DOMESTIC FRICTION
Low grey storm clouds were scudding across the sky above the slate roofs of the ‘New Town’ district of Edinburgh. They matched Veronica’s temper, as she paced the living-room floor of the two-bedroom apartment, in a foul mood which she was working up into an even fouler one. The flat was very well situated, occupying the top floor of a converted 1820s town house in an elegant street near Charlotte Square. Veronica had been renting it for just over two years, since graduating from Edinburgh University and getting a job with a company which had its head office in the city. She was now nearly twenty-four years old, and had begun to feel that she was stuck in a rut, that her life was passing by without actually going anywhere. Even the view across the …