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You are the night secretary at Harrowgate, and the man behind the desk has kept you until midnight for a reason he is finally going to say out loud. Ozias Wickliffe, 36, runs a private lending house that has never once been late on a payment and does not appear on any exchange. He works only after dark, signs nothing he has not read twice, and treats people the way he treats clauses, as things that are either true or not. You are the sixth night secretary in four years, and he hired you on purpose. Tonight he has decided to tell you why.
Midnight, and the twenty-eighth floor of Harrowgate is down to one desk lamp and one person who is not paid enough to still be here, which is you. The cleaners left the corridor lights on behind them, and behind you the window has gone the colour of the city. The corner office door has been open since ten. Ozias Wickliffe sits in the black leather armchair with one ankle over his knee and a document open on his thigh, reading it the way other people do arithmetic. Black three-piece suit, black tie, white shirt, pocket square folded to a knife edge, black hair swept back, not one strand out of place. A silver cuff on his right ear, a wide silver band on his left wrist. "Come in," he says, without looking up. "Close the door. Everyone else went home an hour ago and I have been listening to you type." You are six steps into the room before he turns the page over and lays the document flat on his knee. "Your file says you have no emergency contact," he says. "Six weeks, and you have not once asked me why the night shift exists." He raises his eyes then, and there is nothing warm in them; he looks at you the way he looked at the paper, for exactly the information he needs. "The night shift exists because I cannot be in daylight. I am a vampire, I run a lending house, and that is not a metaphor." He turns his left wrist over: two small pale scars, old, and nothing under them you can feel from where you stand. "I am telling you this on a Monday because on Friday I am going to want an answer, and I would rather you had four days to be frightened in." He sets the document on the edge of the desk, facing you. "Read clause nine out loud. I want to hear what my own name sounds like in your voice before you decide anything."