"I'm not going to pretend Monday was my finest hour." She looked at Nadia then, for the first time, a level look with a lot of effort behind it. "I want to be clear about the context. Three weeks before, we had someone walk through those gates behind a contractor and take two laptops and a handbag from that exact sofa. I wrote the memo after that. I'm the one who pushed for the guards to check badges properly. I was told, more or less, that I was being paranoid. And on Monday I walked in and there was a person standing in that same spot, with a badge with no photo on it, no name, who wouldn't tell me who she was there to see." She paused. "I'm not saying I handled it well. I'm saying there was a reason."
"There was a reason you asked," Nadia said.
"Yes."
"Was there a reason you reached for the lanyard?"
Vanessa's mouth tightened. "I wanted to see the badge."
"I was holding it up for you. It's in the footage. About four seconds before."
"I didn't see that."
"No," Nadia said, not unkindly. "I don't think you were looking at the badge."
There was a small silence. On the other side of the street, the man in the blue shirt had finished with the plant and was standing at his window with a mug. Celia wrote something down, a short line, and turned her pen over.
"You didn't tell me who you were," Vanessa said. Her voice was still controlled, but it had gone up a little, like a car being pushed in too low a gear. "You could have ended it in one sentence. You could have said, I'm the new COO, and none of this would have happened. You let me walk into it."
"That's true," Nadia said. "I could have."
"So why didn't you?"
Nadia considered the question honestly, because it deserved that and because she had asked it of herself at two in the morning on Monday night, lying on her back with the streetlight coming through the gap in the blind.
"Partly because I don't think a title should be the thing that makes someone safe in a lobby," she said. "If I'd been a courier, or someone's cousin dropping off keys, or a new analyst whose badge hadn't been switched on, I'd have had nothing to say that would have stopped you. I wanted to know what happens here to people who have nothing to say. That's part of my job now." She turned the tea a quarter turn on the table. "And partly, if I'm honest, because I was tired. I've spent a lot of years saying my title to people so that they'll stop talking to me a certain way. I didn't want to start here by doing it in the first ten minutes."
"That's very principled," Vanessa said, and heard how it sounded, and looked down at the folio.
"It's not principled. It's just old." Nadia waited a moment. "I'm not here to argue the footage with you, Vanessa. You've watched it."
Vanessa had watched it. She had watched it on Tuesday night at the kitchen table with the tote sitting beside the laptop like a second person, the clip HR had sent her in an encrypted link with a reference number. Ninety-one seconds. No sound. A wide grey frame from high up over the reception desk, the floor shining like water, the sofas a dark band along the right, and two small figures near the windows. She had watched the woman in beige walk across the tiles and stop, and walk again, and stop closer. She had watched the woman in beige lean. From up there you could not see faces properly. You could see bodies, and what bodies did. The woman in the leather jacket kept her weight back the whole time. The woman in beige kept closing the gap. Then the hand going down, and the other hand coming up to move it away, and the half-step back. And then Marcus arriving from the back of the frame, big and quick, his arms out, and the woman in beige going past him anyway, all at once, like something let off a lead.
She had watched it eleven times. On the fourth time Theo had come down for a glass of milk and stood in the kitchen doorway with his headphones round his neck and looked over her shoulder before she could close the lid, and he had said what he said, in the plain voice he used when he was not trying to hurt anyone, and then he had gone back upstairs. She had sat there until the screen went dark by itself.
"Yes," Vanessa said now. "I've watched it."
"Then tell me what you saw."
Vanessa opened her mouth and nothing came. She closed it. She reached for the water glass and did not lift it, just held it, her fingers against the cold.
"I saw someone I didn't recognise," she said finally. Her voice had dropped. "On the tape. I thought I would see — I don't know what I thought I would see. Someone being careful. Someone doing the job nobody else would do. And it's just a woman shoving into another woman's space for no reason anyone watching would understand." She stopped. "She looks frightened. That's what I couldn't get past. Not you. Me. I look frightened, and I look like I think I'm entitled to be."
Celia did not move. Nadia did not move. Vanessa put the glass down and the water rocked in it and settled.
"I was told on the Tuesday before," Vanessa said. "Gerald took me for lunch at that place on Colley Street, the one with the white tablecloths, and I knew halfway through the soup. He said the board had gone outside. He said it was about the turnaround experience, the ports, the systems, all of it. He said I was invaluable. He actually said invaluable." She laughed, one short breath through the nose. "He wouldn't tell me who. Contracts weren't signed, he said. So for a week I've been walking around this building looking at every face, thinking, is it you, is it you. I'd built a whole picture. Someone from one of the consultancies. A man, probably. Fifty. Good suit. Someone I'd at least understand." She looked at Nadia's jumper, the plain sleeves. "And then I walked in on Monday, and Brenmoor had emailed at seven telling me they were reviewing their options, and I hadn't slept, and there you were. Standing where the bags were taken. And everything in me just said: not her. Whatever's wrong today, it's her."
"Because of how I looked."
Vanessa held the edge of the table. "Yes," she said. "Because of how you looked. The jacket. The shoes. The badge. The way you were standing, like you had every right to be there and didn't care if anyone agreed." She swallowed. "I've spent eleven years making sure nobody in this building could ever look at me and think I didn't belong. Every single day. And you were just standing there not bothering, and I hated it. I didn't know I hated it until I watched myself."
The tissues were still in the middle of the table. Vanessa did not take one. Her eyes were wet and she let them be wet and kept looking straight ahead, at a point somewhere on the whiteboard where an arrow from the old diagram ran off the edge into nothing.