It hit home, as it always did, that Mike Kennedy had been a good-looking man. Bold and tall, he laughed out at the camera, all early-seventies sideburns and hair curling on his patterned shirt collar. It was funny because on the one hand he was her dad. But on the other, he looked like the kind of bad man you’d see at a party and be drawn to, but whom your self-preservation would warn you well away from.

Mike had his arm around Janet, aged four. She was bent at the waist and had her fist shoved between her legs – she’d wanted to go to the toilet, the camera had always had that effect on her. Leaning against Mike, holding the three-year-old Owen in her pucci-swirled polyestered arms, was Monica. She was smiling happily, looking unfeasibly young, her hair smooth and set, her mascara Priscilla Presley glam. And stage centre, wedged between the two adults, her six-year-old’s eyes crossed comically, was Ashling.

Lucifer, Before the Fall, she always thought when she inspected this picture. They looked like such a perfect little family. But she often wondered if, even then, the rot had already set in.

Replacing the photo, she came back to the present. It had been about three weeks since the last time she’d rung her mum and dad. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten to since – she thought about it a lot, but could nearly always think of excuses not to.

However, she was never really at peace with her lack of communication. She was aware that Clodagh rang her own mother daily. Although Brian and Maureen Nugent were very different from Mike and Monica Kennedy. Maybe if Brian and Maureen had been her parents she’d be better at keeping in touch.

22

Monday morning. Traditionally, the bleakest of all mornings. (Except following a bank holiday, when Tuesday morning gets a go.) Nevertheless, it perked Lisa up no end. The thought of going into the office made her feel in control – at least she’d be doing something to help herself. Then she tried to have a shower and the water was stone cold.

But she temporarily shelved the notion of collaring Jack about the timer on her boiler when Mrs Morley let slip that he’d been working over the weekend, sorting out irate electricians and hard-done-by cameramen. He looked exhausted and black of mood.

Ashling, grey and late, was also finding the day hard. Even more so when Jack Devine stuck his head out of his office and said, curtly, ‘Miss Fix-it?’

‘Mr Devine?’

‘A word?’

Alarmed, she stood up far too quickly and had to wait for her blood supply to catch up and restore her sight.

‘Either you’re in big trouble or else you’re riding him,’ Trix whispered gleefully. ‘What’s going on?’

Ashling was in no mood for Trix and her antics. She hadn’t a clue why Jack Devine wanted to speak to her in private. With a presentiment of doom, she crossed to his office.

‘Close the door,’ he ordered.

I’m going to be sacked. She was in the horrors.

The door clicked behind her and instantly the room shrank – and darkened. Jack, with his dark hair, dark eyes, dark-blue suit and dark mood, tended to do that. To make matters worse, he wasn’t behind his desk, he was balanced on the front and there was very little space between the two of them. He made her so uncomfortable.

‘I wanted to give you this, without the rest of them seeing.’ She found herself leaning away from him, although there was nowhere to go. He thrust a plastic bag at her, which she accepted dumbly. Hazily, she noticed that it was a bit big for a letter of notice.

She just held it in her hands, and with an impatient laugh Jack said, ‘Look inside.’

Crumpling plastic, Ashling peered into the pearly light of the bag. To her surprise it contained a carton of two hundred Marlboro, with a red rosette stuck crookedly on the cellophane.

‘Because I kept bumming your cigarettes,’ Jack dead-eyed her. ‘I’m, er, sorry,’ he added. He didn’t sound it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she mumbled, stunned by the reprieve – and the rosette.

For the first time since she’d met him, Jack Devine laughed properly. An honest-to-God, head-thrown-back, belly laugh. ‘Beautiful?’ he exclaimed, alight with mirth. ‘Sailing boats are beautiful, eight-foot waves are beautiful. But cigarettes beautiful? Actually, maybe you’re right.’

‘I thought you were going to sack me,’ Ashling blurted.

His face twisted with surprise. ‘Sack you?… But Little Miss Fix-it,’ he said, his voice suddenly soft, his eyes playful, ‘who else would keep us in plasters, Anadins, umbrellas, safety pins, what’s the thing for shock – remedy something…?’

‘Rescue remedy.’ She could do with some right now. She needed to get out. Just so she could breathe again.

‘What are you so scared of?’ he asked, even more softly. It seemed to her that his bulk moved closer.

‘Nothing!’ she squealed like a bus’s brakes.

With his arms folded, he considered her. Something in the way his mouth kinked up at the corners made her feel girlish and silly, like he was mocking her. Then, in an instant, he seemed to lose interest. ‘Go on,’ he sighed, moving back behind his desk. ‘Off you go… But don’t tell any of the others,’ he nodded at the bag. ‘Else they’ll all be wanting one.’

Ashling went back to her desk, her legs belonging to someone else. Hold the front page. Jack Devine in Not-Such-a-Miserable-Bastard-As-He’d-Originally-Seemed shock. But the oddest thing of all was that Ashling kind of thought that she preferred him the other way. Though later that day, it was business as usual.

Mercedes lurched into the office, and everyone nearly fell off their chairs when they saw that she was uncharacteristically displaying emotion. A lot of it. As per Lisa’s instructions she’d gone to try and interview mad Frieda Kiely. And even though Mercedes had spent the weekend in Donegal shooting a twelve-page spread of Frieda’s clothes, Frieda kept her waiting an hour and a half, then professed to have never heard of her or Colleen.

‘Who are you?’ she’d demanded. ‘Colleen? What the hell’s that? What is that?’

‘She’s a maniac. A mad bitch,’ Mercedes hissed, then fell into another fit of humiliated convulsions. ‘A mad fucking BITCH!’

‘A premenstrual psycho hoor from hell.’ Kelvin was very keen to get on the right side of Mercedes.

‘A schizoid slapper,’ Trix threw in.