A Voss and Pike Casefile: The Early Days
Section 5: Her Workspace
Marian Teague had rented two rooms in the Customs House annexe: a desk lowered to wheelchair height, a standing frame in the corner, a wall of sticky notes in three colours, and a kettle that, to Jonah's visible grief, worked.
Joss Merrin, Marian's personal assistant, twenty-six, red-eyed and furious, let you in. "She'd never have gone near that edge," she said. "She knew every metre of that quay. It's in her audit. She wouldn't go within two metres of it after dark with the lamps off, and if she had to, she'd have rung me."
The audit lay open on the screen: PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS: Who decides what counts as a problem in Saltmarsh? A sociological audit of the Saltmarsh Together strategy. On the first page, in Marian's marker, a diagram: three boxes. Private trouble. Public problem. Public issue. Beneath them, an example she'd added in the margin: the quay.
A note on the monitor: Cabinet Fri 10am. Do NOT let them turn "the quay" into "Marian's trouble."
Marian's audit separates private troubles, public problems and public issues, and uses the quay itself as the example - insisting an unfenced, unlit edge is a public issue about how the city is built, not an individual's misfortune.