I opened the wrong door on the fiftieth floor and saw what the most powerful woman in the company had been hiding — the next morning she put eighty-five thousand dollars on the desk.

Because the easy thing — the completely defensible thing, the thing any sensible man with an eviction notice does — was to walk away down that corridor and go and empty the bins on forty-nine.

She had told me to forget it. I had permission. Nobody would ever have known.

And if I had done that, I would not have been in that room on the thirty-first of October, and she would never have asked me what I had actually seen, and eleven dates would have stayed in the back of a notebook with the consumables order.

Lars Thale would be Chief Executive of Kelvedon Group.

All of it came out of forty seconds in a corridor.

And the other thing, which is smaller and which I think about more.

I had those eleven dates since September and I did nothing with them, because I raised it once with my supervisor and nothing happened and I decided it was not my business.