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Screw it. She’d do it. She’d told her agent that she was working on something, so she should probably get on and change the lie into a truth. A half-truth.

She opened her laptop again and looked up the cheapest tickets to Scotland she could find. One day, she was sure, someone would pay for her to fly places. They’d probably fly her out in comfort too. If they wanted her there so badly, they would at least book her into business class. After all, she imagined, it would be based on a business deal so it would be fitting.

Steph shook herself out of her head and paid for the tickets. She wondered whether her parents would be annoyed knowing she would have been relatively close and not called in. She could do that on the way back. They wouldn’t know. She could hire a car and drive down to Sheffield as a surprise. That would win her points.

Steph yawned again and looked at the black travel case she kept under her bed. Then she looked at her wardrobe with its door hanging open and a couple of shirts tumbling down from one of the shelves. She rubbed her eye with the palm of her hand. She’d pack tomorrow; it wouldn’t take long.

Steph arrived at San Francisco International Airport earlier than she needed to. Although she was a messy person, she at least knew she was punctual. Punctuality was what most people noticed. That was the impression she liked to give. It helped that she didn’t work in a job that required a desk or anything static, where her shadier habits would be noticeable to others. Not that she’d ever wanted a desk job. It was why she had trained to be a field biologist rather than the dentist her mother had suggested so strongly she become.

As usual, Steph breezed through the check-in, flew through security, grabbed a McDonald’s breakfast despite promising herself she would not this time, and sat and read her book. It had been nine months since she started it, but she was determinedto finish it even if it killed her. She should have just picked up something trashy that she would enjoy. Now she was stuck with a classic she thought would make her seemmore intellectually insighted. She thought it might make her more attractive to any single men potentially looking for something more than a one-night-fling. Not that Steph would have turned down a fling. But at what cost would this fling come? The book was painful!

Steph put down the book and picked up the magazine she’d bought. It was a waste of time but less of a slog.

It was to Steph’s displeasure that she found herself sitting next to one of those social types when she got on the plane. The seatbelt sign had hardly been turned off when the man seated next to her turned to engage her in conversation. The man was smiling as if a long-haul flight was something to be happy about. His hair was turning white, but wrinkles seemed to have mostly missed crevassing his face apart from where they marked out his happy nature.

“What takes you to Scotland?” the man asked.

“Work,” Steph replied, fiddling with her bag.

Through her peripheral vision, she could see the man nodding.

“Oh, and what’s your line of work?”

“Biology.” That was half true.

Steph pulled a notebook from her bag along with a Parker ballpoint. Her grandmother had always insisted one should have something good to write with. She’d always written with a fountain pen. Steph could understand why as they wrote much smoother, but they lacked the practicality of a ballpoint, especially when traipsing around the wilderness.

“What kind of biology?”

“Field biology.”

Steph started making notes on her pad. There wasn’t much aim to their content, but she hoped that the actionwould be enough to dissuade the man from further attempts at conversation. She was wrong. The man was apparently irrepressible.

“Gosh, field biology sounds exciting,” the man said, leaning back.

“I suppose it is, not that what I do is perhaps as academically smiled upon as that of colleagues I know,” Steph replied before grimacing. She’d said more than two words. She’d flung the door open; she knew it.

“Why do you say that?”

Stuff it. In for a penny, in for a pound. She put her pen down.

“I don’t go to study normal phenomena exactly. I could do; I have the qualifications to do so. However, I suppose I go where the money is. I do what is popular.”

“What do you mean?” the man asked, frowning.

“Well, let’s put it like this: there are a large number of people who go into the study of plants and animals, but could you really tell me any you know or what they do? No. Unless you are in that line of work, you just know they study animals. That is to be respected. I respect it, I do. But and here is the thing, where do they get their money from?”

The man opened his mouth slightly before deciding there was nothing to come out of it except a stumped exhale. He shrugged.

“That’s my point,” Steph continued. “If you’re really lucky you might be picked up by a television company. You might fall into studying a species of animal that has some sort of commercial value to some private company – I’d rather not get into the details – but the chances are you will end up studying a species of plant or animal that, although it furthers human knowledge, is not massively interesting to the wider society. Someone must pay you for your work. The idea of driving around the savannah following big animals sounds cool, but who is going to pay you to do it? Why you? Why not someone else as there are enoughpeople about? And what are they getting out of it that is of value to them?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied slowly, clearly unsure whether Steph was inviting him to talk or not. She was becoming more fervent in the way she spoke.

“Precisely. So like I said, I go where the money is. I find niches where there is a hunger for information that people are willing to pay for?”

“Like studying monkeys in a lab or something to help cure brain tumours or…?”

Steph, for the first time, turned to look at the man who shrank slightly.