What the Log Said

The timecode log came through on Friday at four minutes past six in the evening, attached to an email from Nadia with no text in the body at all, which is a thing people do when they want you to read the attachment before they have to have an opinion about it.

Seventeen fixed positions. Sixteen of them powered up at 15:40 on Tuesday, in a block, the way they had powered up every day for a fortnight.

Position fourteen powered up at 22:58.

Three hours and eighteen minutes after the others. Twelve minutes before Simon and I walked into the walk-in. Card reader signed out at 22:51 and back in at 23:47 to D. Yule, AP (story).

I read it four times in the office at Ilé with a delivery note stuck to my elbow and the Friday prep going on the other side of the wall, and then I forwarded it to Roz, and then I did the last service of the week and did it badly, and Deja sent two of my plates back at me on the pass without saying anything, which is the highest compliment she has ever paid me.

—

At twenty to two in the morning I was doing stock.

That is not a euphemism for brooding. It is a thing that has to happen on a Friday night if there is going to be a Saturday, and the chicken bones go in at midnight and come off at four, and if I am in the building anyway I do it myself, because I like it, because for four hours nobody can ask me anything.

Somebody knocked on the glass.

He had a rucksack and a bicycle helmet and he was extremely wet, and when I opened the door he said, “I’ve got the tape,” and then, “That’s a terrible opening line, I’ve had forty minutes to think of a better one.”

“Come in. Don’t touch anything on the left.”

He came in and stood dripping in my kitchen, looking at it the way he had looked at the arch, and I watched him not say anything about it, which cost him visible effort.

“Right,” he said. “Three things and then I’ll go.”

“Sit down first. There’s a stool.”

He sat down on the stool. I skimmed the stock. Then I put a bowl of last night’s soup in front of him without asking, because he was blue around the mouth and it is two in the morning in October and I am not a monster.

“Thank you,” he said, and ate half of it before he spoke again, which I liked.

“Thing one.” He took a freezer bag out of the rucksack. Inside it was a curled strip of matt black gaffer tape, about nine inches, with dust on the adhesive. “That came off the release plate. I didn’t take it off. Wes took it off at half past eight on Wednesday morning, on his own initiative, because he has done this for twenty years and he knew that by Thursday somebody would have cleaned it, and he has had it in his camera bag ever since because he did not know who to give it to.”

“Why did he give it to you?”

“He didn’t. He gave it to Nadia, and Nadia gave it to me at six o’clock tonight with a look on her face that I will be thinking about for a while.”

“Thing two.”

“Thing two is that I went to the hire company that supplied the fixed rig. They’re in Park Royal, they shut at five, I got there at twenty to.” He wiped his mouth. “Position fourteen isn’t a hire item. It’s not on their manifest. Someone bought a consumer security camera off the internet for a hundred and forty pounds and put it on the rig schedule as though it were one of theirs, which is why it doesn’t record to the same card system as the others, which is why it powers up separately, which is why it has its own log.”

I put the ladle down.

“Thing three,” said Simon, and his face changed.

“Go on.”

“Thing three is Sadie Lomax.”

—

He had gone to find Dom Yule and had not found him, because Dom Yule had been sent to a shoot in Manchester on Thursday morning at nine hours’ notice, which is one of the oldest moves there is. So Simon had gone back to the arch at ten to look at the rig schedule, and Sadie had been in the production office on her own doing the following week’s purchase orders, and had asked him, in a very small voice, whether he was going to the police.

“And then she told me,” he said.

“All of it?”

“All of it, in about two minutes, standing up, crying, into a printout of a fish order.” He had his hands round the soup bowl. “Dom asked her on Tuesday afternoon to tape the release plate. He told her it was a rig test. He told her it had been cleared by Nadia and that it was going back off at the end of the night. She taped it at five past ten and she went home at half past ten because she is on a day rate and she’d done twelve hours, and she did not know we were still in the building, and she found out what had happened on Wednesday morning from the same forty-second clip as everybody else.”

“She’s twenty-three.”

“She’s twenty-three, she’s been on the job seven months, she has no contract, she’s paid by the day, and she was asked to do something odd by a man four rungs above her who told her it was signed off.” He looked up. “And on Monday there will be a version of this where she is the person who did it. It writes itself. A runner taped a door, the runner has been let go, we take safety extremely seriously.”

The stock ticked over.

“Right,” I said.

“Ines—“

“No, I’m not arguing with you. I’m working out the order.” I turned the gas down. “What have we got that they want?”

He blinked.

“Sorry?”

“We have something they want, or none of this matters and we’re two people being sad about a girl at two in the morning.” I got the folder out of my office, the one Roz had couriered over in week one, and put it on the bench. “The personal appearance release. Episode two. It hasn’t been signed by either of us, because they’re signed weekly, at the end of the week, on the Monday. That’s Monday. That’s ten o’clock on Monday morning.”

He put the bowl down very slowly.

“Without both releases they can’t broadcast a frame of episode two,” he said.

“They can’t broadcast a frame of episode two.”

“Which is the fridge episode.”

“Which is the fridge episode, which Guy Fenner has already told me is the best thing this show has made.” I found the page and turned it round so he could read it. “So on Monday morning we go in together and we don’t sign, and we say why, and there are three things on the list and they are not negotiable. One, the walk-in material is destroyed — not shelved, destroyed, and Nadia confirms it in writing. Two, an independent contractor checks every fire door and every rig position in that building this week and the report goes to the Trust as well as to the network. Three, Sadie Lomax is kept on for the run of the series on a written contract at a proper rate, and nothing goes in her file, and nobody ever explains to her why she got lucky.”

Simon read it twice.

“You know what that costs,” he said.

“Tell me what you think it costs and we’ll see if we agree.”

“It costs us Fenner. Not loudly. He’ll be charming about it on Monday and we will never have a single easy thing from him again for the rest of this series, and at some point, probably around the finale, it will arrive.” He folded the freezer bag in half. “I’ve been on the other end of that. I know exactly what it looks like when a man like that decides you’re difficult.”

“And?”

“And I came here at twenty to two with a bag of tape and a plan to protect a runner by being a nuisance for a fortnight, which was the best I had, and you have built a better one in ninety seconds while skimming a stockpot, and I would like to be allowed to say that out loud once.”

“Twenty pounds,” I said.

“That was operational.”

“Nothing about it was operational.” I took the folder back. “Go home, Ashworth. Ten o’clock Monday. Don’t say a word to Sadie before then, because if she knows, she’ll try to stop us, and she’d be right to and it would work.”

—

It worked, on the Monday, in twelve minutes, which was the part that made me angriest.

Guy Fenner joined on a screen from a room with a very good painting in it. Nadia sat at the end of the table with a folder she did not open. I read the three points out and did not soften any of them, and Simon said one sentence, which was, “Both of us or neither of us, and it isn’t a bluff, because the alternative to signing is that we don’t sign.”

Fenner said my name. He said it was a serious matter and that he was glad we had come to him directly. He agreed to point two in about four seconds, because point two is a thing an executive can spend money on and be photographed spending money on. He agreed to point three in nine, and asked, pleasantly, whether we understood that we were asking him to put a runner on a series contract on the basis of a conversation he had not been party to, and I said yes, and he said, well, then.

Point one took the rest of it.

“Destroyed,” he said. “That’s a strong word for footage that shows two people being decent to each other in a cold room.”

“It’s the word,” I said.

And he looked at me on a screen from a room with a very good painting in it, and he smiled, and he said, “Of course. Nadia will confirm it in writing.” And that was the moment, I think, if I had to put my finger on one.

Not because it was hard. Because it was that easy, and nobody had done it, and all it had ever needed was two people who could afford to be difficult standing in a room saying no at the same time.

Sadie’s contract came through on the Wednesday. She did not know why. She came and found me in the walk-in — which had a new release plate on it by then, and a sticker with a date, and no camera on the shelf above the fish — and said that she’d been put on a proper rate and that she thought it might be a mistake, and should she say something.

“Don’t say anything,” I said. “Take the money and learn the job.”

“Chef, can I ask you something.”

“No.”

She went, and Deja, who had heard all of it from behind a rack of trays because Deja always has, came and stood next to me and looked at the empty shelf where the camera had been.

“You know he cycled from Park Royal to Bermondsey to Camberwell in the rain,” she said.

“I know.”

“And you gave him soup.”

“He was blue.”

“Mm,” said Deja, and went back to the mackerel, and did not say the other thing, and I was extremely grateful and did not say that either.