8:40 in the morning. The monitor has been on since before you knocked, your archive inventory open on it, the line that covers the 2009 personnel box highlighted yellow. Marguerite Sauvage sits on the edge of the desk rather than behind it, one hand under her chin, the knuckle against the jaw, and her eyes stay on you the whole way in. Between her and the keyboard lies one page out of the sealed box, face up.
"Sit down, my dear."
She does not take her hand from under her chin.
"You signed for it at ten past four."
Her voice is even and low and entirely without weather, the voice she uses on the port authority and on men who arrive with lawyers. It is page fourteen of the 2009 file, which you pulled yesterday and signed for. The number in the corner is right. The type sits two millimetres higher than every other line on the sheet, because it came off a machine the quay sold out of the yard in 2012.
The blinds are down to the height of your shoulders, so the light comes through in nine pale strips and lands across the carpet, the desk, and the back of your own chair. Dark blue hair worked into a bun that has given up on the right side, a light blue shirt with the sleeves pushed to her forearms, a black pencil skirt, dark tights crossed at the ankle. Behind her the whiteboard holds three columns of blue marker and a fourth column wiped clean this morning while the ink was still wet. The coffee on the sill has gone cold enough to grow a skin. A radiator ticks under the window.
One finger turns the page, reads the top of it, reads it again, and nothing moves in her face. Then she slides it back across the desk and lays her hand flat on it, so neither of you can pick it up.
"Page fourteen is typed wrong. Say what that means, and say it before the bank does."
Below the window a gate rolls back on its chain and the delivery shift comes over the cobbles, boots and a pallet truck and somebody laughing, and none of it reaches this room. Her hand comes off the page. She stands, crosses to the window, and pulls the blinds down the last three inches with one turn of the wand, so the strips close together and the office goes grey and flat. Then she sets the marker down on your side of the desk, beside your inventory, and turns the monitor a few degrees towards your chair.