The ceiling was a standard drop grid, white tiles, recessed light panels every few feet, a couple of them flickering very faintly at the edges in a way that would give someone a headache by mid-afternoon. The air-conditioning ran under everything at a low, steady pitch, a sound so constant it took her a while to notice it at all. Somewhere a door to a back corridor stood half open, and through it came the smell of floor polish and burned toast.
She looked at the gates again. Five gates and one guard, and the guard faced the wrong way to see the gates properly when he was on the phone. The gates were waist high. Speed gates had sensors that were meant to catch tailgaters, two bodies passing on one tap, but she had watched a dozen sites set the sensitivity low because the alarms annoyed people and the alarms annoyed the guards more. A person in a hurry, with a coffee in one hand and a confident face, could walk straight through behind someone else and nobody would look up.
On the edge of the reception counter, facing outwards, someone had taped a sheet of A4 paper in a clear plastic sleeve. She went over to read it, and the guard opened his eyes, glanced at her, glanced at the badge on her chest, and closed his eyes again.
The notice was printed in bold, in a font that someone had chosen to look official.
ATTENTION ALL TENANTS AND VISITORS. Following a theft from the ground floor lounge area on Thursday 2 October, all persons must badge individually through the security gates. Do not allow others to follow you through. Do not leave bags or personal items unattended in the lobby. Report any unfamiliar or suspicious individuals to reception or to Ardent Workplace Security, ext. 4410. Thank you for helping keep Calder Point safe.
Beneath it, in smaller type: Issued at the request of Ardent Freight Systems.
She read it twice. Gerald had mentioned the theft, in passing, in their third conversation, as one more item on the list of things that had gone wrong this year. Two laptops and a woman's handbag, lifted from the sofa while their owners were at the coffee machine. A man had walked in behind a courier and walked out again four minutes later with all three, and the footage had shown nothing but the back of a hood. It had shaken people, Gerald said. It had been a small thing, a few thousand in hardware and a wallet, but it had landed in a year when everybody already felt like the floor was moving, and they had taken it badly. People were jumpy.
Report any unfamiliar or suspicious individuals.
She looked at the blank white badge on her own chest, and at her reflection in the glass of the nearest gate, a woman in a leather jacket with her hair pulled back and her hands in her pockets, and she thought, with some amusement, that she was very probably the most unfamiliar individual in the building.
She went back to the window. It was easier to think standing there, with the grey street at her shoulder and the room in front of her. She took out her phone and checked it. Nothing from Priya yet. A thumbs-up from her father, under the photo of the tyre gauge, and then, a minute later, a second message: Cold reading or warm? She typed back warm, it's fine, stop it, and put the phone away.
The lobby began, slowly, to fill. Not much, not yet. It was still early for an office tower, and Ardent was not a company that started at seven. A young man in a puffer jacket came in through the vestibule shaking water off an umbrella, tapped through the second gate without looking up from his phone, and was gone into an elevator. A woman with a lanyard from a different company, a law firm by the look of the logo, walked past the lounge, looked at Nadia, looked away. A cleaner came out of the half-open back door pushing a cart, a woman in her sixties with a blue tabard and reading glasses on a chain, and Nadia caught her eye and said good morning. The cleaner looked surprised, and then said good morning back, and went on to the elevators. One. Nadia filed it away. She had promised her father she would watch.
She thought about the dispatch floor on fifteen, which she had seen once, at night, during the last interview, from the doorway. Rows of screens, half of them dark. Whiteboards covered in handwriting where there should have been a system. A man in a cardigan asleep with his head on his arms next to a phone that had not stopped ringing. She thought about what it would take to get those people to believe anything she said, and about how long, and she knew the answer to both was the same: longer than anyone upstairs would want, and less than they would fear, if she did it properly. You did not turn a place around with speeches. You turned it around by being in the room when it was hard and not pretending it was easy.
She thought, too, without wanting to, about the other thing. About the faces at the interviews, some of them. The board man with the pocket square. A recruiter years ago, at a firm she had not ended up joining, who had looked at her CV, then at her, and said, kindly, as if it were advice, "You might want to think about how you present." A site manager at her first warehouse job who had mistaken her for the agency temp for a full month after she had been made his deputy. It did not hurt anymore, mostly. It was weather. You noticed it, you dressed for it, you rode through it. And then every so often it caught you on a morning like this one, in a building like this, standing in your own company's lobby with a badge that said nothing at all about who you were, and you felt it go through you like a draught under a door.
She was not going to start this job angry. She had decided that weeks ago. Whatever she found here, whoever she found, she was going to begin by looking and listening and assuming that most people were doing their best with what they had been given, which was usually true. If she came in swinging, she would spend the next year being the woman who came in swinging. She had watched other new bosses do it. It never worked for long.
Across the street, through the rain-streaked glass, she could see Priya in the café, third in a queue, holding up her phone to read something on it with an expression of real distress. The building management office, presumably. Five minutes was going to be ten. That was fine. Nadia had nowhere to be until ten o'clock, and the lobby was teaching her things.