Rashida smiled thinly. ‘Don’t worry. Just go through to the kitchen. Salvador will see to you.’ She pointed further down the side corridor. ‘Remember, Camilla. This is a great opportunity for you and great things might happen to you. You should try your best.’

Petra didn’t know how to answer, so she didn’t say anything as she watched Rashida push through the glass doors into the lobby. Once she had disappeared into the crowd there, Petra tried to follow, intending to make for the stairs. She pushed at the door but it didn’t budge. A magnetic lock held the top and the bottom fast, a discreet red LED shining on a pad on the door handle.

Shit. This wasn’t her route. She’d have to go and see Salvador – the show would only let her advance from there.

Down the corridor, a large glass-fronted room with three massive stainless steel vats on one side and steel worktops along the other was doubling as the kitchen set. Back in real life, this room would have housed some technical stage of the brewing process – the vats were interspersed with blocky industrial machines with coloured buttons and dials on their fronts, and tubes running from them over stations on the worktops. Everything had been wiped down and polished, and the smell of food cooking from somewhere deeper in this area mingled with the persistent memory of yeast and fermenting barley. The room was staffed by a cluster of waiters dressed in the same black-and-white uniform as hers, and five or six white-jacketed kitchen staff. Two waiters were filling trays full of flat champagne coupes and sending others out to serve them, while along another long bench, the cooks were finalising trays of canapes. They were getting on with their job quietly and efficiently, clearly not playacting the part.

‘Ah, Camilla. New girl, there you are. Come here.’

The man’s voice was loud and dramatically projected – the voice, she was noticing, set the actors apart more than anything. She wondered what the staff thought of her, playing at being a worker while the rest of them did their jobs. Despite this awkwardness, despite her disciplined intention to focus solely on extracting Vincent, she felt a thrill of the immersion kicking in. No matter how disturbing Cabinet had been, it was tempting to follow another storyline, play along with this exclusive brand of opulent make-believe. To be utterly someone else for a few hours.

She located the fake chef standing between the two furthest vats.

Don’t get sucked in, Petra.

I won’t, she told herself. But playing along for now is the only way out into the lobby.

‘You’re Salvador, right?’