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grinned, and Pattie said,
    ‘He might not want to talk to me.’
    If he did she thought it would be a difficult session. She couldn’t imagine him co-operating as the others had done, anxious to make a good impression and get a good write-up. Roz was telling her, ‘Look on him as a challenge. A touch of antagonism wouldn’t hurt. Go for one who can be mean and moody for a change.’
    ‘You’ve just thought of this, haven’t you?’ said Pattie, and Roz admitted gleefully,
    ‘Yes—and I wonder I didn’t think of him before. Rough, tough, successful and sexy is a lovely combination.’
    Pattie gave a deep sigh. ‘Well, I’m certainly glad I’m on holiday. I shall need at least a week in a good hotel to get my strength up if I’m due to start tracking Duncan Keld as soon as I get back.’
    She was making the best of it and trying to joke, but she hated the idea. He couldn’t have forgotten what she had done. Even if he was no longer angry he would still in all probability tell her to get lost, and then she would have to admit to Roz that this was an interview she couldn’t deliver. That would make Roz even keener so that she might send someone else along, or go herself, and it would be a mark of failure against Pattie.
    She was proud of her reputation for reliability. ‘You can depend on Pattie,’ her friends always said, and she was lucky that this was the first unpleasant assignment she had been given since she started here. It had all been smooth going, hard work but no hassles, and perhaps some of these Man of the Month articles had been a little cloying. Duncan Keld wasn’t Pattie’s idea of the man she would like to date, but Roz, who was happy and faithful in her marriage, had drooled over him. So, in the month the serialisation of his book started on TV, an article about him would appear, and with luck it would carry Pattie’s byline.
    She went downstairs to the library to get out the envelope with his name on, as she always did before she interviewed celebrities. By the time she met them she aimed on knowing as much as possible about them, and hers wouldn’t be the first interview by a long way that had been written about Duncan Keld.
    There were plenty of photographs too. She sat at one of the green-leather-topped tables, with the cuttings spread out before her, and he seemed to be looking back at her from every picture. He had dark eyes that photographed piercingly, but Pattie found her own eyes sliding away from the pictures and concentrating on the print.
    There was the small gossip column paragraph linking his name with Jennifer Stanley dated this month last year, and she put that quickly back into the envelope. He got around. All over the world, going by this lot, mostly in the trouble spots. He had a flat in London and a hunting lodge on the Yorkshire moors. There was a photograph of him outside the lodge, hair ruffled by the wind, laughing. The black and white hills would have been purple and green — Pattie knew that place. She had never been to the lodge, of course, but she had had it pointed out to her across the hills during a motoring holiday in Yorkshire last summer, and it was such beautiful countryside.
    ‘Heathcliff with a Sense of Humour’ ran the headline to the article and Glenda, one of the girls in the library, giggled, passing the table and looking at the photograph, 'I wouldn’t kick him out of bed!’
    ‘Oh, you!' said Pattie, pretending to be shocked. Glenda was a pert and pretty teenager who tried hard to sound blasé and shocking, but although she smiled Pattie’s stomach muscles clenched in distaste. Her instinctive reaction to ‘Heathcliff with a Sense of Humour' had been ‘Yeuk!’
    She made a list of his books and his TV plays, and took notes of tastes, opinions and background and his London address and phone number. Then she returned the envelope to its place on the shelves, and everybody wished her a nice holiday, and she went down to the car park and her