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Scarlett had a swimming pool. Well, of course she did. And a Jacuzzi, and a sauna and a gym. What every well-dressed Essex hacienda is wearing. I followed her to the back of the house and through a double door that acted as an airlock for the smell of pool chemicals. In a changing room heavily fragranced with cedar and vanilla, Scarlett flung open a locker to reveal a selection of identical black one-piece swimsuits on hangers. ‘There’s a full set of sizes from ten to twenty,’ she said. ‘Help yourself.’
    With the complete lack of self-consciousness that comes from having been drunk and naked on the nation’s TV screens, she stripped off and slipped into a turquoise and blue suit. She looked surprisingly toned and fit, which made the gentle swell of her four-month pregnancy seem incongruous. I’d been right about the all-over spray tan, though.
    I didn’t share Scarlett’s ease at public nakedness so I stepped into a curtained cubicle to undress. By the time I emerged, she was ploughing up and down the ten-metre pool in a ragged but effective crawl. I sat on the edge and dangled my legs in the water. I reckoned it wouldn’t hurt to give Scarlett the initiative and see where it took us. There would come a point where I would need to draw my own lines. If she couldn’t stick to that, it was as well to find out now, while I could still walk away.
    I could see her checking me out every time she headed back down towards me. I think she expected me to crack and slide into the water. To go head to head with her in an attempt to show who was boss. But I wasn’t playing that particular game. After a dozen lengths, she’d had enough. She glided to a halt alongside me and looked up. The swim had sleeked her hair back against her head but her waterproof mascara was still holding fast. Her lips were pulled back against her teeth as she caught her breath, and I could see the dental work that had transformed her smile after that first series in the Goldfish Bowl . Sometimes the cosmetic dentistry goes too far, giving people a glow-in-the-dark smile never found in nature. But Scarlett’s dentist had done a good job. If you’d never seen the ‘before’, you wouldn’t have thought it was an ‘after’. Just the smile of someone blessed with good dental genes.
    ‘D’you not swim, then?’ she asked. Straightforward curiosity or aggression; I could have read her tone either way.
    It was time to give her a little bit of me. ‘I like swimming. But I don’t like pools much. I prefer the sea. So I don’t swim very often because it’s too bloody cold in this country.’
    She folded her forearms on the edge of the pool and looked up at me with a grin. ‘Fair enough. What happened to your leg? It’s not like you limp or owt. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with you till you took your trousers off.’
    I looked down at the long scar that runs from my left knee almost to my ankle. ‘I was in a car crash. A drunk drove into my friend’s car. We hit a tree and my leg got trapped by the car door. I’ve got a metal plate and a handful of screws holding my leg together. They did a good job and I did what the physio told me, and that’s why I don’t have a limp.’
    ‘That must have hurt like a bitch,’ Scarlett said. She pushed herself out of the water and scrambled to her feet.
    ‘It did. But it doesn’t now. Only when I do too much walking. Then it aches a bit.’ I lifted my legs out of the water and stood up. I was a good three inches taller than her; I could see the roots of her hair would soon need touching up. ‘Would you like me to tell you how I go about helping people tell their story?’
    Scarlett dragged her hair back from her face and gave a little snort of laughter. ‘You never call a spade a spade, you lot.’
    ‘What lot?’
    ‘Journalists. Writers. Interviewers. All you lot that take me and twist me into summat for your readers to feed off of.’
    ‘Is that what you think this is all about?