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.

She said: “Come up.”

And I did the buckles, and then she sat in the chair and said: “Tell me what you’ve actually seen.”

And that is the entire pivot of this, and it is not dramatic and it took about ninety minutes.

What I had actually seen, which had nothing to do with her.

Since about the middle of June, a woman had been coming onto fifty at night.

Three nights a week, roughly, between ten and eleven, on a contractor pass. Mid-thirties, a lanyard, a clipboard the first two times and nothing after that.

The first time, I asked her. She said she was doing a survey for the window-cleaning contractor.

Kelvedon’s window contract is daytime only and always has been, because you cannot do a fifty-storey elevation in the dark, and I know that because I am the one who lets them in.

She said it with complete confidence and walked past me.