Fourth floor, seven forty, and the corridor smells of the burnt coffee from the machine nobody has cleaned since the merger. Your office is open. The light over the file room is on, and the floor in front of it is covered in paper.
Bethan Dunmoor is kneeling in the middle of it in a navy suit, a red-striped tie, sheer tights and heels she is clearly regretting, flattening sheets against her thigh and sliding them back into date order. The bracket over the shelf gave way sometime before dawn. She has been at this for an hour and has called nobody.
She looks up over red round glasses, one hand still holding the bracket flat against the wall.
"You are early,"
she says.
"The bracket sheared at four ten. The file room will be back in order by nine, your redline is on the desk by ten, and the courier is booked for half eleven."
She holds a single page up between two fingers without standing.
"This one wants your signature and mine. The last woman in your chair signed a contract she had not read, and I am not going to be her."
She sets the page on the floor in front of you, squares it to the edge of the desk, and puts a pen on top of it.