Catherine Ferguson - Humbugs and Heartstrings - A gorgeous festive read full of the joys of Christmas!

I shrug as if I don’t care – and actually, I don’t think I do any more. It’s taken a great deal of practise but I’ve become fairly good at allowing her unpleasantness to roll over me. Does anyone like her, apart from her bank manager?

At the same time, I can’t help feeling a sneaky admiration for the woman’s stingy single-mindedness; her never-ending drive to acquire something for nothing. I mean, hello! Only The Boss could spot a freebie at ten paces from behind a car windscreen and get there in time to nab it.

It’s rumoured she goes to weddings with confetti on elastic.

But as I need to hold on to this job, naturally I couldn’t possibly comment …

Chapter One Contents Cover Title Page Humbugs and Heartstrings Catherine Ferguson A division of HarperCollins Publishers www.harpercollins.co.uk Copyright Dedication For Matthew Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Back Ads Acknowledgements About the Book About the Publisher

‘You haven’t a ghost of a chance.’ Shona returns from the kitchen with our first caffeine hit of the day. ‘Here, get down, Bobbie, and let me do it.’

The desk beneath my feet sways scarily as I clamber off. It’s the flimsiest bit of flat-pack rubbish ever designed. We cobbled it together one lunch hour. (There were some screws left over, but we chucked them in the bin.)

Shona hands me the tray of mugs, pushes her oversized specs up her nose, hoicks up her long cord skirt and shoves it between her knees. Then she clambers up and, with a skill born of regular practise, surfs until she is steady, as the desk sways on an illusory ocean.

I watch, arms up ready to catch her, marvelling at what ‘Health & Safety’ would make of our ‘quirky’ work environment. It’s just as well a dodgy paint job from the last century has cemented the windows of our offices tight shut. One whisper of a breeze and I swear that desk would lift off on its spindly legs and float around the office like a dandelion clock.

The Boss never tires of pointing out that the desk actually cost her less than a box of the cheap print cartridges she buys (the kind that, if more than fifty per cent of them actually work, you feel chuffed out of all proportion).

The Boss thinks my desk is hilarious.

She doesn’t have to stand on it.

Looking back, she’s always found other people’s misfortune mildly amusing.

‘That’s it.’ Shona climbs down, having temporarily ‘fixed’ the terminally knackered blind.

The headquarters of Spit and Polish cleaners are two cramped, interconnecting offices and a shared kitchen in a converted Victorian villa that looks fairly impressive until you get inside. I once heard The Boss describe it as ‘shabby chic’. She is only half correct.

‘She’s coming.’ Shona rushes to switch on her computer.

We hear heels on the stairs and The Boss makes her entrance, elegant in a new honey-coloured cashmere coat that is almost the exact same shade as her chic, cropped hairstyle.

She holds the coat out to one side and barks, ‘Twenty-five quid at a car boot sale!’ Then she marches into her office and kicks the door shut with a beautifully-clad foot.

‘And good morning to you, too,’ mutters Shona.

She shoots me an anxious glance. ‘Do you think she’s noticed?’

I shake my head. ‘The radiators are clay cold now. She won’t suspect a thing.’

‘Really? Because I’d already started job hunting.’

Shona had phoned me late last night in an uncharacteristic panic and, being an office key-holder, I’d dived out into the frosty night to put things right. I reasoned The Boss never had to know that Shona, working late to catch up on some filing and finding herself alone in a chilly office, had not only committed the punishable-by-death crime of turning on the heating but also, in an unusual lapse of concentration, had forgotten to switch it off before she left .

The Boss’s rules on temperature control are non-negotiable. The heating cannot creep above ‘minimum’ between the months of October and April except in extreme conditions, such as when our fingers turn black and drop off. The rest of the year, we rely on chunky cardigans draped over the backs of our chairs to combat the shivers.

People laugh when I tell them of her meanness, but Shona and I haven’t found The Boss amusing for quite some time. Not since the day she announced she was dispensing with pay rises because in such an uncertain financial climate, we should consider ourselves bloody lucky to be in work in the first place.

Behind The Boss’s door, there’s the sound of something crashing to the floor followed by a loud expletive.

Ella, our new junior, purses her perfectly glossed lips. ‘Stress.’ She shakes her head regretfully. ‘I’ll bring her some chamomile teabags. I’ve got a mountain of them at home.’

Shona and I exchange a grin. The only way The Boss would ever go near a herbal teabag mountain would be if she had to climb over it to get to the hard stuff (Death Wish Coffee, treble strength).

Ella, who was watching our antics with the faulty blind in mild disbelief, points a square, French-polished fingernail under my desk and says, ‘Isn’t that arrangement a little dangerous?’

Since Ella arrived two weeks ago, we are even more pushed for space. I am crammed into a corner with no electrical sockets, so I get by with a complicated series of extension cables that stretch out across the floor like sleeping snakes.

Our junior casts a censorious glance at The Boss’s door. ‘I mean, doesn’t she care about Health & Safety?’

Shona and I exchange a look.

Ella is right, of course. But Shona is probably thinking exactly the same as me: since when did teenage girls become so confident ? And so obnoxiously superior. It almost makes me want to defend The Boss!

Ella stands up. ‘I’ll volunteer to sort it out.’ She straightens the skirt of her cute pink dress.

‘No, no,’ chorus Shona and I in alarm, all but leaping out of our chairs to restrain her.

Ella gives us the kind of bewildered and slightly pitying look my twelve-year-old brother gives my mum when she gets flushed and animated recalling her brush with Beatles mania. (She saw them perform live, back in the day, and loves to tell how she had to revive her friend Marjorie who overheated in her vinyl mini dress and fell down in a swoon.)

I smile cheerily at Ella. ‘Best leave it up to The Boss, eh?’

‘If you want to keep your job ,’ I murmur, sitting down at my computer and clicking on the following week’s cleaning rota.

Thankfully, Ella – who comes direct from the New York catwalk each morning – sits back down again. Today she is wearing a tangerine fake fur over the pink dress and skyscraper ‘nude’ shoes which, she informed us helpfully yesterday, can make women with fat legs look an awful lot slimmer. She was looking at Shona’s rear end, snugly encased in brown cord trousers, when she said this. Luckily, Shona had her head in the filing cabinet and didn’t notice.