“You’re a natural.” Harvey’s ugly face broadened when he smiled, and the tips of his incisors showed. He had a high forehead, a receding hairline, and while his hair was clipped short, it had a noticeable curl, and left to itself would probably fall into ringlets. It was a light dirty brown in colour. He favoured open-necked shirts with a check pattern, and in cold weather wore a long black overcoat with a wide collar, of a kind she could imagine adorning gangsters. “You’ve done this before—admit it!”

He joked to put her at her ease, and it worked.

So now she was in the lobby of the eighteenth, and needed to climb seven storeys.

The doors required a security pass. She wore hers on a lanyard round her neck, and flashed it now across the face of the reader, which blinked red to green and allowed her through. The stairwell had no windows, and the lights were constantly on, a health and safety requirement. But the stairs were uncarpeted, and difficult to climb noiselessly. They made her trainers squeak. She tried to step only on the runners, two at a time, but still foot and stair conspired to produce this noise, like a cat’s toy. If he reached the stairwell again—or so much as put his head round the door—he’d hear her. What good would speed do her then? Better to climb slowly, hugging the wall, out of the line of sight. She was just about to do this when a door, some flights below, opened.

“Remember, the building won’t be empty.”

“Even after midnight?”

Every so often a look would ripple across his face, like the shadow of a cloud, and in it she could see irritation, frustration—disappointment, mostly. She was adept at the art of reading disappointment. And when that happened it was as if a fish-hook tugged at her heart.

But Harvey had not let his feelings break surface.

“There’ll always be someone. Not on the upper floors, but lower down, where the actual work gets done. You know, by ordinary people. Like you and me.”

He was not ordinary. But she was, and this was the obstacle she had to overcome.

“The markets sleep for no man,” he said. “But you should be okay. Overnighters are for junior staff. The top floors will be quiet. All the fat cats’ll be home in their little palaces, or snuggling their mistresses in five-star hotels.”

He’d actually said snuggling. The word distracted her from any number of questions, complaints really, worries—such as, What if I’m spotted? What do I say when I’m challenged? What if I’m caught in the stairwell, and someone shouts up at me:

“Hello?”

Tight against the wall, she tried to make herself smaller.

“Anyone there?”

She didn’t move.