All Chapters of What Happened After Midnight: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The profile went live at six in the morning on the nineteenth of February, and by twenty past Poppy had read it four times on the Victoria line, holding the phone in front of her face like a woman reading her own post-mortem.It was not a bad piece. That was the trouble. Lucy Ferrers could write. The headline was The Girl Who Hit Send, and under it, in italics, ran a strapline that Poppy suspected had been workshopped by a committee: How one wrong group chat turned a sleepy City agency into the most talked-about workplace in London. There was a photograph of her taken in the atrium on the day of the all-hands talk, caught mid-sentence with one hand raised, looking, she thought, like a woman trying to flag down a bus. The first three paragraphs were funny and fond. The fourth quoted the tuna line. The fifth described the Honest Feedback Project as the most unusual piece of corporate reform in recent memory, and the sixth said Dame Eleanor Marlowe had called Poppy the only person in adv

Poppy's mother arrived on the twelfth of March at ten to six, on the stopping train from Margate, carrying a cake tin, a thermos and a very small suitcase, and looking at the flat in Walthamstow the way a customs officer looks at a bag."You've done something with the sofa," she said."I've put a blanket on it.""It's an improvement." Marianne Whitlock set the tin on the table, laid her coat over a chair, folded her scarf into a square and put it on top. She was fifty-eight, small, straight-backed, with a neat grey bob and sea-glass earrings and the stillness of a woman who had spent most of her working life sitting very quietly in rooms where other people shouted. "Many happy returns, darling. Twenty-seven. I can't think where it went.""Mum.""I've brought a Victoria sponge. I don't trust the ones from shops. They have an air of having been made to look like cake." She turned on the spot, taking in the room, the drying rack, the lemon magnet on the fridge with the laminated menu und

Dee came down from Manchester on the twentieth of March with a bag of Haribo, a rucksack that smelled faintly of hand sanitiser, and the grey, glittering look of a woman who had worked a twelve-hour night shift and then caught a train out of sheer force of character."Don't say I look tired," she said, on the doorstep. "I'm aware.""You look wonderful.""I look like a haunted lamp." She dropped the rucksack in the hall, put both arms round Poppy and squeezed so hard that it hurt. She was a small, solid, dark-eyed woman with a laugh like a trumpet and a way of holding on to people that made them feel they'd been rescued. They had met at eleven, on the first day of secondary school, when Dee had punched a boy for calling Poppy Poppycock and been given a detention for it. They had been in each other's pockets ever since. "Right. I want tea. I want crisps. I want to hear everything. And I want to see this radiator that I've heard so much about, because I've decided I don't believe in him.

The marquee went up on the morning of the first of April, in a hard white frost, with a great deal of shouting and one lost mallet.It was the tent from Stroud. Poppy had found it at midnight on a Friday, after six phone calls and a fight about a deposit, and she had paid for it out of a budget line she wasn't sure existed. Now it stood on the long lawn at Larkhill House like a ship that had run aground, its canvas stiff with rime, its guy ropes strung out across the grass in a web. The gardeners had been up since five to cut a path through the frost. A young man with a clipboard was shouting at a van. And on the terrace, in a long dark coat and a woollen hat pulled over her ears, Dame Eleanor Marlowe stood alone with her cane, looking at it all with an air of deep and critical satisfaction."It's rather large," she said, when Poppy came up beside her."It was the only one I could get.""Good. I dislike a tent that apologises." She tapped her cane once on the flagstones. "I have been

The lay-by was on the A429, between a hedge and a sign advertising free-range eggs, and Theo pulled into it without being asked.It was Saturday, the fourth of April, at about half past eleven in the morning. The snow had gone in the night, as if embarrassed, and left the Cotswold fields shining and drenched under a thin, fresh sun. They had been driving for twenty minutes in comfortable, hungover silence, in his scruffy estate with the broken wing mirror, with an empty wedding cake tin on the back seat and a tangle of green ivy that Meera had left on the dashboard. Poppy had had four hours' sleep. She had a headache like a small bell. She had said, quite suddenly, somewhere past Burford, "I need to tell you something, and I need you to stop the car."He had looked at her. He had not said can it wait. He had put on the indicator.Now the engine ticked. A tractor went by, slow and enormous, and a farmer lifted two fingers from the wheel. Poppy sat looking at her hands in her lap, in th