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She had served her apprenticeship slogging in the foothills of trade publishing, laboured on to do her share of latrine cleaning in the tabloid base camp and now, at this stage of her career, at the age of twenty-seven, she could aim higher and set her sights on
S * nday
, the Chomolungma of British newspaper publishing. With a little perseverance, a staff job or a fat freelance contract with the most admired publication in the UK would be hers for the taking.
    She frowned at herself in the mirror. She wished she could afford atrip to the hairdresser’s. Her highlights badly needed retouching, but the cut—a high-street approximation of Diana’s layered bob—was neat enough. She gathered up her notebook, pencil and tape recorder and stowed them in her bag.
    Honor Tait was famously tricky. Even her publisher acknowledged as much, warning that any details of her author’s private life were offlimits. But Tamara would be prepared. She had
The Monitor
’s cuttings library file on Honor Tait’s life and work, printouts from the publishers, an advance copy of the new book, and another unappetising hardback—grim and dense as a sociology textbook—of an earlier collection of Tait’s journalism, which apparently included a Pulitzer Prize–winning article. Though Tamara had not had a moment to look at any of the research material in depth, she had already jotted down some questions in her notebook. As she walked to the bus stop on her way to the interview, she felt armed and ready for combat.

Two
    Honor’s energy was fading; the span of alertness between the first cup of coffee and the swooning urge to nap was dwindling daily. But she had to complete this task. Forty-five minutes to go. The picture of Tad on the rosewood side table could stay. As twinkly eyed, white-haired and pink-cheeked as a clean-shaven Selfridges’ Santa, a patron saint of goodwill and constancy: the irreproachable, dead, final husband. He had given the photograph to her, in a typical gesture of ingenuous egotism, as a wedding anniversary present. What could be more uxorious?
    The one photograph in the flat that she had framed herself, clipping it between two Perspex squares bought from the stationer’s, was safely out of range of reportorial eyes, on her bedside table. The summer sun had bleached the boy’s untidy thatch of hair, and his shirt was coming loose from the woven belt girding his shorts. Honor, wearing a polka-dot frock cinched at the waist with a patent belt, held his hand a little too tightly. Behind them was the solid Georgian bulk of Glenbuidhe Lodge, with dripping candelabra of fuchsia by the front door and, in full sail in the drawing-room window, a ship in a bottle, another appeasement offering from Tad. Daniel’s head was tipped on one side, shyly challenging the photographer, and his left eye was closed, as if winking, against the light flaring on the loch. It was Lois who took the picture. She had brought Daniel up on the sleeper for the Easter break. Later she sent Honor the photo with a presumptuous note: “Look after him, Honor. He’s more fragile than he seems.” Honor had thrown the note on the fire. In the end Tad had urged her also to destroy the picture, and she had concealed it for years. She could not get rid of it, though she was ashamed of this maudlin attachment. Now Tad was gone, too, and she could do as she liked.
    Propped on the sitting-room mantelpiece above the black maw of the coal-effect gas fire was a postcard, a picture of a graceful coolie-hatted figure in a paddy field. It was a dutiful dispatch from Saigon sent by Tad’s goddaughter, who seemed to have spent the last decade on what they called a “gap year.” Honor’s own Saigon gap years had been somewhat different. No blithe backpackers drifting to exotic destinations with the unconscious imperialism of the young, no pleasure trips on the river, stultifying student bacchanals in ethnic bars, no folkloric dancing or crafts markets. It had