But useful or not, one thing Molly Doran most certainly was was out of the way. Her archive was her island, and she never came to shore. Though check-in data showed she spent more time in the building than anyone bar Diana herself, she might as well have been a ghost on wheels, unnoticed by any but the most sensitive, and dismissed as a story by everyone else. And yet eight weeks ago she’d registered a complaint; reported one of the in-house police team – the Dogs – for ‘unwarranted intrusion, unacceptable language and all-round arseholery’, the last of which wasn’t a recognised infringement of a house rule, but could probably be taken as character appraisal. The complaint had been investigated; an HR lackey sent to mollify Molly, which probably ranked as the most thankless task available to that department; and a mild wigging delivered to the miscreant, in the form of an email suggesting he read up on the disability protocols outlined in the staff handbook. Thereafter, the wheels of the Park had ground on, as had, presumably, the wheels of Molly’s chair.
The Dog in question: Tommo Doyle, Damien Cantor’s ‘man’.
This information had come her way when Diana had looked up Doyle’s employment record on her return to the Park. Cantor’s impertinent valediction, How’s Doyle working out?, had been intended as a one-fingered salute, that was clear; Cantor was a show-off, a man-child, like most men, and clearly convinced of his own cunning. She’d checked the CCTV capture of his tourist outing, and he’d been wearing glasses and a windcheater. A disguise. No wonder Oliver noticed him. And all it was, she thought, was manspreading; he was pissing on a lamppost, marking territory. There was no shortage of such behaviour in this business, or any other; there were always men in the background, imagining they were centre stage. The newer variety, who were careful to keep their inner Weinstein on a leash; older ones like Peter Judd, who wore their chauvinism like battlefield decorations; and uncategorisable miscreants like Jackson Lamb, who probably thought the glass ceiling was a feature in a Berlin brothel. She remembered, not long back, an uncharacteristically informal conversation with Josie, who worked on the hub. It’s funny, Josie had remarked, how we always end up working round male insecurities. The Bechdel test gets flunked here on a daily basis. ‘Our job is tackling crises and clearing up messes,’ Diana had reminded her. ‘That’s pretty clearly going to involve discussing men.’
It was not beyond the bounds of probability, she now thought, that whatever Tommo Doyle had been up to that pissed off Molly Doran would lead back, like an unravelled clew, to Damien smugging Cantor.
There was an alcove just inside the archive room, a wheelchair-sized cubbyhole where she expected to find Molly, but it was currently vacant, and the room silent. You could not, she thought – Molly could not – navigate her way round here without a certain amount of mayhem; the aisles were surely too narrow for a wheelchair to manoeuvre freely. There would be caution, hesitation and stop/start calculation. Except there wasn’t. What there was instead was a smooth cornering on near-silent wheels, and the sudden appearance of Molly Doran barrelling towards her, like Mr Toad in a fury.
She came to a halt with her front wheels a precise inch in front of Diana’s toes.
‘Very impressive,’ Diana said drily.
‘I practise a lot,’ said Molly.
Diana stepped aside, and Molly executed a neat little three-point turn which left her precisely in her alcove.
‘You registered a complaint,’ Diana said, once Molly was stationary.
‘I most certainly bloody did.’
‘About Doyle.’
‘I don’t care what his name is. One of your security gorillas. I’ve told them before, and I’ll tell them again, I won’t have Dogs on my floor. Not even guide ones.’
Diana suppressed irritation. ‘Might I ask why?’
‘You might. I don’t have any tea leaves to hand, so I’ve no idea what’ll happen next.’
‘If I don’t get your cooperation pretty soon, I can sketch a fair idea of what your future will entail. If that helps.’
Molly thrust her jaw out. This was not an especially attractive look for her, though compiling a list of such looks would be a challenge: some time ago – Diana was guessing it was subsequent to the event that saw Molly consigned to a wheelchair – she had taken to making her face up in a manner only a little way short of being eligible for a clown’s patent, if such things existed, and weren’t an internet myth. Red cheeks, pale face, almost as thick as Kevlar. Her hair in tufts. A challenge to the world in general, though Diana was the wrong person to lay a challenge down in front of, unless you were prepared to see it bent in half and thrust into the nearest bin.
‘They tend to be uncivil,’ said Molly.
‘And what form of incivility did this particular example display?’
‘Trespass.’
‘Any detail you want to add?’
‘I found him poking around when I arrived one morning. Which meant he’d opened up and entered without my permission. Which would not, in any case, have been forthcoming.’
‘The Dogs have access rights on all floors,’ said Diana. ‘Regardless of your personal antipathy. What was he doing?’
‘Just checking things out,’ Molly said. ‘That was his story.’
‘You didn’t believe him?’
She said, ‘He called me a crip.’
‘He called you what?’
‘I asked him to leave. He said he didn’t take instructions from a crip.’
‘And so you reported him.’
Molly nodded.
Diana looked around. They were the only people there, which would probably have been true at most times. The secrets Molly kept didn’t burn with urgency; they lay like mantraps in overgrown patches of woodland. Long forgotten, most of them, but not yet rusted shut. When she looked back at Molly, the other woman’s expression was a familiar one; it spoke of an extra layer of knowledge you hadn’t drilled down to yet. Slappable, really, though that wouldn’t be politic. Better to probe a little deeper. There weren’t many options.
She said, ‘You think he was blowing smoke.’
‘Not at the time,’ said Molly. ‘At the time, I saw red. Big man, seen some action by the look of him. Could have thrown me, chair and all, from one side of the room to the other.’
‘And strong men aren’t bullies. Weak ones are.’
They both knew an exception to that rule, of course, but he was a study all to himself.
‘But later, when I thought about it,’ Molly said, ‘after that moron from HR came to pacify me, it occurred to me, that’s why he’d rolled the insults out. To stop me wondering what he’d really been doing.’
‘You’ve checked for missing files?’
Molly didn’t bother to laugh. ‘I’ll do that, when I have a decade to spare.’
‘And all he’d need was a phone,’ Diana finished. Ten minutes on his own in here, he could walk away with a hundred years of history in his pocket.
It was her own fault, or could be made to look like it was, which came to the same thing. Until a few months back, Head Dog had been one Emma Flyte, whose departure Diana had much enjoyed arranging once she’d come into her kingdom. Following this, there’d been a minor exodus from the ranks, three or four of Flyte’s colleagues feeling the need to move on too. It wasn’t a huge issue. Replacements were found. And as the Dogs were frequently recruited from ex-forces personnel, a former SAS officer with private security experience would have been seen as a good fit.
She left Molly and took the lift back to the hub, her mind simmering. Josie was at her office door, the overnights in her hand: reports of incidents that had come in during the dark hours. ‘Bullet points?’