Chapter 8

Dorcas Starling arrived at 8:48 on Monday morning, twelve minutes early, with a bruise on her cheek that no amount of concealer had hidden and a manila envelope under her arm.

David told him the moment she cleared security. “She asked reception for the oldest conference room on the floor. Not the nicest. The oldest.”

“Why?”

“She said it would have the fewest people walking past.”

Desmond did not reply. He was reading the envelope she had left on his desk, which she had walked straight to his office to deliver and then walked out again.

Inside were printouts. A notary registry entry. A health regulator’s facility page. A photograph of a creased paper card with fourteen stamps down the side. Clipped to the front, in small neat handwriting:

Halcyon Private Clinic. Licence revoked, premises closed, 21 months ago. Still operating when I was treated there ten months ago. Still stamping documents nine months ago. Questions I cannot answer yet: Were my eggs ever used? Whose embryo was it? What did I sign, and who has the records?

He read it twice. Then he picked up the phone.

“David. Halcyon Private Clinic. Find out who owns the building, who held the licence, and who is holding its files, if anyone is.”

“She found that last night?”

“She found it at one in the morning, with a search box.”

There was a short silence on the line. “Then I have a problem,” David said. “I was going to do that this week.”

“Do it today.”

He hung up and sat looking at the handwriting.

The test had been David’s idea, originally, though Desmond would never admit to having liked it. Twelve vendor contracts, all approved by procurement and signed off by legal. One of them, the Meridian Freight renewal, had a flaw David had noticed by accident. Three people in his legal department had missed it.

If she found it, she was better than the people he paid.

He expected her to skim. Or panic, and ask for help.

At 8:55 he walked down the corridor. Two analysts by the lifts were whispering. “That’s her. The wife.” “She looks like she’s been hit by a truck.” Desmond stopped and looked at them until they remembered something urgent.

The conference room was windowless and smelled of old carpet. Dorcas sat at the end of a long table in a borrowed grey blazer, with a legal pad and a pencil.

“Twelve contracts,” Desmond said, setting the folders in front of her. “Procurement has approved all of them. Legal has signed off on all of them. Tell me which, if any, should worry me. Five o’clock.”

“Is there a trap?”

“Find out.”

She opened the first folder. She did not look up as he left.

* * *

At ten fifty, David came into his office without knocking.

“She’s asking for ten minutes.”

“Now? It’s not even eleven.”

“She says she’s finished.”

Desmond put down his pen.

She was standing at the head of the table when he walked in, with the pad in one hand. Eleven folders were stacked neatly on her left. The twelfth lay open in front of her, with three pages tabbed in yellow.

“Meridian Freight,” she said. “Clause 9 says the price is fixed for the full five-year term. Schedule B says there’s an annual escalator of twelve percent. Clause 31 says that if a clause and a schedule conflict, the schedule prevails.”

She turned the pad around. Neat columns of figures marched down it.

“Over five years that’s about eleven million more than you think you’re paying. Nobody reading the clauses would notice. You have to read the schedules, and then read the order of precedence in clause 31, which is on page forty.”

Desmond looked at the numbers. Then he looked at David, who was already on the phone to the head of legal.

“Check page forty,” David said quietly into the receiver. “Yes. Clause 31. And Schedule B.”

The room was silent for six minutes. Then David put the phone down.

“She’s right.”

“How long did it take you?” Desmond asked.

“I read all twelve first. Quickly.” Dorcas shrugged. “Then I went back to the one that looked too clean. Real contracts are never that tidy.”

“Legal reviewed that contract twice.”

“Then legal read the clauses. I read the schedules.”

“The head of legal will want to know who caught it,” David said carefully. “We could say I did.”

“I’d rather you told him the truth,” Dorcas said.

It was the first time anyone had spoken to him that plainly in this building in years. He waited for the old reflex, the sharp reply, the estimate of what it would cost to make her useful. It did not come.

He had given her a task designed to see whether she would fail. She had finished it in two hours, and she had not asked him for anything.

“What do you want?” he said.

“Sorry?”

“You have just saved this company eleven million. Ask for something.”

She hesitated. “Halcyon’s records. If anyone is holding them. I can’t make an inquiry from my own name, because they would simply stop answering.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s what I need.”

He had half expected a title. A salary. An office with a view. Instead she had used her first win to ask for a file.

“David is already on it,” Desmond said. “You’ll have an office. Not a conference room.”

“I like the conference room.”

“It smells of carpet.”

“It’s quiet.” Her mouth almost moved. “I’ll take the office afterwards.”

David cleared his throat. He was holding his phone and had gone pale in the particular way he did when a board member had been in touch.

“Desmond. Mrs Prudence has called an emergency board meeting for three o’clock this afternoon.”

“On what?”

David looked at Dorcas, and then back. She turned the ring on her finger once.

“Item one. Whether the marriage is genuine.”