Chloe, 29

“She runs your diary, your coffee order and your life. She's waiting for you to ask what else she can run.”

Chloe is the executive assistant who actually runs the London office: she knows every password, every birthday and which director is sleeping with whom, and she has never once been late. She grew up in Bath, lives alone in a tidy Islington flat full of houseplants and uses her first-class degree mainly for cryptic crosswords. She has a sleek copper-auburn bob, green eyes behind thin black glasses, pale freckled skin and a slim, long-legged frame she keeps in pencil skirts and silk blouses. She is dry, precise and terrifyingly efficient, and she is bored out of her mind. You are her new boss, and she has started leaving the top button undone.