‘We’re the last. All done for the day. Just locking up,’ said the younger man, eager to sound helpful.

‘But the floors aren’t all in yet,’ protested his older mate. ‘Not beyond the fifth, at any rate. And the external sheeting doesn’t go beyond that, either.’

Gwen leaned right back, and stared up into the early evening sky. The building construction loomed over her, a vertiginous cliff of scaffolding and grey concrete. Far above, a dirty orange crane poked out above the top floor. Green fabric netting flapped in the breeze around the unfinished office block, a rippling sign announcing that it was a Levall-Mellon development.

‘The site manager’ll have my guts. I can’t be blamed if you lot get yourselves killed.’ The construction worker’s tone had changed completely now. Gwen recognised it from a dozen similar encounters with her new team. The people you encountered started out superior, arrogant. And when faced down by anonymous authority, they were cowed into submission. Or, like now, they started looking to offload the responsibility they’d made such a fuss about to start with. That’s when you knew they weren’t going to be a problem, because they no longer wanted that authority.

She pointed to the yellow hard hat clipped to his waist. ‘I’ll need that,’ she said. He hesitated. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all day.’ She pulled the door open again. ‘Lock this behind me.’

Beyond the chipboard barrier, it was gloomier than in the street outside. Gwen paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. She tried the hard hat and found that the guy’s head was much bigger than hers. She gave up trying to adjust it, and placed the hat on the edge of a rusting yellow skip. The skip was half-full of rubble, grey chunks of broken wall and spiral scraps of concrete reinforcement steel.