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time I wrote it down in an e-mail, it just looked moronic. It needed a girls’ night in with a couple of bottles of decent red wine before I could let this one spill out.
    Late on the second night, after a particularly gruelling Amnesty International event, we sneaked back to the flat we were sharing with a couple of the boys from the Berlin office and started in on the confessional. My story crawled out of me, and I realised yet again how foolish I’d been from the horrified expression on Camilla’s face. That and her appalled silence. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she breathed.
    â€˜I know, I know,’ I groaned. ‘How could I have been so stupid?’
    â€˜No, no,’ she said angrily. ‘Not you, Sarah. Sam Uttley.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜That duplicitous bastard Uttley. He pulled exactly the same stunt on Georgie Bullen in Madrid. The identical line about his wife leaving him. She told me about it when I flew in for Semana Negra last month.’
    â€˜But I thought Georgie was living with someone?’
    â€˜She was,’ Camilla said. ‘Paco, the stage manager at the opera house. She’d taken Uttley down to Granada to do some lectures there, that’s when it happened. Georgie saw the scumbag off on the plane and came straight home and told Paco it was over, she’d met someone else. She threw him out, then two days later she got the killer e-mail from Sam.’
    We gazed at each other, mouths open. ‘The bastard,’ I said. For the first time, anger blotted out my selfpity and pain.
    â€˜Piece of shit,’ Camilla agreed.
    We spent the rest of the bottle and most of the second one thinking of ways to exact revenge on Sam Uttley, but we both knew that there was no way I was going back to Moscow to find a hit man to take him out. The trouble was, we couldn’t think of anything that would show him up without making us look like silly credulous girls. Most blokes, no matter how much they might pretend otherwise, would reckon: good on him for working out such a foolproof scam to get his leg over. Most women would reckon we’d got what we deserved for being so naïve.
    I was thirty thousand feet above Poland when the answer came to me. The woman in the seat next to me had been reading Material Girl and she offered it to me when she’d finished. I looked down the editorial list, curious to see exactly what Rachel Uttley did on the magazine. Her name was near the top of the credits. Fiction editor, Rachel Uttley. A quick look at the contents helped me deduce that, as well as the books page, Rachel was responsible for editing the three short stories. There, at the end of the third, was a sentence saying that submissions for publication should be sent to her.
    I’ve always wanted to write. One of the reasons I took this job in the first place was to learn as much as I could from those who do it successfully. I’ve got half a novel on my hard disk, but I reckoned it was time to try a short story.
    Two days later, I’d written it. The central character was a biographer who specialises in seducing professional colleagues on foreign trips with a tale about his wife having left him. Then he’d dump them as soon as he’d got home. When one of his victims realises what he’s been up to, she exposes the serial adulterer by sending his wife, a magazine editor, a short story revealing his exploits. And the wife, recognising her errant husband from the pen portrait, finally does walk out on him.
    Before I could have second thoughts, I printed it out and stuffed it in an envelope addressed to Rachel at Material Girl. Then I sat back and waited.
    For a couple of weeks, nothing happened.
    Then, one Tuesday morning, I was sitting in the office browsing BBC online news. His name leapt out at me. ‘Sam Uttley Dies in Burglary’, read the headline in the latest-news section. I clicked on the button.
    Bestselling biographer