Position Fourteen

By twenty past nine on the Wednesday there was a forty-second clip.

I know it was forty seconds because Nadia told me, in the production office above the arches, standing up, with her coat still on and her laptop open on somebody else’s desk and two people pretending very hard to be reading emails four feet away.

“Forty seconds,” she said. “It’s gone to Guy Fenner and about nine people at the network with W2 TEASE — FRIDGE in the subject line, and the audio is clean, and the last thing on it is you asking him why he wrote it.”

“Who cut it?”

“An assistant editor in Soho who was sent a card of rushes at eight o’clock this morning and did his job.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “That’s the honest answer and it’s the worst one, because there’s nobody in that sentence to be angry at.”

“Who put the card in his hand?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Who put a camera on the shelf above my fish?”

“I don’t know that either.” She turned the laptop round. There was a rig sheet on it, a scanned PDF, two pages, signed. “What I have is this. Fixed-rig schedule, approved on the fourth, covering seventeen positions. Position fourteen is cold store — interior, high, north shelf. It has been on the schedule since before either of you walked into the building, and it is signed by me, because I sign the rig schedule, because that is my name against every camera in this production.”

“Did you know what position fourteen was?”

“I knew there was a camera in the fridge. Every fixed-rig show has a camera in the fridge. They record forty hours of nothing and once a series somebody drops a tray.” She closed the laptop. “What I did not know, and what is not on this sheet, and what nobody has yet put a name to, is why at some point on Tuesday somebody went and put a strip of matt black tape across the release plate of a fire exit.”

Out of the window a train went over the arches and the whole building did what it does.

“Nadia,” I said. “I think you and I are about to end up on the same side of something, and I would rather we got there on purpose than by accident.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t care about the clip. The clip is embarrassing and in a week it will be a thing people have seen. I care that for twenty-six minutes on Tuesday night two people were shut inside a cold room because somebody disabled the way out, and that if it had been one person, and that person had been on their own, at ten past eleven, with no signal, they would still have been in there at midnight.”

Nadia did not say anything for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the actual thing.”

“Then that’s what I’m going to keep saying, and I’d like to know now whether you’re going to say it with me, because if the version that gets told upstairs is two chefs got locked in a fridge and it made great telly, then the tape becomes a funny detail, and nobody will ever look at it again.”

“I’ll say it with you.” She picked up her phone. “I’m also going to tell you the thing you won’t like, because you’ll hear it by lunchtime anyway.”

“Which is.”

“Which is that four people in this production already think it was him.”

—

Here is how that works, and it took about nine hours.

Somebody in the crew says, out loud, in a van, that it is a hell of a coincidence: a man who has spent three years trying to get one conversation with a woman who will not have it, and then the two of them end up sealed in a room together for half an hour and the conversation happens.

Somebody else says that he was seen at the walk-in at about ten to eleven. Which he was. He was taking hake crates out of it, because I asked him to, because we had been shifting stock since the pass was wiped.

Somebody else says — and this is the one that travels, because it is true — that he is the only person in the building who wanted that conversation to exist.

And then it is not gossip any more. It is a thing four people have said to each other and each of them has heard it back from someone else, which is the only mechanism by which anything has ever become true in a television production or a kitchen.

By half past two I had been asked about it twice. Sadie asked me, badly, in the corridor, in a rush, and then went red and said she hadn’t meant it like that. Wes asked me properly, camera down, off the record, because Wes has been doing this for twenty years and knows that the person you should ask is the person it was done to.

“I don’t know,” I told Wes.

Which was true, and which I heard come out of my mouth and did not like the sound of.

At ten past three Guy Fenner rang me from a car.

I had not met him. I have still, at the time of writing, met him twice. He has a warm voice and he uses your first name about once every forty seconds and he is, I am told by people who would know, extremely good at his job.

“Ines. I’ve watched it four times.” He sounded genuinely moved, which was the most unsettling part. “I want you to know that nobody here is treating this lightly. There’ll be a full look at the rig protocol, Nadia’s all over it, and if somebody’s been careless with a door then that’s a serious matter and it’ll be dealt with seriously.”

“Careless.”

“Careless, deliberate, we’ll find out. Ines, can I say one other thing, and then I’ll let you get back?”

“Go on.”

“That forty seconds is the best thing this show has made. I don’t mean the situation. I mean the two of you in the dark at two degrees, and you asking him the question, and the way he starts to answer.” A pause exactly long enough to be sincere. “I’d like to build episode two around it. Properly. Give it room. Nobody’s going to do anything cheap with it, that’s not the programme we’re making.”

“It stops being about a taped fire door.”

“It doesn’t stop being about anything. It just stops being the headline.” Somewhere behind him a car indicator ticked. “Think about it. You’ve made something extraordinary by accident and my job is to not waste it. That’s the whole of my job, really.”

Then he said my name once more and rang off, and I stood in the yard and understood that no one was going to look for the person with the tape unless I made them.

—

At four o’clock I went and found Nadia at the tape store and asked for the raw file.

“Which raw file.”

“Position fourteen. Tuesday. Everything it recorded, not the forty seconds. From the moment it was powered up to the moment it stopped.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Can I ask why?”

“No.”

“Ines—“

“You can have it in writing from my lawyer if you’d rather, but you can’t have the reason. Not today.”

“That’s going to cost me about four hours of my life with legal.”

“I know. I’m still asking.”

She wrote it on the back of her hand, which I had noticed she does when it is something she will actually do.

“And the timecode,” I said, and then stopped, because I did not know what I meant by that and I did not want to say a wrong word to a person who does this for a living.

“Yes,” said Nadia. “You’d want that.”

—

He came and found me at half past six, in the yard, by the bins, which is where anybody who has ever worked in a kitchen goes when they want ninety seconds.

“You asked for the raw file,” he said.

“Who told you.”

“Everyone. Everyone told me. It took about forty minutes.” He had his hands in his pockets and he was standing further away than he usually stands, and I understood, with a small unpleasant drop, that he had put himself there on purpose so that I would not have to move. “I am not here to ask you not to. Whatever else you take out of the next minute, take that.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you asked for the raw file and you wouldn’t say why, and half this crew has decided that means you think it was me, and about a third of them are pleased about it.” He said it without any heat at all. “And I can’t fix that by telling people it wasn’t, because that is exactly what a man who did it would do.”

“And if I did think it was you?”

He considered that, standing by four wheelie bins in the rain, with his hair flat and his sleeves down.

“Then you’d be being reasonable,” he said. “I’d think it was me. I’m the only person in the building who wanted that conversation. I’ve wanted it for three years. If I’d been told on Monday that there was a way to be locked in a room with you for half an hour, I’d have said no, and I’d have thought about it afterwards, and that isn’t nothing.”

“That’s a stupid thing to say to someone who has your name on a list.”

“It’s the true thing, and you told me on the first day that the honest ones are the only ones I’m allowed.” He shook his head once, and then he did the thing that undid me entirely, which was that he stopped being about himself. “Ask for the timecode log as well.”

“I did. I didn’t know what I was asking for.”

“Then ask for it by name, in an email, with a date on it. Every fixed rig writes a log — power-up, power-down, card change, and who was holding the card reader when it happened. It’s a boring file that nobody reads and nobody thinks to alter, and it will tell you what time position fourteen came on. If it came on at four in the afternoon with the rest of them, it’s a fridge camera and somebody taped a door for a laugh. If it came on at ten o’clock at night, an hour before the two of us walked in there, then somebody planned it, and the log will say who had the reader.”

The rain went on doing what rain does off a railway arch.

“You’ve thought about this all day,” I said.

“I’ve thought about nothing else all day. It’s the only useful thing I’ve got.” He turned to go back in, and then stopped. “Ines. If the log says it came on at ten, get the door plate looked at by somebody who isn’t the production company. Not because I think you’d be wrong to suspect me. Because whoever taped that plate is still working in the building, and nobody has asked them anything yet.”

He went back in through the fire door with his shoulder, the way everybody in that building did, forty times a day, without once looking at it.