For what felt like a minute, nothing happened. Perhaps he had been convinced by her pretended absence. The only way of being sure was to lean forward and see him not seeing her, but to do so would break that spell. But if he came up the stairs to check, if he found her trying to hide—

Another door opened. The one Maggie had come through.

“Sir?”

A deep voice, a bass delight. The security guard.

“Oh, Joshua, hi—thought I heard someone.”

“Just doing the rounds, sir.”

“Yeah, you don’t need to call me that—how you doing, anyway? All good?”

“All fine, sir.”

Maggie recognised the rhythm of the exchange. A young man in a suit, and another in a uniform. White/black went without saying.

The younger man, the suit, came up a flight, so the two were only one level apart.

“You still turning out on a Saturday?”

Maggie heard a rustling kind of noise, as if he were miming something physical, the throwing of a ball, the wielding of a bat.

“. . . Sir?”

“The old rugger?”

“I don’t play rugby, sir.”

“Oh, right, no, only I thought—”

“Don’t go for sports at all, sir.”

“Right. Must be thinking of someone else, yeah?”

“Sir.”

“Well, I’d better be . . . Have a good night, Josh.”

“You too, sir.”

A door opened, closed.

Maggie’s palms, flat against the wall, felt wet as well as cold.

“The old rugger,” the security guard said.

After a moment, another door opened and closed, and she was alone in the stairwell once more.

When she was ready to move, Maggie crept up the remaining flights. She kept her back to the wall, and allowed time for her trainers’ squeaks to subside between each step. It reminded her of being a teen again, slinking to her bedroom after a night spent with Jezza, desperate not to make a sound, knowing that the slightest creak would wake her parents’ wrath.

At the twenty-fifth floor she let herself into the lobby.

Before the lights came on, there were men in each corner, four of them, waiting—a trap. But when the now-familiar flickering to life was done, the men turned into pot plants, their thick green leaves like rubbery imploring hands. Instead of earth, the pots were rim-full of smooth stones, between which, she imagined, each plant’s roots twined and clutched. Low-maintenance vitality.

She took the right-hand door. There were offices here, but glass-walled, and she could see through them to the outside world—London after dark was a fairground whose wheels kept turning. Sleek buildings, already higher than they had a right to be, strained further skywards still, while in the spaces between them cranes clustered, resembling huge metal birds, building nests where the city allowed.