The woman was standing by the lounge. Not sitting, which would have been one thing, but standing a pace or two in front of the grey sofas with her weight on one hip and her hands in the pockets of a black leather jacket, the kind with the zip running at a slant and the snapped collar. Jeans. White sneakers. Hair scraped back off her face. She was looking at the window wall, or at the sofas, or at something in the space between them, and she had the stillness of a person who was not waiting for anything in particular.
A lanyard hung around her neck. Navy, unbranded. On the end of it, a white card.
Vanessa pushed through the inner doors and kept walking, because stopping dead on the threshold would have looked strange, and she did not do strange. She aimed herself toward the speed gates as she always did, a straight line past reception, and she let her eyes do the work while her feet did their usual job. The card on the lanyard was blank where a face should have been. From this distance she could make out black type, a short line of it, and nothing else. No photo. No coloured stripe for a floor. Not the Ardent badge, with its teal band and the little logo that looked like a folded paper plane, and not the building's visitor sticker either, the cheap peel-off kind that Sal handed out with a felt pen.
The lounge was where the bags had gone. Three weeks ago, a Thursday morning. Two laptops, one of them belonging to a junior analyst on her own team, and a handbag from Legal, all left on those sofas for a few minutes while their owners went to sign for a delivery. The footage, which Vanessa had asked to see and had been shown, reluctantly, by Marcus Bell, showed a man in a dark hooded jacket walking in behind a group of visitors, standing in roughly that spot with his phone in his hand, and then simply bending down and leaving with all three bags as if they were his. He had not hurried. That was the detail that had stayed with her. He had looked like he had every right.
She slowed. Her heel came down a fraction harder than she meant it to and the sound of it went up into the ceiling panels and came back.
Sal was at the reception desk with the phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder. He had a pen in one hand and was writing something on the back of a delivery slip, nodding, saying, "Yeah. Yeah. No, the loading bay, not the front," in the patient, worn-down voice he used for couriers. He saw her and lifted the pen in a small salute. He did not look at the woman by the sofas at all.
Of course he didn't.
Vanessa set her flat white down on the end of the reception counter, something she never did, and changed course. It was not a decision so much as a drift, the way a shopping trolley pulls to one side, and by the time she was aware of it she was already walking diagonally across the floor toward the window wall, away from the gates. She shifted the tote higher on her left shoulder and felt the strap settle into the groove it had worn in every blazer she owned. Her right hand was free. She noticed that, distantly, the way you notice which foot you have stepped off with.
Up close the woman was younger than Vanessa had first guessed, or older, it was hard to tell. Mid-thirties. No make-up that Vanessa could see, or the kind that didn't announce itself. A faint pale line across the bridge of her nose and a pink mark at the top of each cheekbone, the sort of pressure marks you got from goggles, or from a helmet. Her sneakers were very clean, which was somehow worse, as if they had been bought for an occasion. The jacket was old. Good once, maybe. Creased white at the elbows, the leather gone soft and dull over the shoulders. There was a smell coming off it, cold air and something oily, like a garage.
The woman glanced at her phone, thumbed the screen, put it away. Then she looked, quite deliberately, at the low glass table between the sofas, and at the floor beneath the nearest seat, and then up at the corner of the ceiling where the camera was not.
Vanessa stopped about two metres away. She made her face pleasant. She had a very good pleasant face. She had been told so by clients, by a former manager, by her ex-husband on one of the bad nights, when he had meant it as an accusation.
"Good morning," she said. "Can I help you?"
The woman turned her head. Not her body, just her head, and she took Vanessa in with a single unhurried look that went from the heels to the blazer to the tote and back up to her face. It was not rude. It was the look of someone reading a delivery manifest.
"Morning," she said. "I'm fine, thanks."
Her voice was lower than Vanessa had expected and had a flat, unbothered quality to it, as if she had been asked the time.
"Are you waiting for someone?"
"I am."
Vanessa waited for the rest of it. People always gave you the rest of it. That was how conversation worked, you asked a question and they filled the silence because silence was uncomfortable. The woman did not fill it. She looked back toward the windows, where the street was the colour of dishwater and a man on the far pavement was fighting an umbrella that had turned inside out.
"Who are you here to see?" Vanessa said.
"A colleague."
"At which company?"
There was the smallest pause. Not hesitation. More like the woman was deciding whether the question deserved the answer. "Ardent," she said.
Something in Vanessa's chest went tight and bright, a hot wire. She smiled harder.
"Well, that's lucky. I'm with Ardent. I've been with Ardent for eleven years." She let that sit. "So I'm sure I can help. What's your colleague's name?"
Nadia had clocked the woman the moment she came through the outer doors, because clocking people coming through doors was a thing she did without meaning to, the same way she counted forklifts on a floor or listened for the wrong note in an engine. Beige blazer, cream blouse with a little sheen to it, trousers with a crease you could have sliced bread on. Heels the colour of skin. The bag, which was the loudest thing about her, tan canvas covered in a pattern of letters, the leather handles darkened where her hand went. She had walked in on a line for the gates and then bent off it like water finding a slope, and Nadia had watched the bend and known, before the woman was halfway across the floor, roughly what was coming.
She could have headed it off. She was aware of that. She could have smiled and said, I'm the new COO, it's my first day, my badge is being reprinted because someone put three Rs in my surname, and the woman's face would have rearranged itself and the whole thing would have turned into a funny story by lunch.