She peered through the floor-to-ceiling windows to see the place was peppered with bright and shiny types decked out in designer gear. While the chocolate-brown knee-length skirt she'd found in the back of her closet sat at a slightly askew angle to hide a fresh doggie shampoo stain.

'In a couple of hours I'll be out of these high-heeled boots and back into sneakers,' she said aloud. 'While you'll all have bunions before you're forty.'

As some kind of perverse justice, her boots teetered beneath her as she twirled out of the way of a rushing pair of suits barging out of the restaurant barking into their mobile phones rather than looking out for stray women on the pavement.

Not wanting to push her luck, she slipped inside the glass doors and patted the criss-cross of bobby pins holding back her too-long fringe to make sure they were still in place and not dangling from the end of her hair like some odd mobile.

'Do you have a reservation?' the skinny, bald maître d' in head-to-toe black asked.

'I'm Chelsea London,' she said, leaning back slightly to make sure he wouldn't get a waft of the mothball scent of her recently de-cupboarded fancy clothes. 'Meeting Kensington Hurley. She's always madly early. I'd be happy to sneak through and find her myself—'

'Not necessary.' He gave her a cool smile.

Phoney schmuck, she thought as she gave him a weak smile in return.

He ran a bony finger down the pale pink diary page and nodded. Then said, 'Yo