The McCabe Girls Complete Collection: Cat, Fen, Pip, Home Truths. Freya North

6 hours, 24 minutes and 16 seconds. Consuming two out of the three intermediary sprint bonuses, Cipollini retains the green jersey on points, today resplendent in matching shorts.

      For five riders, the Tour de France ended way before the Stage finish in the heart of Basse-Normande. Jalabert and Olano most notable among them, retired gracefully. Pietro Calcaterra, an esteemed domestique for Zucca MV and key lead-out man for Stefano Sassetta, was scraped off the road and helped back to his team car, too devastated to cry. He had landed heavily on a knee already bandaged from his collision with Kelme’s Fernando Escartin yesterday. ‘Though the pain from his knee must be excruciating, it doesn’t even register against the agony he feels at the termination of his race,’ said Rachel McEwen, his soigneur.

       Lomers’s victory is a popular one. Though the crowds love Stefano Sassetta for his flamboyance, it wins him few friends in the peloton. Jesper Lomers, universally respected, may find that his triumph today is redefined by Sassetta as a veritable gauntlet. Demoted yesterday for dangerous riding and held up today by the crashes, Sassetta will be tasting blood tomorrow; primed, charged and desperate for a good ride.

       <ENDS>

      ‘Brilliant!’ Cat says quietly to herself, stretching her fingers out and glancing around the salle de pressé, the majority with heads down, cigarettes hanging from lips, fingers scooting in organized chaos across keyboards. ‘I’m pretty pleased with that. I had a good day. I hope Rachel likes her soundbite. Oh God, poor Pietro Calcaterra.’

      Poor Pietro Calcaterra indeed. But his girlfriend was waiting for him at the team hotel. Her tenderness dressed his injuries far more curatively than the stitches from the Zucca MV doctor; her support settled his psyche much more quickly than his meeting with his directeur; her embrace was infinitely more soothing than Rachel’s massage.

      Poor Jesper Lomers, therefore. On paper, as all the journalists were busy lauding, Jesper won not just the Stage but the yellow jersey too. However, though he has a wife, she is not here. Nor was she at home. She had left no message on his mobile phone. Jesper craved her congratulatory embrace but he had to settle for his directeur’s praise, his team’s delight, the deluge of attention from the media. Though Jules Le Grand did not particularly like Anya Lomers, banned mere girlfriends of riders from the Tour and actively disapproved of the presence of wives during the race, today he would have welcomed her. The key sprinter of his Système Vipère team should be euphoric, buoyed by his victory and hungry to keep the maillot jaune for the team. Instead, Jules observed him at the team supper looking detached.

      If I offered him the maillot jaune in one hand, Jules contemplated, his wife in the other, I fear I know which he’d choose. Wives are more disruptive, more harmful to my Viper Boys than the crashes. They can cause my riders more pain, more suffering, than back-to-back mountain Stages.

      ‘Women!’ he hissed with venom under his breath.

      Fabian Ducasse heard him. Women indeed! he smirked to himself. I am Ducasse. I am a national hero. I can have any woman I want.

      Système Vipère are having supper when Cat gathers her laptop and cables and goes to send her article down the line.

       What a day!

      She returns to the main hall and searches out Josh.

      ‘Coffee?’ she asks.

      ‘Can’t,’ he says, looking frazzled.

      ‘Alex?’ she offers. He’s typing so hard he does not answer, so she does not press.

      ‘I’m through,’ she says apologetically to Josh who regards her accusatorially as if she can’t possibly be a bona fide journaliste then.

      ‘Lucky you,’ he says, not unkindly.

      ‘I thought I’d phone Maillot,’ Cat whispers, ‘see if they’ll take an article. I so want that Feature Editor position, I thought some earnestness now wouldn’t go amiss.’

      Alex and Josh nod politely but she sees they’re too engrossed in their work to be especially interested in her career development so she goes to the hotel to make her call.

      ‘Sutcliffe.’

      ‘Andy? This is Cat – um, McCabe.’

      ‘Hi Cat, how’s the Tour?’

      ‘Fine, brilliant – have you seen my daily reports?’

      ‘All two of them?’

      ‘Oh. Um. Well – I’ve had an idea for an article for Maillot, can I run it past you?’

      ‘Are you sucking up to me?’

      ‘No! Well – I’m serious. About the job – I know I don’t have it yet, that I have to earn my position, I know I’m out here for the Guardian, but I’m thinking ahead, thinking laterally.’

      ‘Shoot.’

      ‘Well,’ Cat clears her voice and wonders whether this conversation is as bad an idea as foisting even more work upon herself, ‘how about an interview with Rachel McEwen – Megapac’s soigneur?’

      ‘I know who Rachel McEwen is,’ Andy replies in a tone of voice Cat can’t really decipher, ‘but I don’t think it’s fleshy enough.’

      ‘OK, not an interview,’ says Cat, not wanting to sound disheartened but not wanting to sound like she’s clutching at straws either, ‘how about an article on soigneurs?’

      ‘I’ve asked Josh to do something along those lines.’

      ‘Female soigneurs?’ Cat specifies.

      ‘There are only two.’

      ‘Women in cycling?’

      ‘Why don’t we discuss your ideas after the Tour?’ Andy suggests. ‘See how it goes.’ There’s not a lot Cat can say to this. She nods at her hotel room walls and says OK as brightly as she can.

      I’m not going to give up. Nor am I going to be fobbed off. I’m going to formulate my ideas and bloody bombard Maillot again. Before the end of the Tour.

      It was nine thirty. Neither Josh nor Alex were in their rooms but, aware that she was sharing the hotel with Megapac, her confidence and determination in fact bolstered by her potential future boss’s rejection, Cat left her room and, eschewing the lifts, meandered along the corridors as if that was the way to reception anyway. She was on a quote hunt; not quite brave enough to phone specific riders’ rooms, she was hoping to come across them accidentally-on-purpose.

      She should have known that Megapac, by this hour, would mostly be asleep. She would not have known that Luca and his room-mate Didier LeDucq were deep in the pages of Penthouse and a Dutch magazine that made the former look like the Beano, but as all doors were shut, she was saved this unsavoury revelation. She found herself in reception with no real purpose at all. However, a huge rumble from her stomach suddenly gave her one. The humiliation of Ben York’s presence was almost enough to make Cat want to march purposefully back to her room but her hunger and his hypnotic eyes kept her exactly where she was.

      ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘was that thunder?’

      Cat swallowed down an embarrassed laugh but this lacked the substance and nutrition that her stomach needed so it groaned again, loudly in protest.

      ‘Yes,’ said Cat, surprisingly cool, ‘there it goes again.’

      ‘I was going to the bar for a quick drink,’ Ben said. ‘Do you want to join me?’

      ‘OK,’ said Cat, hoping she looked neither keen nor shy, for suddenly she was feeling a very odd combination of both. She was following Ben, just about to make small talk, when her phone rang. She stopped, Ben turned to her. She shrugged and regarded her handset.

       Fen. It’s bloody Fen. No, not bloody at all. I have to