Chapter Twenty: The Chair With a Camera

The first signed message arrived on a Monday, at eight minutes past nine, and by lunchtime there were eleven.

The Right Chat had been running for three months. Most of it was the sort of thing that people post when they can finally say something without being punished: a request for better coffee, a thank-you to the post room, a long and impassioned complaint about the third-floor microwave, which turned out, on investigation, to have been fixed in 2019 and then quietly broken again by a man who would not be named. But on the thirteenth of May, one by one, people began to write about the fourth floor.

The messages were not long. Each began with a name, because that was the rule, and the rule was the whole point. This is Anika Desai, in Production. I would like to put on record that I have not been allowed to leave my desk for lunch in eleven weeks. Then another. This is Paul Whitby. My monitor has a camera in it. I did not know until March. Then a fourth, from a young man who had never posted anything before. This is Jonah, junior producer. I was told in a meeting last Thursday that I would be 'managed out' if my output didn't improve. The person who said it threw a file at the wall. It was a thick file. It left a mark.

By half past one, Margot Finch was standing in the door of Poppy's office with her glasses in her hand.

"It's Neil Overton," she said.

---

Poppy had met him exactly once, in the lift, in February. He was a big man, fifty-two, wide in the shoulder and heavy in the brow, with a grey crew cut and a voice built for the floor of a warehouse. He ran Production the way some men run a ship. He had been at Lumen & Crane for twenty-two years, and he'd been told so often that he was indispensable that he had, perhaps, begun to believe it. His department produced every printed thing the agency sold: the brochures, the banners, the boxes, the thousand small physical objects that go out with a campaign. He had never, in two decades, been late.

It was also the department that glowed, red as a coal, on the map she had made in January.

There had been a grid. She had been rather proud of it. Fifteen departments across the top, five fault lines down the side, and in each square a colour, from pale green to dark red, according to how many people had said how many things in how many glass rooms. Production was red in every column. She had shown it to the board. She had not shown it to Neil Overton. She had never, in her life, wished so hard to take a thing back.

"The signed messages are mandatory," said Margot. "Under the Charter, once there are three on the same subject, the complaint is formally opened. There are eleven. I'm obliged to begin an inquiry, and the Charter obliges you to be present."

"Me?"

"You are the guardian of the document. Your name is on it." She put on her glasses. "I'm afraid it's an honour of a very peculiar kind."

They went down to the fourth floor at two. The Production office was a long, low, open-plan room with a window along one side and a smell of paper and glue and coffee, and a row of grey desks under strip lights. They were all, Poppy noticed, very straight. Everyone sat at the same angle. And on top of each monitor, in the middle, on a small black bracket, there was a little round glass eye.

"What are those?" she said.

"Argus," said Margot. "It's the monitoring software. It tracks keystrokes and idle time, and takes a photograph of the user every ninety seconds. Mr Overton installed it in January, after an audit." Her mouth was thin. "It was not, as far as I'm aware, authorised."

The room had gone quiet. Forty heads had turned. And behind them, at the far end, in a glass-walled office with the blinds half down, a very large man was standing at the window with a file in his hand, looking at them, and not moving at all.

---

The inquiry took four days.

It was run, as the Charter said, by Margot, with Colm Ashworth at her right hand to advise on the law, and with Poppy in a chair in the corner, forbidden to speak, taking notes. It was horrible. It was not dramatic, which was the horror of it. People were called in one at a time, and sat on the other side of a small table in a glass room, and told it. They said it carefully. They said it in the voices of people reading out a list from a hospital. They said that the Argus camera had been switched on in the middle of a bereavement, once, and that a woman had been told to take a call in the corridor because her keystrokes were slow. They said that in March a junior had been shouted at for twenty minutes, in front of everyone, for the sin of getting a Pantone reference wrong. A man in his fifties said he had not told his wife what it was like. He said he thought it would worry her. Then he stopped and looked at his hands.

"It's not legal," Colm said afterwards, in the corridor, in the faint voice of a man afraid of being overheard by his own conscience. "The cameras. At least I don't think so. You can't capture that data without telling people why, and you can't keep it for ever, and every one of those people has a right to ask what's been collected about them. It's, um. It's quite a big right. People forget about it." He chewed a mint. "It's called a subject access request. I've never actually seen anyone make one."

Poppy wrote it down. She did not know why.

He was called in on the Thursday. She had been dreading it for three days. Neil Overton came down the corridor at ten past two with his jacket on and his tie done up and his big hands loose at his sides, and sat in the chair on the other side of the table, and looked, not at Margot, but at her.

"Miss Whitlock," he said. "I wondered if you'd be here."

"Mr Overton."

"I'm told I'm not to speak to you."

"I'm told the same."

"Very well." He turned to Margot. "Ask your questions."

---

She found him afterwards, as she had half known she would, in the stairwell.

It was the same white shaft of concrete between the fortieth floor and the forty-first, at ten to six on the Thursday evening, with the window on the half-landing full of low yellow sun. He was sitting on the step with his tie pulled loose and his elbows on his knees. He did not look up when she came down. He said, to the floor, in the heavy flat voice of a man who has spent four hours being very polite:

"I know you're not supposed to be here."

"I know."

"Then go away, please."

"I will." She stayed where she was, on the step above, with her notebook shut. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry. Not about the inquiry. That had to happen. I'm sorry about the map."

He turned his head slowly.

"The grid," she said. "The one with the squares. You were red. I put you in a square and showed it to the board. I wish I had come and talked to you first."

He didn't speak for a long time. Below them a door banged, very far away, and the sound went up and up the shaft like a bird.

"You put my worst day in a spreadsheet," said Neil Overton.

"I know."

"Twenty-two years. I came here when I was thirty. I've done every job. I've stayed till midnight on the night before every launch for two decades. I've carried boxes. I once drove to Aberdeen in a snowstorm with a pallet of banners in the back of a van, for Mr Ellison's grandfather, who shook my hand." He stared at his knuckles. "And I'm the red square."

Poppy had nothing ready to say. She'd had the whole of Thursday to prepare, and every sentence she had written had turned to dust.

"I have a son," he said. "Callum. He's fourteen. He has a condition. He's in a wheelchair, and he's the cleverest boy you've ever met, and he needs a very particular kind of school, and a very particular kind of care, and every penny that I earn goes into the three of us staying afloat." He said it plainly, like a man reciting an address. "In January there was an audit. It said Production was behind on its targets. It said the department was under review. I've been in this building twenty-two years and I'd never once been told I was under review. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I put in the cameras because I thought if I could prove they were working, and show the board a chart, they'd leave us alone." He closed his eyes. "And then I started to shout. I don't know why. It didn't feel like shouting. It felt as if the building was on fire, and I was the only one who could see it."

"That's not an excuse," said Poppy, very quietly.

"No."

"People were hurt."

"I know that." He opened his eyes. They were red, and not entirely with anger. "I know it. I heard them today. I sat in a room and heard what I'd done, and I thought, I'm a man who has been standing in a doorway for twenty years telling himself he was holding the roof up." He gave a short rough laugh. "I'd like to hate you. I've been trying since Monday. It isn't working very well."

"I'd rather you didn't," said Poppy. "But I'd understand."

He rubbed his face with both hands, and when he lowered them he looked, for a moment, not like a large dangerous man but like what he was, a tired one.

"I don't forgive you," he said.

"You don't have to."

"Good," said Neil Overton. "Then we understand each other."

---

It was Sade who said it, in the end, on Friday, in her glass office, with the white orchid and the photograph of two small boys on a beach.

"You look wretched," she said.

"I made a man cry in a stairwell."

"I heard. Margot told me. She said he did most of it himself." Sade took off her glasses. "Sit. I've something I should have told you in January. I wasn't sure you'd be able to hear it."

Poppy sat.

"I said, Do not mistake being believed for being safe. I've been thinking about it ever since. I think there was another half of it." She turned the glasses in her fingers. "Truth without care is just noise with good PR. You can tell people the truth until you're blue, and if nobody is looking after the people it lands on, you haven't built a culture. You've built a firing range with a nice name."

"I didn't mean—"

"I know you didn't. That's the point. Nobody means." She put the glasses on again. "So. What happens next? Not what the Charter says. What do you think should happen?"

Poppy thought. She thought of a boy called Jonah, with a mark on the wall. She thought of a big man on a stair with his hands hanging. She thought of a long, grey, careful conversation in the lift in March, with a woman in a navy suit, about the difference between true and kind.

"I think he should take the cameras down," she said. "All of them. This week. In front of the team. I think he should say sorry to every one of them, to their faces, and not in an email. I think he should have a coach, a proper one, and a review in six months, and if he does it, he stays. And I think—" She stopped. "I think somebody should find out why a good man who has been here for twenty-two years felt like the building was on fire."

Sade looked at her over the glasses for some time.

"That," she said, "is a restorative process. Margot will have a name for it. It's the first time I've heard you say it."

---

The cameras came down on the following Tuesday.

They went in a cardboard box, forty-one little black eyes on brackets, carried across the Production floor by Neil Overton himself, with his sleeves rolled up and a screwdriver in his pocket. He did it in front of everyone. He stood at the end of the room, with his big hands holding the edges of the box, and he said something that took him a very long time to say, and that Poppy, watching from the doorway, was too far away to hear. When he finished, a young man at the back, Jonah, the one with the file, stood up very slowly from his desk. He did not say anything. He nodded once, and sat down again.

She was on her way back to the lifts when Overton caught her in the corridor.

He was holding the box. He looked like a man who had come through a very long tunnel and not yet got used to the light. He put the box down on the carpet, carefully, at his feet, and wiped his hands on his trousers, and said, without preamble:

"There's something else. I'd not meant to say. But I think you should know."

"All right."

"Last month. A woman rang me." He frowned. "Quite a pleasant woman. Fenella, she said. From a firm called Calder and Wren. She said they were doing what she called culture due diligence for a client, and she'd heard Production had been through a difficult spell, and might I have a coffee."

Poppy's blood went cold, all at once, from the top of her head to her feet.

"I said I'd not talk to her. She was very persuasive. She asked about the project. About what you'd promised us in the atrium." He rubbed his jaw. "She wanted to know if you'd meant it. If it was just a speech. She said she wanted to understand whether you could be bought. That was the word. She said, Is she the sort of person who can be bought?"

"What did you say?"

"I said I didn't know you. But I said you'd made me take down forty-one cameras and I hadn't heard anyone else try." He gave a short rough huff that might, in a different man, have been a laugh. "I think she wrote that down."

He picked up the box. He nodded to her, once, gravely, the way a man nods to a woman he will never be friends with and has begun, rather against his will, to respect. Then he went off down the corridor, heavy and slow, with the little black eyes shifting and clicking against each other in the cardboard.

Poppy stood where he'd left her. She thought of a woman called Fenella, and a boy with a mug, and a pleasant man in clean trainers. She thought of a vault, and two keys, and the sentence she had said in the atrium, with the whole building listening: Nobody will be punished for telling the truth.

That night, at half past eleven, she asked Theo, in his kitchen, on the floor, with a bowl of cereal between them, whether there was anything that touched the staff.

He looked at her for a long time. He had a spoon in his hand. He did not click anything.

"I can't say it," said Theo, very gently, and she believed him, and wrote it down.