The stairs up to the lab had never felt so long. Nadia went first, in her borrowed tunic, with Liesel a step behind in her ruined coat and Sol a step behind that, carrying a mop she had decided, on the pavement, to keep.

The lab door stood open. Light fell out of it in a flat white slab, and with it came voices, one of them Toby's, high and bright and slightly too fast, the voice of a man narrating his own funeral.

"...and that one's for calibration, that's the only reason it's got a label, nothing sinister, I just like things labelled, ask anyone, I label my leftovers. I once labelled a banana."

"Lovely," said a woman's voice, dry as toast. "Please step away from the drawer, Mr. Eze."

"Sorry. Sorry! Yes."

Nadia stopped on the threshold and took the room in at once, the way she would a reaction gone wrong.

Her lab had been opened like a fish. Every drawer was out. Every cupboard door stood wide. On the bench two men in grey Registry fleeces were photographing everything in turn, the balance, the centrifuge, the GC-MS with its cheerful green light, and a third figure, a small, round woman in a beige raincoat and sensible shoes, was sitting at Nadia's own desk with a tablet and a thermos, ticking things off a list. Toby stood in the middle of the floor with his hands half raised, as though he had been told to look innocent and was doing it from a diagram.

And on the shelf above the bench, the autoclave, in its tablecloth, sat untouched.

"Ah," said the woman in the raincoat, without looking up. "The tenant."

"The tenant," said Nadia, "wants to know by whose authority."

"Mine." The woman held up a laminated card on a lanyard and, behind it, a sheet of paper stamped in three colours. "Odalys Ferreira-Singh. Registry Compliance. Warrant for inspection of unlicensed pharmaceutical premises, signed this evening by the Director. You're Ms. Quispe-Halloran?" Her eyes lifted at last, small and brown and unhurried. "And you've brought a friend. Two. And a mop."

Nadia heard Sol, behind her, take a very careful breath.

*Odalys. In Compliance. Keeps a ledger of the biscuits.*

"This is a very well-labelled laboratory," said Odalys, turning back to her tablet. "I'll say that. I've seen worse in hospitals. Mr. Eze, is it true that the large grey machine is a gas chromatograph?"

"It's a very good gas chromatograph," said Toby, to the ceiling. "For, um, soap."

"For soap."

"We do a lot of soap."

"It has a hospital serial number."

"We bought it second-hand."

"From a hospital that was closed down last year, and from which seventeen items are listed as missing." Odalys made a note, and for a moment her mouth twitched. "Which is not a charge. That's an observation. Do you see the difference?"

"I'd love to," said Toby faintly.

"Ms. Ostergaard-Banda," Odalys said then, without turning. "Good evening. I did not expect to see you."

Liesel stepped into the light.

She had pulled herself together on the stairs; Nadia had watched it happen, a series of small adjustments, the shoulders, the chin, the hand smoothing the coat. Now she stood in the middle of the lab like a woman in a receiving line, composed and warm and entirely unreadable, and the miracle was that it worked.

"Odalys," she said. "How lovely. I do hope this is quick. The Director asked me to look in. He thought it would be easier if there were a familiar face." She smiled. "He sends his best."

"Does he."

"He's very anxious that nothing is damaged."

"It's a Registry warrant, Ms. Ostergaard-Banda. We damage nothing. We take photographs, we tag, we record. Afterwards, the Director decides what is seized." Odalys's pen paused. "I'm curious why he would send you to hold my hand. I've never needed it."

"Perhaps he's fond of you."

"He is not," said Odalys, pleasantly. "Nobody has ever been fond of me. It's the biscuits."

The room held its breath. One of the men in fleeces coughed.

In the silence, a new sound came up the stairwell: footsteps, quick and heavy, taking the steps two at a time, and with them a voice calling, impatient and strained, from the landing below.

"Toby? Mr. Eze? I came as fast as I could, there's a, there's a *car* on the pavement..."

Kaveh Dastgheib reached the lab door in his shirtsleeves, his tie half undone and his hair in disarray, an expression of complete and unrehearsed alarm on his face. He had run. Nadia had not known he could run. He stopped on the threshold, took in the open drawers and the fleeces and the camera flashes, and then he saw Liesel, and his whole face went still.

"Liesel," he said.

"Kaveh."

It was a very small word, and a very large silence.

"I messaged him," said Toby, from the middle of the floor, in a rush. "At eleven forty-two. I know I said I wouldn't, Nadia, but I was frightened and he'd given me his number in case of emergencies and he'd said it was in case of, and I thought this was an *emergency*, and also I thought maybe he'd come with a, a lawyer, or a, um, a hat."

"A hat," said Kaveh.

"For authority."

"Noted." Kaveh straightened. Slowly, with an effort Nadia could see, he buttoned his collar and pulled the knot of his tie into place. When he turned to Odalys, he was the auditor again, and the room understood it before he spoke. "Odalys. This premises is part of an open Registry investigation. It is my investigation. I have been running it for six weeks, and I did not authorise a Compliance sweep."

"I have a warrant."

"Which is signed by the Director."

"Yes."

"Who also, under section eleven of the Operating Protocol, may not issue a warrant for a premises under audit without the auditor's countersignature." He took out his phone, tapped twice, and held it up. A form, a cursive header, a red stamp. "Here is my notification of audit. Filed on Tuesday. Time-stamped. You will find, if you check, that it was lodged with the Director's office. I should think it has been sitting in his inbox unread."

Odalys stared at the screen for a long moment. She took off her glasses, wiped them on her raincoat, and put them on again.

"Well," she said at last. "That's a technicality."

"It is the only thing I have ever been any good at."

"It's a *beautiful* technicality." She stood, with a small grunt, and began to pack her thermos. "Right. I'm going to leave. All of you are going to stay where you are, and my team are going to put everything back in the drawers, and I am going to write a report saying the premises were found to be under a prior audit and the sweep was suspended pending clarification. It will take about a week to be read."

"Thank you," said Kaveh.

"Don't. I haven't done it for you." She shouldered her bag, gave the lab a long, sad, comprehensive look, and crossed to Nadia on her way out. For a moment she stood very close, a small round woman in a beige raincoat, smelling, presumably, of biscuits and ink.

Then she put something into Nadia's palm, warm from her pocket, no bigger than a thumbnail.

"Wren Castellanos-Boyd was my friend," Odalys said, very low, so that only Nadia could hear. "She sat opposite me for nine years. She told me she wasn't what she seemed, and she told me who to give this to if she ever fell. I assumed she meant someone from the family. Then I saw your name on the warrant." Her eyes were wet, and furious. "I think she'd have liked you. She was always rude about people with lab coats."

She was gone before Nadia could answer.

The two men in fleeces packed up their cameras in sheepish silence and followed. In the lab, only the five of them were left, among the open drawers and the quiet hum of the fridge: Toby, white as paper; Sol, clutching her mop; Liesel by the window; Kaveh, with the cold fixed expression of a man who has kept his head through an emergency only to find the harder one standing beside it.

Nadia closed her hand over the thing Odalys had given her. A memory stick. Small, black, scratched, with a strip of masking tape on one side and, in blue marker, a single word.

*Register.*

Kaveh was looking at Liesel. Liesel was looking at the floor.

"Dr. Quispe-Halloran," said Kaveh at last, without turning. "Would you be so kind as to tell me why my mate is in your laboratory at midnight?"

"I'd rather she told you," said Nadia.

"I would rather," said Kaveh, "that nobody had to." He turned then, finally, and looked at Liesel full on. It was not an angry look. That was the dreadful thing about it. It was the look of a man reading a long document he had already signed. "Liesel."

Liesel lifted her chin. Nadia saw the Ostergaard training come up in her like a tide, the poise, the smile ready at the corner of the mouth, and saw her put it down on purpose, one piece at a time, like a woman setting her luggage on a platform.

"I knew it was an arrangement," she said. "My mother told me when I was twenty-eight. I said no, and then I said yes, because I was frightened and I wanted to keep the house and the seat and Saoirse in the same life. I didn't know about the forgery. I swear it. I thought the Assay would be a formality. I thought the world was kinder than it is." Her voice shook but did not break. "I did not know about the tea until this afternoon. But I made it, Kaveh. I put the leaf in the strainer with my own hands. And that is mine, whatever my mother did. I would give a great deal to take it back."

Nobody in the lab moved. In the corner the fridge shuddered and was still.

"Saoirse," said Kaveh.

"Yes."

"Is she the reason you have never once stayed for breakfast."

"Yes."

"I see." He nodded, slowly, once. Then, with a fastidious care that was almost unbearable to watch, he took out his pocket square, folded it into a perfect triangle, and handed it to her, because she was crying again. "Noted," he said.

It was the quietest thing Nadia had ever heard.

Liesel took the square. She did not say thank you. She pressed it to her face and bent over, and for a moment the entire lab, the chemist, the courier, the boy with the banana, looked in different directions.

"Mr. Eze," said Kaveh, in a perfectly level voice. "I believe there is a kettle."

"There is!" Toby bolted for it like a man released from a bomb. "Yes. Tea. Tea, absolutely. I only have the rubbish sort, there's a, there's actually a pastry..."

"Wonderful."

"Kaveh," said Liesel, behind the handkerchief. "There's one more thing, and I'd like to say it before I lose my nerve. Nadia has an idea."

"I do not," said Nadia, "have an idea."

"She does. It's a good one. It solves everything. It has to do with you and her and a, a registration." She looked up, red-eyed and reckless. "You'd both be safer. The Director's list, Kaveh. She's number eight."

Kaveh went rigid.

"I do not have an idea," said Nadia again, rather loudly, over the sound of Toby dropping a mug.

"Number eight," said Kaveh, quite softly, "of what?"