COO, the girl from HR had said. Priya. Marcus lowered his arms the rest of the way and found he did not quite know what to do with his hands. He put them on his belt, which was a habit, and his fingers touched the radio, which reminded him he hadn't called this in, which reminded him that there was nothing to call in, which was its own strange relief.
"Ma'am," he said. It came out at his parade-ground volume, and he dialled it down. "Ma'am, are you all right?"
Nadia looked at him for the first time properly. He had the sense of being weighed, quickly and without malice, like a pallet being eyeballed for an overhang.
"I'm fine," she said. "Thank you for stepping in."
Her voice was low and completely level. He would put that in the report too.
Behind the reception desk, Sal Duarte had finally put the phone down.
He came round the end of the counter at the pace of a man whose knees had been explaining things to him for a decade, one hand on the edge of the desk until the last possible moment. He had been on with the contractor's dispatch office about the rota for the Christmas weeks, and the woman on the line had been reading him dates, and he had heard the raised voices the way you hear traffic, and by the time he understood they were not traffic it had been over. He had seen the end of it. He had seen a director of Ardent go backwards onto the sofa, and his first thought, which he was not proud of, was: not on my shift.
"Everything all right here?" he said. "Marcus? Everything all right?"
"It's handled, Sal."
Sal looked from Marcus to the woman in the jacket to Vanessa on the sofa, and back to Marcus. He had a laminated card in his breast pocket with the contractor's incident procedure on it. He touched the pocket, the way some men touch a cross.
"You want me to call it in?"
"No," said Nadia, before Marcus could answer. She said it gently. "Not yet. But thank you."
Sal didn't know who she was. Nobody had told him there was anyone coming today. He had been told about the all-hands only because they'd asked him to expect a surge of people at the gates around ten, and to keep the visitor lane clear. He nodded anyway. There was something about the way she said it that made nodding the obvious thing.
Nadia turned to the sofa.
She did it slowly. She was aware of everyone watching her do it, of Priya in the vestibule with the coffees, of the young man behind Priya with his phone held at chest height, of Marcus at her shoulder and the old guard by the counter, of the grey glass wall to her right with the street beyond it where a bus was sliding past, lit up and half empty. She was aware of her own heartbeat, which was steady and heavy and much too slow, the way it got in the ring after the bell, when the body was still deciding whether it was finished.
She was aware most of all of the woman on the sofa, whose name she did not know.
Nadia looked at her and saw what she had seen from the start, behind the blazer: the hours. The concealer applied with care under the eyes and still not quite covering what it was there to cover. The polish on the nails, perfect except for a chip on the right index finger that she had probably not noticed yet. The way she had gripped that bag with both hands in front of her stomach, like a shield, like a life jacket. Nadia had known a lot of people who held themselves like that. Some of them had been her bosses. One of them, for a long time, had been her.
None of that excused anything. She did not intend to let it.
She took one step forward, not into range, just closer, and held out her right hand, palm up.
"Are you hurt?"
Vanessa looked at the hand.
It was a plain hand. Short nails, unpainted. A pale scar across the base of the thumb, old and shiny. A faint grey line of something, grease or ink, in the crease of the middle knuckle that hadn't come out with washing. Vanessa looked at it the way she might have looked at something offered to her on the street by a stranger, and then she understood that this was exactly the way she was looking at it, and the understanding was so unbearable that she looked away, at the floor, at the reflection of the ceiling panels in the polished tile.
"I'm fine," she said.
Her voice came out thin and steady and wrong, like a recording of herself.
"Your wrist," Nadia said. "You put it out when you landed."
"I said I'm fine."
Nadia let the hand stay where it was for a count of two. Then she withdrew it, without any show, and let it hang at her side.
"All right," she said.
Vanessa did not get up. She knew that if she stood, her legs would do something unreliable, and she would not give them, any of them, that. She sat with her spine very straight and her ankles crossed and her bad wrist laid carefully across her lap, and she looked at a point somewhere past Nadia's left hip, at the speed gates with their little green arrows, at the rows of glass panels that would open for anyone who had the right card.
Nadia turned back to Marcus.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I don't know your name."
"Bell. Marcus Bell. I'm head of workplace and facilities security for Ardent. The Ardent floors, and the liaison with the building." He paused. "Ma'am."
"Nadia's fine. Marcus, is that camera live?" She lifted her chin a fraction toward the black dome above the reception desk.
He did not have to look. "Yes. Wide angle, the whole lounge and the gates. No audio."
"Good. I'd like the footage pulled and preserved from, let's say, eight-forty until now. Before anything overwrites. A copy to HR, a copy held by you, and nobody else gets it unless HR says so. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"And I'd like a written report from you. Today, this morning if you can manage it." She held his eyes. "I want what you saw. Not what you think I'd like to read, and not what you think anyone else would like to read. If you think I was in the wrong, write that down. If you're not sure of something, write that you're not sure."
Marcus felt something in his chest that he had not felt at work in a while, something that was close to the feeling of a good officer handing you a clear order.
"Understood," he said.
On the sofa, Vanessa made a small movement. Her lips parted.
"I didn't," she began, and her voice caught, and she tried again. "I didn't know. Nobody told me. You have to understand that I had no way of..."
"Not here," Nadia said.
She did not say it loudly. She did not say it unkindly. She said it in the tone you might use to stop someone stepping off a kerb, and Vanessa stopped.