Under Their Watch

They told Joanna Orme about the camera before they let her look at the painting.

The building on Park Square had been a cloth warehouse once, and it still had the proportions of one: six storeys of dark red brick, tall windows set in rows as regular as a ledger, a stone doorway wide enough to have taken bales. Somebody had spent a great deal of money on the inside. Joanna stood in the lobby at twenty-five past eight on Monday the second of March with her tool case at her feet and her coat still buttoned, and she priced it without meaning to. Limestone floor, honed, not polished. Oak panelling, quarter-sawn. A security desk in the same oak with a man behind it who had checked her name against a printed list and then, instead of letting her through the glass barrier, had asked her to wait.

The fee was nine thousand eight hundred pounds. Fixed, ten working days, invoice on completion. It was the largest single job she had been offered since she went freelance, and it would pay the rent on the studio in Kirkstall until about the end of November. She had read the engagement letter three times on Friday night, looking for the clause that would take the money back, and had not found one. That was not the same as there not being one.

At half past eight exactly, a woman came out of the lift at the back of the lobby and walked towards her. Fifties, short and neat, iron-grey hair cut in a bob, reading glasses on a chain against a navy cardigan. She had a clipboard, and she held it the way other people hold a handbag.

"Miss Orme. Ruth Ackland. I look after the collection." A dry, brief handshake. "You found us."

"I did."

"Is that everything?" Ruth looked at the tool case, then at the canvas holdall over Joanna's shoulder.

"The rest comes by courier on Wednesday. Solvents. I don't carry them on the bus."

The glass barrier opened for Ruth's card. The lift was an old cage shaft refitted in brushed steel and oak, with a narrow upright panel of glass in each door, and it was small; Joanna and her case and Ruth and her clipboard filled it. There were seven buttons. G, one to five, and a sixth that was not a button at all but a brass plate with a keyhole in it.

Ruth took a key from her cardigan pocket. It was brass too, long in the shank, old-fashioned, on a short loop of green cord. She fitted it into the plate and turned it, and the doors closed.

"It won't go to six without that," Ruth said. "There's one lift to the top floor, and this is it. The stairs are alarmed above five."

"And if I need to get out?"

"You ring down. There's a phone by the door. Somebody comes up." Ruth did not look at her while she said it. "In an emergency the fire door opens from the inside and the alarm goes. I'd rather it didn't."

"So would I."

The numbers climbed. At five the lift paused for a breath, the way lifts do at floors they are not stopping at, and Joanna had an impression, through the narrow glass panel set into the lift doors, of carpet, more oak, a glass wall with a long room behind it, and nothing moving. Then it went on up.

"The partners' floor," Ruth said, as if Joanna had asked.

The collection room ran the length of the building. It was north-lit through a long roof lantern, and on a grey March morning the light came down into it flat and even and cool, which was exactly what anyone would have asked for, and which almost nobody got. The walls were a dark neutral grey. The air had the particular dead stillness of climate control, and a hygrometer on the wall by the door read fifty-two per cent. Twenty-odd pictures hung at eye level down both long walls, with more racked in bays at the far end behind a steel mesh screen. Joanna did not let herself look at them properly yet. She knew what she would do if she did.

At the north end, under the lantern, somebody had set up a bench for her: a long work table with an oak top, an easel, a trolley, two lamps, an extraction arm on a flexible hose. It had been done by someone who had read a list rather than by someone who had used one, and she could already see the three things she would move. But it had been done. The painting stood on the easel in its frame under a sheet of glassine, and she wanted to go straight to it the way other people want a drink.

"The form first," Ruth said. "I'm sorry. The insurer."

There was a small desk just inside the door with a chair on either side of it. Ruth sat, and put her glasses on, and turned the clipboard round.

It was four pages. Joanna read all of them, because she always read all of them, and because Ruth was plainly a woman who would notice if she didn't. Conditions of access. No food or drink within two metres of any object. No naked flame. Solvents to be logged in and out with volumes. All work carried out in the room; nothing to leave the room without two signatures, one of them a partner's. The security log, which she was to sign at arrival and departure, with the time. The fire procedure. A paragraph on photography that allowed her to take whatever documentary images she needed, provided the files stayed on the firm's own camera and not on her phone. She did not love that, but she had worked under worse.

"The room is on camera for the insurer," Ruth said, reaching across and putting the end of her pen beside a line on the third page, so there could be no argument later about whether it had been said. "The feed goes to the partners' floor."

Joanna looked up. The camera was in the corner above the door, where she had not thought to look when she came in: a small matt-black dome on a bracket, and beneath it, steady, a single red light.

"Recorded?"

"Ninety days, then overwritten. It's in the policy."

Joanna had the word fine ready. Every private collection worth insuring had a camera somewhere, and every one she had ever worked in had fed it to a screen in a room where a man in a fleece ate a sandwich and watched the car park instead. She had been filmed cleaning a Stubbs in a house outside Harrogate for three weeks, and on the last day the owner had asked her what the black thing on the wall was.

Ruth did not wait for it. She took the pen off the page and laid it across the form, and did not turn to the next sheet.

"Mr Harker will explain the rest of that line himself," she said. "He asked to. He's on his way up."

Joanna heard the lift go down, and not long after heard it come back up. The doors opened at the end of the landing and a man came through the door of the room and stopped just inside it, under the corner where the camera was, and did not come any further.

He was tall and very lean: a long, spare man in a charcoal suit and a white shirt, built on long bones, with nothing on him that did not need to be there. Black hair, thick, cut close at the back and sides and left longer on top and combed straight back off his forehead, and it stayed there. A long narrow face, pale and clean-shaven, with a hard line to the jaw. Dark eyes under heavy lids, so that he looked half asleep until he looked at you, and then he did not. In his forties. His name was at the head of her engagement letter, above a signature she had looked at for a long time before she countersigned it.

He did not offer his hand.

"Miss Orme. Stephen Harker." He looked at the form under Ruth's pen, not at her. "Ruth's read you the line about the camera. It's accurate and it isn't enough. So here's the rest of it. The feed comes to my desk on the fifth floor and nowhere else. The people who watch it are Martin Greaves, Simon Caddick and me. Mostly me. Not the insurer. The insurer wants a recording kept for ninety days and has never asked to see a minute of one."

"Why?" Joanna said.

"Two reasons." Now he looked at her. "The painting's insured for one million four hundred thousand pounds and you'll be alone in a room with it and a bottle of solvent. That's the reason on the form, and it's true. The second is that we like watching somebody who is very good at something, and your references say you are. You'd have worked that out for yourself inside a week. I'd sooner say it now."

He said it the way she would have said a canvas was lined. There was nothing in his voice that asked her to feel anything about it.

"The camera's in this room," he went on, "and nowhere else. None on the lift, none on the landing. Nobody will go near your flat or your studio. Ruth has your number because it's on your letter, and it's in a drawer she keeps locked. When you walk out at the bottom of the building, nobody in this firm knows where you are, and nobody will try to. If any of that turns out not to be true, you'll have my resignation in writing the same day."

He took a folded sheet from his inside pocket and put it on the desk beside the form, and did not push it any nearer to her.

"If you'd rather not be watched, you won't be. There's a secure conservation studio in York, approved by our insurer and two others. They'll hold a bay for you from today until the job's done. The fee is the same, nine thousand eight hundred pounds, on the same terms, and the firm pays their bay rate, which is four hundred and twenty pounds a week. A fine-art courier takes the painting from this room in a climate case the afternoon you ask, and it's in York by six. Their camera goes to a security company in Sheffield that has never heard of you. The transfer's drafted. It wants my signature and yours." He looked at the sheet, and then back at her. "You don't have to decide in front of me. Tell Ruth, today or any day after, and she'll ring the courier. If you tell her nothing, the painting stays here and so does the camera. I won't ask you again."

He waited, briefly, to see whether she had a question. She did not have one she could put into words yet. He nodded to Ruth and went, and she heard the lift take him down one floor and stop.

Joanna unfolded the sheet. The figures were typed, and they were the ones he had said, and his name was typed at the bottom above a line with nothing on it yet. It was a good offer. She knew what a bay in a secure studio cost and what a courier with a climate case cost at a morning's notice, and nobody had ever arranged either of them for her without being asked. He had made it so that she could take it.

She thought of every monitor she had ever been filmed by, on desks nobody sat at. This one had three names at the end of it, and one of them had just come upstairs to say so to her face, and why, and had not waited to be thanked. She found she was not frightened by that. She found, looking at the glassine over the easel at the far end of the room, that she was something she did not have a word for yet, and that it was not far from wanting.

She folded the sheet again and put it face down under the form.

"I'll work here," she said.

Ruth picked up the pen. "I'll tell him."

"You needn't. He said that if I told you nothing, it stays here."

Something that might have been approval went across Ruth's face and was gone. "So he did."

Joanna signed at the bottom of each page. Ruth countersigned, dated it, and wrote 08.56 beside the date.

"Security log." A second, narrower book. Joanna wrote her name and 08.57 and her signature, and Ruth took both books back, and the folded sheet with them, and stood up.

"Now," Ruth said, "you can look at her."

Joanna took off her coat and hung it on the back of the chair. Underneath she had dressed for work the way she always dressed for work: dark trousers cut close to the leg, a fine grey jumper, the sleeves pushed up to the elbow because otherwise they got into everything. She took the white cotton lab coat out of her holdall and put it on, and did up two of the buttons, and then reached back and twisted her hair into a low tight knot and pushed the bamboo skewer through it to hold it. She had done this so many thousands of times that her hands did not consult her about it.

She was aware, briefly, of the room around her and of how little of it she took up. She was five foot three and she had never been anything but narrow, and the bench had been set at a height for someone six inches taller. That was the first of the three things.

Then she turned back the glassine.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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