sophie dropped some pound coins into the driver's change tray and ripped the tickets off the machine. "I won," she repeated as the bus lurched out of the stop and more or less threw all three of them into an empty seat. "I was dressed before either of you, so actually I'm the winner." Sophie squeezed both the girls next to the window and jammed herself onto the end of the seat.

"But you can't be the winner," Bella protested. "You're the grown-up, and anyway you already had your clothes on when you set the competition, so that doesn't count."

"'S not fair!" Izzy joined in. "Not fair, not fair!"

Sophie looked at both girls and bit her lip. She wanted to say to them that life isn't fair and that it was about time they realized that, but it sounded exactly like the sort of thing Mrs. Stiles used to say to Carrie on a regular basis, and she knew Carrie would hate it being said to her children, even if, quite honestly, right now Sophie thought that Mrs. Stiles was right. But, she wasn't heartless, just rather tired, so she said, "Okay, we'll call it a three-way tie. We all win, okay? After I've sorted out work, we'll all go and get a prize, okay?"

Izzy and Bella exchanged suspicious looks.

"'Spose," Izzy said.

"I won," Bella said but very quietly and mostly to herself, folding her arms across her chest, her shoulders slumping.

"Er, I think you'll find I won," Sophie said before she caught a woman looking scathingly at her and realized exactly what she was doing. Then she shut up.

Sophie stopped the girls in front of the office building in which McCarthy Hughes occupied the seventh and eighth floors. The children looked upward openmouthed.

"A giant's house," Izzy breathed, awestruck.

"It's a skyscraper, thicko," Bella said. "Giants' houses are much bigger." Sophie thought about the chapter on puppy psychology she'd read last night. Body language, it was all in the body language. You believe that you are in control and in charge, and they believe that you are control and in charge-or something like that. Show no fear, that was what the manual said, because they can feel it through the leash. So perhaps it was fortunate after all that it was probably illegal to make children wear leashes. She crouched down on the steps of the building and, putting a hand on each of the girls' shoulders, looked them directly in the eye. "Now listen," she said. "This is where I work. This is my job. It is very very important that while you are in this building you do exactly what I tell you. You don't scream or run away or cause a flood or"-Sophie narrowed her eyes at Izzy-"attempt to fix anything just like Bob the Dentist-"

"Bob the Builder!" Izzy said, with a giggle.

"Whatever. Do you understand?" Sophie looked back at Bella, whose attention had drifted skyward once again, and pressed her palm gently down on the top of her head until she was looking in her eyes. "You don't run about, you don't touch anything, you don't talk to anyone, because this is Aunty Sophie's job and it is a very, very important job."

Bella screwed up her mouth into a sideways knot. It was an expression that Sophie was beginning to learn usually preceded an impudent and often hard to answer question. She braced herself.

"What do you do for a job, Aunty Sophie?" Bella asked. "Are you a doctor, or a vet or a..." The girl searched for an occupation that could be appropriately described as very important. "Are you an astronaut?" she asked. Sophie sighed. There were a lot of people in the world who thought her job wasn't very important, comparatively speaking, and couldn't see why she allowed it to occupy 90 percent of her life that wasn't taken up by sleep, but she hadn't expected a six-year-old to jump on the bandwagon.

"I plan parties," she said quickly, and added under her breath as she stood, "Really, really important ones."

On the way up the lift, Sophie had been planning several types of camouflage to get the children into the office unnoticed. Perhaps she could hide them under her coat, or maybe stick photocopy paper boxes on their heads and edge them along in the shadows. She stopped herself. She didn't have to sneak the girls into the office. Children, unlike smoking, weren't completely banned. Gillian's nanny brought her two in every now and then, during school holidays, for example, and everyone would smile at them and ask them how school was. But Izzy and Bella weren't like Gillian's children. Compared with Gillian's neatly combed and surprisingly sedate offspring, they were like half-wild savages who had previously been raised by wolves.

Miraculously, though, the open-plan part of the office was completely empty, and Sophie guessed that everybody was in Gillian's huge office going over the week's events, with Gillian sitting at the head of the table. Despite her conviction that she wasn't doing anything wrong, Sophie hurried the girls toward her office, and once she had more or less thrown them safely through the door, she slammed it behind her and adjusted the venetian blinds on the interior windows so that no one could see in or out.

"Are you being chased by the feds?" Cal asked, twirling in her chair, looking her up and down. "You look terrible, by the way."

Sophie looked around the office. "Where's Lisa?" she said.

"In the meeting," Cal said. "She said she couldn't go in, because everyone would know that she had been crying, and I said, Well, yes, they would, Lisa, but everyone was used to that by now and she had to go in anyway even if she didn't want to, as it is her job, and you can't just back down from every challenge life throws at you, otherwise you'll never get anywhere. Look at Liza Minnelli." Cal smiled at the girls and winked. Both girls giggled. "And off she went like a trouper. I lent her your emergency mascara, which she put on over her old mascara, so ironically she actually she does look quite a lot like Liza Minnelli now."

Sophie had to admit that Cal's built-in inability ever to answer even a simple question without turning his response into a lengthy monologue did slightly affect her level of affection for him, especially when time was of the essence.

"So what's the damage?" asked, walking around her desk and opening the drawers until she found her spare notebooks. She also took out two pens and a set of highlighter pens, and gave them to Bella. "Sit here in the corner on the floor and do me some lovely pictures, okay?"

Bella took the pens and sat reluctantly on the carpet. "What of?" she asked as Izzy plonked herself next to her.

"Anything," Sophie said impatiently. "Draw the view." Bella looked around her, assessing the view of desk legs, the bottom halves of two filing cabinets, and a wastepaper bin, a deep frown slotted between her brows.

"I'm drawing mermaids," she said to Izzy, who shook her head.

"I'm drawing Arsey-miss," Izzy said, and it took a moment for Sophie to realize she meant her cat and was not planning a self-portrait. She returned her attention to Cal, who reluctantly vacated her chair.

"Well?" she asked.

"Same as before-Eve has your Rolodex, your leads book, and your diary," he repeated in a singsong voice, his eyes skyward. "She said Gillian told her to take them. Lisa could hardly contradict her, could she? And she couldn't go marching into Gillian's office asking her what she thought she was playing at, so after the briefest of struggles, we let her take them. What else could we do?" He gave a little shrug and examined his nails.

"Right," Sophie said. She walked back to the internal office window and, prizing open a space between two blind slats, peered through it. Her colleagues were gradually filing back to their desks. She spotted Eve standing by Gillian's office door talking and laughing with their boss as if they were best friends. "The meeting's out. Lisa will be here in a minute. I want you and her to keep an eye on those two. Don't let them out of your sight, okay?" she ordered.

Cal did not have time to answer before Lisa opened the door. "Thank fuck that's over," she said with feeling.

"You're not supposed to say fuck in front of us." Bella's voice floated up from the other side of the desk a moment or two before her bangs and then eyes peered disapprovingly over the edge.

"Fuck," Lisa said, jumping and then looking at Sophie. "Oh, f-flip. Sorry, Sophie."

Sophie briefly assessed what Lisa was wearing-a pink button-down shirt-not Sophie's usual style, but it would have to do.

"Never mind that now. Take your top off."

Lisa looked alarmed. "I beg your pardon?" she said.

"I said, 'Take your top off,'" Sophie said impatiently. "I'm not going in to see Eve and Gillian looking like this, am I? You lend me your shirt until I've sorted this out." Sophie seemed confused by Lisa's reluctance, and she peeled her T-shirt off over her head. "You can wear this, all right? Now hurry up." Lisa took the less than fragrant T-shirt gingerly from Sophie's hand and draped it over the back of a chair before unbuttoning her shirt and handing it to Sophie.

"Is now a good time to tell you I lied about being gay?" Cal said. Sophie ignored him, but Lisa's cheeks burned brightly as she pulled the stained T-shirt over her head. Perhaps she had a secret crush on Cal too. Otherwise he'd be the only man on the planet on whom she had not focused her attention at one time or another.

Buttoning Lisa's slightly too tight shirt up, Sophie untied her hair, combed her fingers through it, and twisted it into a tightly knotted bun at the back of her head before securing it with a pen. Cal handed her her emergency mascara, which she applied somewhat haphazardly in the ghostly reflection of the office window. She took out of her jeans pocket the remnants of one of her lip glosses that she had just about managed to salvage from Izzy and rubbed a little onto her lips.

"Right," she said, pulling the shirt down over the top of her jeans. "How do I look?"

"You look like a slightly pudgy Amazon preparing for battle," Cal said, giving her the thumbs-up.

Sophie gritted her teeth and headed for the door. "Right," she said. "I'm going to sort this whole mess out. All you two have to do is keep the kids under control and out of Gillian's sight. Do you think you can you do that?" she asked them.

"Of course we can," said Lisa, smiling down at the busily drawing girls. "Easy-peasy."

Somehow, Sophie did not feel reassured.

As Sophie opened Eve's office door, she was confronted with her colleague's frankly bony arse. Eve was in the midst of committing two cardinal sins. Not only had she opened her office window, thus threatening to send the carefully controlled climate into total disarray, but she was hanging out of it smoking. Sophie watched Eve for a moment kneeling on the seat of her chair, her elbow resting on its back, trying her best to send the smoke out of the window but failing as a passing gust of window blew every puff back in her face. Of course, Sophie could just have pushed her out the window and claimed it was an accident, solving all of her problems in one fell swoop. But it had been almost twenty-four hours since her last cigarette, and Eve was holding her packet in one hand. At that moment, Sophie could have happily murdered Eve, but she just couldn't bear to let the cigarettes suffer too. She contented herself with slamming the door behind her and watching Eve jump before pulling herself in through the window, flicking her cigarette onto the street below as she slid back into her chair, her face a picture of innocence.

"Sophie!" she said, reaching behind her to pull the window shut. "What a nice surprise."

"You're not supposed to do that," Sophie said, nodding at the door and sounding a lot more like a school prefect than she wanted to.

"You're not supposed to do that," Eve said breezily, looking Sophie up and down. "Never wear a shirt that gapes in the bra area, Sophie. I thought you knew better."

Sophie knew Eve's tactic better than anyone, but she was not going to be thrown. She sat down with a thud, and one of the buttons pinged off Lisa's shirt. Sophie did her best to ignore it. "What are you playing at, Eve?" she asked bluntly.

Eve shrugged. "How do your mean?" she said, casually.

"What are you doing in my office, taking my Rolodex, my leads book, and my client account info?"

Eve rolled her eyes. "Oh, that. You've raced all the way down here over that, have you?" she said, picking up a pen from her desk and swinging it by its tip. "Gillian asked me to keep on top of your stuff. So I did. What's the problem?" Eve looked genuinely mystified.

Sophie bristled, her inner fury stoked even more by the fact that she wasn't exactly sure what the problem was herself. Cal had rung her, Lisa had cried, and before she knew it she was charging down here like fury. Perhaps there had been a slight overreaction.

"Lisa is handling everything," Sophie said, carefully moderating her accusatory tone. "I'll be back in the office soon enough. Just give me back my stuff, okay? You don't need it."

Eve sighed and dropped her chin. "Look, Sophie, really I'm quite disappointed in you. I thought we were supposed to be on the same team. I don't know what you think I was up to, but-"

At that moment Eve's assistant walked in with a pile of photocopying and Sophie's Rolodex. "I've photocopied this, like you said. I'm just about to do the book now, okay?" she said, catching sight of Sophie. "Oh, hi, Sophie. I didn't know you were back in today. Enjoyed your holiday?" Eve gave the poor girl a look sufficiently evil enough to send her scuttling out of the room without waiting for a reply. She was probably off to pick up her severance papers at that very moment.

"I knew it!" Sophie exclaimed, scooping the pile of photocopying off Eve's desk and plonking her Rolodex on top of it. "You're poaching my contacts, my accounts, and my prospective clients." She stared at Eve, who still appeared unfazed, even when caught in the act. "Come on, Eve, don't jerk me around. I know you too well to buy this butter-wouldn't-melt act. Gillian might have asked you to check up on Lisa, but she certainly didn't ask you to go through my drawers and do this!" Sophie brandished the pile of photocopying as Exhibit A.

"Okay, Miss Marple," Eve said, holding her palms out. "I was. It's a fair accusation." Eve smirked like a schoolgirl who'd just got caught snogging behind the bike shed.

Sophie was taken aback. She hadn't expected such an easy confession. "Well...right," Sophie said. She found the wind suddenly taken out of her sails. "Just don't do it again, okay?" As she turned to the door, she realized that this was exactly what Eve wanted her to do. To leave without making a fuss. She sat down again, and still clutching the papers to her chest, she pulled the chair closer. Eve's face was perfectly devoid of expression.

"It's pretty shit behavior, isn't it? To try to get one over on me when I'm not here to do anything about it?"

Eve raised her eyebrows and twiddled her pen. "The best time to do it, I'd've thought," she said glibly, suddenly switching on her death's-head smile. "Come on, Sophie-you'd have done the same thing."

"Actually," Sophie said with conviction, "I wouldn't have. Let's cut the crap here, okay? We both know that if...when Gillian steps back from the office, we want her job. We both know that only one of us is going to get it. We both know that the other one would rather slit her wrists and wear flip-flops than endure the ignominy of staying here and reporting to the other one. I understand that, I accept it. I don't have a problem with competition, as long as it's a fair competition. And shafting me while I'm looking after my dead friend's kids-It's not fair, Eve. It's evil. Seriously evil." Sophie paused for effect. "Gillian would be horrified," she said with the hint of a threat.

"Oh, yes, the dead friend's kids," Eve said bitterly. "How very convenient."

Sophie opened her mouth and then closed it again. Where was the usual poor little mites, oh, how terrible routine that she had become used to? "I beg you pardon?" she said.

"Well, it's all very well going on about it being a fair competition and all that bullshit. But it's not fair, is it? It hasn't been fair since you waltzed off to do your Mother Teresa bit. Gillian loves you right now! She goes on nonstop about how selfless you are and how rare it is to have the kind of guts it takes to rise to this kind of challenge and how you must have been such a good friend for wosshername, thingy to trust you with her most precious legacy, blah fucking blah. How is that fair? Have I got a dead friend with fatherless kids? No. Therefore, it's not fair." Eve lifted her chin slightly. "I was just leveling the playing field," she finished.

"I didn't ask for this!" Sophie exclaimed, gesturing at the door as if all of her problems were piled up high behind it. "Do you think I'm happy that my best friend is dead?"

"Don't seem too depressed by it, frankly," Eve said.

"Trust me, I'm depressed!" Sophie yelled at her. "I'm sorry if Gillian thinks what I'm doing is the right thing, but do you honestly believe at the end of day that Gillian is going to give me a job over you because of a bit of babysitting?" Oh, God, I hope so, Sophie thought to herself. "She's a tough businesswoman, Eve. She'll give it to the person who's best at her job, and being out of the office is dragging me down enough without you sabotaging me, okay?"

Eve leaned across the desk so that the two women were just a few inches apart. "Okay!" she said. "But just ask yourself one question, Sophie. Ask yourself why do you really want this promotion?"

Sophie shook her head. "Why does everybody keep asking me why?" she protested. "Why this! Why that! No one ever asks you why."

"Because we all know that you've been at McCarthy Hughes since puberty, that you've worked you way up the ladder, paid your dues in blood, sweat, and tears et cetera. But seriously, why are you here, why do you really want this job, why does it mean so very much to you? Are you absolutely sure that you're not sitting here in my office as a senior accounts manager at McCarthy Hughes by mistake? What if the job center had sent you to a fashion magazine or, or a pet shop?"

Sophie sat back in her chair abruptly. It was a surprisingly tricky question to answer off the top of her head.

Seeing her expression, Eve laughed. "You didn't choose this career, Sophie," she said. "It chose you, and never once in the last ten years have you stopped to think about whether or not it makes you truly happy. You have no idea why you want this promotion other than it's there. It's your Everest."

"That's not true," Sophie said promptly. "Obviously I want it because this is my career," she said. "Because this is what I've been working for for the best part of my life."

"Face it, Sophie-you're so stuck in a rut you can't see past it. But ask yourself, What are you going to do when you've got Gillian's job? Where are you going to go then? What will you have left to work toward, huh? What happened to your childhood dreams?"

Sophie rolled her eyes and thought of Jason Donovan. "He got bald and developed a twitch-that's what happened to my dreams," she said. "Come on, Eve, get real, will you? This is me you're talking to. I don't fall for all your bullshit mind games."

"Oh, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie-" Eve lamented. "You should follow your dreams before it's too late, not joke about them to cover up your true despair," she said, sincerity etched all over her face.

Sophie was unimpressed. "My reasons are good ones," she said. "I put a lot of years into this business, and I want the rewards that I deserve. The same reasons as you, I'm sure."

Eve stood up, and coming around the desk, she sat on its edge, crossing her legs so that one of her shoes dangled balanced on her toes, revealing a fleeting glimpse of a Dolce & Gabbana label.

Sophie seethed. She still had on her now rather the worse for wear River Island flats.

"Not at all," Eve said. "I want this promotion because this is all I've ever dreamed about since I was a tiny girl," She said, completely seriously.