"Sit," said Odalys. "Not there. That one's got a wobble. Sit there, and don't let the cat see you eat."

There was no cat. There was a plate of onion fritters on the table, a window over the sink with a geranium in it, and a smell of frying that Nadia found, to her intense irritation, enough to bring her to the edge of tears. She sat in the chair that did not wobble. Kaveh remained standing by the fridge with his badge in his fist, until Odalys put a fritter in his other hand without looking at him, and he looked down at it as at a summons.

"Eat," she said. "You can be suspended on a full stomach as easily as an empty one."

The flat was on the sixth tier of the Strata, three floors above a dentist, and it had the settled disorder of a person who had lived alone for a long time on purpose: books in drifts, a sewing machine under a dust cover, a framed photograph on the dresser of two women in office lanyards pulling faces at the camera. Nadia knew one of them without being told. Wren Castellanos-Boyd had a long face and a mouth that was trying not to laugh, and she was holding up a biscuit tin as though it were a trophy.

Odalys saw her looking and did not turn the photograph over. "Nine years," she said. "I sat across from her nine years. Do you know the thing I remember most? She'd hum when she was thinking. Never a tune. A sort of tuneless... engine."

"I'm sorry."

"I know. Everybody is." She sat down heavily, got up, fetched a teapot, sat down again. "I didn't bring you here to be sorry at. I brought you here because there's a thing I haven't told you, and I'd like to tell it somewhere that isn't the Registry."

Kaveh set the fritter on the table, uneaten. "You've been very brave tonight."

"Don't be nice. I can't carry nice." She pushed her glasses up. "The driver. Your Mr Ferris said red scarf. Man in his thirties, a bit stooped, a way of apologising before he's done anything? Yes?"

Nadia hadn't seen him. Kaveh said, slowly, "Ferris said the red scarf and no more."

"His name is Idris Castellanos-Boyd. He is Wren's brother." She let that stand a moment. "Her little brother. He drives a cab because he can't sit in a room. He came to the funeral in that scarf, and I said, Idris, love, you could have worn black, and he said it was the last thing she knitted him and he wasn't going to be told. He doesn't believe she fell. He has never believed it. For three weeks he's been parked outside that annex at all hours, in a car with its light off, writing down plates."

"Three weeks," said Nadia.

"He's very stubborn. It runs in the family." Odalys took a long breath. "At twenty-one minutes past two this afternoon I got a text from a number I didn't know. One word. I was in the Compliance kitchen, standing by the kettle. I thought it was spam."

She put her phone on the table and turned it so they could read.

*shortbread.*

Nadia looked at the word and her skin did something strange. It was not an emotion; it was an assay, a quick small test, her body checking whether a result she had hoped for was going to hold. She said, "She never told her brother the password."

"She told him a long time ago. It was their mother's joke before it was ours. Wren said once that the only thing worth keeping a secret was the thing nobody would bother to ask about." Odalys's voice cracked on the last word and then mended itself, as if she were running a hem. "He knows the first place I'd look at it. He knows I'd understand. So he's telling me two things: he's alive when he sent it, and he's where he can't say."

"Inside," Kaveh said.

"He's inside. He drove her in. He drove Liesel in on purpose, I think. Idris had been waiting for a fare that went to that bay." She gave him a look over the top of her glasses. "Mr Dastgheib, your wife..."

"My registered mate."

"... your registered mate told that driver something in the back of his cab that made him decide to walk into the building behind her. I'd give a good deal to know what."

Nobody spoke. In the next flat, a television laughed. Nadia pictured the back of a taxi: Liesel Ostergaard-Banda with her hands in her lap and a notebook in her bag that could unmake a city, talking low to a man in a red scarf, and the man, who had spent three weeks listening to the plates of the people who killed his sister, hearing a woman say *take me to the Director.*

"She's not a hostage," Nadia said. "Or she is, but she's a hostage who chose it. That's the thing I can't put down. Saoirse went in at ten. Liesel followed her at two. They each signed their own name. Nobody dragged anyone."

"Which is how Dov likes it," said Odalys. "He's never taken a person in his life. He just makes it the best-looking option."

Kaveh sat down at last. It was the first time he had sat since the Rim, and he did it like a man lowering something heavy onto a shelf too thin for it. He still held the badge. Its plastic corner had left a white crescent in his palm.

"I should report this," he said.

"To whom?" said Nadia.

"That is exactly the problem."

"You've been suspended, not exiled. You can still tell the Registry what it already knows."

"I can send a letter to the Director's office, who will lose it, or to the Ombudsman, who will acknowledge it in six to eight weeks." His tone was the one he used for forms. "Section fourteen is a clean instrument. It cannot be appealed during an active disappearance. It exists to protect the Registry from a spouse's judgement, which is, I have been told, a sound principle. I helped to draft the appendix."

Odalys put her hand over her mouth. Nadia, who had never heard him make a joke at his own expense, wanted for a moment to take his face in both hands and shake it. She did not. She slid the plate of fritters six inches nearer him instead.

"What was in the filing room?" she said to Odalys. "You said you wanted to tell us somewhere that wasn't the Registry. That wasn't it, was it? The brother."

"That was half." Odalys got up, and went to the dresser, and from behind the photograph took out a flat brown envelope soft with handling. "This was in Wren's own drawer, in the Compliance stack, under a false bottom she'd glued herself. I only found it on Monday, because I was looking for the stapler. It's a request slip. A retrieval request for a Registry file, stamped three days before she died."

She slid it across. Nadia took it first. It was a yellow slip in a standard pre-printed form: requester, date, file reference. The requester was W. Castellanos-Boyd. The file reference was a string of letters and digits Nadia did not recognise, and beneath it, in capitals, in the box marked *Reason for Retrieval*, was a single entry.

*Clarification of signatory.*

Kaveh read it over her shoulder. She felt him go still behind her, the way one goes still on a stair that is suddenly one step short.

"That's my file," he said. "That reference. It's the Dastgheib-Ostergaard bond. The original filing, not the renewals."

"Wren pulled your bond three days before she died."

"She was checking the signature." He said it very softly. "The looped D on Okoro-Lund's envelopes. Wren was a nose, not a chemist; she'd have seen the same signature on a filing and a forged script, and known it wasn't a coincidence. She was going to put it in front of someone."

"Dov," said Nadia.

"Or me." His voice did not change at all. "She sat four desks from me for six years, and she never once came across the floor. I wonder why. I wonder what she saw when she looked at me."

"A man who'd have felt obliged to report her," said Odalys, gently, and Nadia saw it land.

He folded the slip once along its crease and put it into his inside pocket beside the dead badge. Nobody commented. He did the little straightening thing with the lapel that she was beginning to read as the equivalent of a man putting his head in his hands.

The phone on the table buzzed.

Not Odalys's. Kaveh's, in his breast pocket, a plain business ring from the days when the Registry owned his ringtone. He took it out. His thumb hovered. The screen said only *Director*, in the grey font the Registry gave to superiors, and he looked at it for exactly the length of time it took Nadia to count to four.

"Put it on speaker," she said.

"He'll know."

"He knows everything else."

Kaveh pressed the glass.

"Kaveh." The voice was warm and tired and unhurried, as if it had been calling at this hour all its life and was happy to wait. "I'm so sorry about the letter. I wanted to tell you myself before the system did. I got a little behind."

"Director."

"Dov, please. Always. You know that." A small, kind pause. "I wanted to say first that Liesel is quite safe. She's in the guest suite on the fifth floor, resting. She was exhausted, poor thing. She has the notebook, and she has handed it to me, in a spirit of great generosity, and I have not opened it. I wanted you to know I haven't opened it."

Nadia stopped breathing. Across the table, Odalys had turned a colour that did not bear thinking about.

"The renewal is at nine," Dov went on. "I thought we might have breakfast first. You and I, at the Founders' Room, seven-thirty. A proper table. Something with eggs." Another pause, the careful, fatherly pause of a man choosing a word he knows is going to be a knife. "And do please bring Dr Quispe-Halloran. I'd so like to meet her properly. We haven't been introduced, and I think we've both been rude about it."

The line clicked softly. Not a hang-up. A man setting down a cup.

On the table, between a plate of cold fritters and a brown envelope, the screen went dark. Nadia sat with her hands under her thighs, as she had done in school when she did not trust them, and listened to her own name hang in the kitchen like something that had been said at last.