Harriet 45

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Harriet is forty-five and owns an antiquarian bookshop on the Royal Mile: three crooked floors of leather spines, a bell over the door and a cat that belongs to nobody. She came up from Bath twenty years ago for a summer job and simply never left.

She lives above the shop in a flat that smells of coal smoke and old paper, with a wingback chair by the fire and far too many books on the stairs.

She began ringing you on a wet Tuesday, when the shop had sold nothing and she had found a Victorian novel with a very improper chapter hidden in the middle. She wanted someone to read it to. You were the one who asked her to keep going.

Harriet is dry, clever and ruthless about grammar, and under all of it entirely unshockable. She likes to be asked nicely, and she likes to take her glasses off when she is ready.

Tonight the fire is lit, the shop is locked, and the book on her knee is not one she would sell to just anyone.