All Chapters of What Happened After Midnight: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The worst part was not that Gregory Pemberton had stolen her campaign. Theft Poppy Whitlock could have survived. She had survived smaller thefts before: her yoghurt from the office fridge, her good umbrella, three consecutive Thursdays of credit on a spreadsheet that nobody else understood. The worst part was that he had done it beautifully.He had stood at the head of the boardroom on the forty-first floor of Lumen & Crane, one hand in his trouser pocket and the other conducting an invisible orchestra, and he had clicked through her slides as if they had fallen out of his own head. Her slides. Her pale gold, the exact shade she had argued over with the printers for three entire days. Her line, the one she had written at her kitchen table at two in the morning with a cold cup of tea beside her: Hello, Tomorrow. We were hoping you’d be early. He had paused before it for effect, the way a magician pauses before a rabbit, and the board had actually murmured.“I’ve been sitting on this id

By Wednesday the rant had stopped belonging to Poppy.She had written it in one furious sitting, on her back, in a football shirt, and now it was walking around the building without her. People quoted it in the lift. Someone in Finance had set "circle back" as the ringtone on his work phone and been asked to stop by three different colleagues, two of whom were laughing. The tuna line had made its way to the sixth floor, then the ninth, and by lunchtime a woman Poppy had never met stopped her by the post trays to say, quite solemnly, that she would never again be able to smell fish at a desk without thinking of a confident man being told no.The mugs arrived that morning.Samir from IT had ordered them on Friday afternoon, before the building had been told she was staying, and he had ordered forty-three, which he said was the minimum the printer would do and which she suspected was a number he had simply liked. They were plain white. Across the front, in neat black capitals, they said

For eleven days after Larkhill House, Poppy Whitlock was a masterpiece of professional calm.She was at her desk by half past seven. In meetings she spoke to Theo in a bright, level voice she had last used on a broadband helpline. Once, by mistake, she called him Mr Ellison, and she watched something cross his face and go out like a match in a draught. She made certain that Margot Finch was in every room he was in. She worked eighteen-hour days on the Marlowe pitch, because work was the one thing that didn't look back at her with grey eyes, and by the second week of December the campaign had turned into something that frightened and thrilled her in about equal parts.It was called Be Known. The idea was as plain as a doorbell: Dame Eleanor's hotels weren't selling luxury at all. They were selling the scarcest thing in a lonely century, which was walking into a room where somebody knew your name. Samir had built the look of it, warm and handwritten and slightly crooked, all wet stone a

The first date began on a kitchen floor, as agreed, at seven o'clock on the fifth of January.The fortieth floor had emptied by half past six. In the narrow staff kitchen the dishwasher ticked as it cooled, the fridge hummed to itself, and the lino was still warm in the patch Poppy had picked out with her sock. She had arrived early, which she'd told herself was professionalism and which was in fact nerves. She had changed her mind about her outfit twice on the Victoria line and settled on the green velvet dress, because it had worked once, and the funeral blazer, because she was beginning to feel it was lucky.Theo came in at two minutes to. He was holding a box of Cheerios in one hand and a bowl in the other, and he was wearing, she saw, a very good jacket and no shoes."I know," he said, before she could speak. "They're under my desk. I'll put them back on before the restaurant. I just wanted to start the way we meant to go on.""With bare feet?""With honesty about footwear."He h

Dame Eleanor Marlowe signed contracts the way other people shut gates: firmly, once, and with a look that dared anything to come through.It was Friday the thirtieth of January, and the long cream drawing room of the Mayfair townhouse was full of people holding pens. There were two Marlowe lawyers in matching grey. There was a Marlowe company secretary who had the look of a woman who'd already read the small print and found it wanting. There was Imogen, supervising the stationery. There was Barbara, who had brought a tin of flapjacks in case the occasion turned out to be solemn. And at the centre of the room, in a high-backed chair by the fire with her cane across her knees and a pot of tea at her elbow, sat the old woman herself, watching Theo sign for Lumen & Crane with the interested face of a cat at a mouse hole."One more," she said. "And one for the girl.""I'm not a party to the..." Poppy began."You are today." Dame Eleanor held out the pen. "I said I'd have you sign everythin