The ovens were lit by three. Nadia had forgotten that, or had never known it: that a bakery on the Floor began its day while the rest of the city was still deciding whether to have one. Down in the shop the dough-slappers were already at work, two boys in flour-white aprons with their sleeves rolled and the radio turned low to a station that played only old love songs with the singers' names read out in between. Warm air came up the back stairs smelling of yeast and burnt sugar. It was the first thing she had smelled in a day that was not fear.

She stood in Imelda's kitchen in her damp socks, because she had left her shoes on the mat, because that was the rule, and watched a grey tom the size of a doormat wind his way between her ankles with total indifference to the end of the world.

"Sit," said Imelda. "Both of you. You make the room look like a funeral and I have only the one tablecloth."

Kaveh sat. Nadia sat. The cat chose Kaveh, which was a mark of something, though she could not have said what. He placed one hand on its back with the caution of a man being handed a bomb.

Sol was in the corner, cross-legged on a flour sack, eating a roll with the grim speed of someone who had been up for twenty hours and driven for fourteen of them. She had said very little since they arrived. She had hugged Nadia too long at the door. Fenwick Okoro-Lund was asleep in the loft above them, in a nest of aprons, snoring in a gentle bubbling way like a kettle thinking about it.

Nadia laid it out. She did it the way she wrote up a bad batch, flat and numbered: the ledger, the leaf, the brackets; Idris and the one word; the retrieval slip; Dov's call. Then the breakfast. When she reached *Dr Quispe-Halloran*, Imelda's mouth thinned, and Nadia saw the old woman's hands, which had been kneading nothing on the tablecloth, go still.

"He wants to see you," Imelda said. "Not the book. Not the fake bond. You."

"He says he'll have the notebook there."

"He'll have a notebook. I'd not swear it's the notebook." Imelda leaned back. The chair complained. "Seven-thirty. Good. Early. Men like him think early is honest."

"I'm going with her," said Kaveh.

"You're going with her because the Director asked for both. If he'd said the chemist alone, you'd be on the stairs with a hat in your hand."

"Noted."

"Don't *noted* me, boy, I taught your mother to make plaits."

A beat. Kaveh's face did something Nadia had never seen it do, which was fail to arrange itself. "You didn't," he said.

"I did not," said Imelda. "But you looked, so I know your mother can't." She almost smiled, and it went out of her again in a breath. "Listen, the pair of you. There is a way to eat with a man like Dov and a way not to. The way not to is to be hungry. You eat first, here, now, before you go up. You do not drink what he pours. You do not say *Director*, you say *Dov*, because he'll like that and liking is a rope. You do not look at his hands."

"Why not his hands?"

"Because they are the only part of him that is not kind."

Nobody said anything. Down in the shop, a tray hit a counter. A singer on the radio was named, and applauded by a studio audience that had probably all been dead for forty years.

Nadia took a breath. It had been in her chest for six hours, and she let it out now, because there was no good time and this was the next one.

"Margit told us something at the house," she said. "She went twice to my father's clinic, once to ask and once to beg. And the night he died, she saw a man go in, a tall man in a coat. With a key."

Imelda did not move. The cat, as if offended, got down from Kaveh's lap.

"With a key," Nadia said again. "Not with a knock. Not with a buzz at the door. The front was locked and he had a key. And there were three keys to that clinic, Imelda. My father had one. I had one, which I gave back to him the day I walked out. And you had the third, because you own the building."

It was very quiet. Nadia heard the oven fan, and Sol's roll stop halfway to Sol's mouth. She heard her own voice, thin and perfectly level. "I didn't give mine to anyone. Did you?"

Imelda had not looked away. That was the worst of it; she was not a woman who looked away. She sat with her big square hands flat on the table, and her old face, which had borne eleven landlord's disputes and two floods, seemed to Nadia to shift on its bones.

"Mija," she said.

"Don't."

"I'll say it. I want to say it before you do the sum for me." A pause. "The night before your father died, a man came to the bakery door. Half past nine. Dov Albrecht-Nwosu. I had not seen him in twenty years, not since the old Assay lot sold the Cutbank block. He stood on my step in a coat the colour of tea and he asked after my knees."

"And?"

"And he said he'd been trying to reach Pablo all week, they were boys at the university together, and Pablo's phone was off. And that he was worried. He said, *I'm not sure he's well, Imelda. I'm not sure he's eating.* And that he'd like only to look in. To leave a casserole." Her voice stayed even, and Nadia thought for the first time that the evenness was a thing she was holding with both hands. "There was a casserole, mija. He had it with him. A dish with a lid and a tea-towel. He held it up on my step like a man holding up his papers."

"You gave him the key."

"I gave him the ring. The whole ring. I was getting my bread out; I thought he'd drop it at the shop in the morning." Imelda's mouth thinned into a line. "He did. At seven. Pressed into my hand, thanked me. He asked me if I'd heard about the flood walls. We talked about the flood walls."

Nadia had stopped being able to feel her hands.

"Seven in the morning," she said. "My father was found at seven-forty. By Mr Adeyemi from the dry cleaner's. On the floor."

"I know when."

"You knew when you sat in this kitchen two days ago and told me you suspected foul play. You *knew*. You told me about the girl with the hatbox and the money and the six weeks. You did not once say, *I lent a man the key.*"

"I was ashamed."

"You were *proud*." It came out of Nadia like a cork. "That's what it is with you. That's what it's always been. You'd rather lose a whole building than ask somebody for help, and you'd rather let a girl think her father fell on his own than say, *I handed over the door.*"

"Nadia," said Kaveh, quietly.

"No." She stood. Her chair scraped. "No, I'm allowed this one."

Imelda said nothing. Her face, which had once been strong, was only old now, and Nadia saw that, and hated that she saw it, and went on anyway. "Three years. I spent three years thinking it was *my* fault. Fourteen months of not speaking to him, and then he was dead, and I thought I'd killed him by being right about the money. And all this time you knew a man had a key."

"I did not know it was a *murder*," Imelda said. "I knew a friend brought a casserole. A stroke is a stroke, mija. It's a thing that happens to old men who work too hard. It was only when the Assayer died, when Wren, when I heard how the lady fell. That is when I... when the casserole began to smell."

"When was that?"

"Three weeks."

"Three weeks!"

"Three weeks and four days. I had a proverb ready. I couldn't find one." The old woman put her palm flat to her breastbone. She was breathing like a swimmer. "I'm seventy-one years old. I have never once had to say sorry to a child of this Tenancy for a thing I could not undo. I had not the first word of how."

Sol had put down the roll. In the corner, very softly, she said, "Imelda. Say it anyway."

Imelda looked at her. Then at Nadia. The kitchen was lit by one yellow bulb and the greying window; the cat had returned and was sitting under the table with the air of a magistrate.

"I am sorry," she said. It was not eloquent. It came out like a plank being laid across a ditch. "I am sorry. I should have said it the first night. I should have said it when you walked into this room with your father's bread in your hand and asked me who killed him."

Nadia stood with her fingers pressed hard against the table's edge and did not sit. She did not forgive anybody. She did not know how, either; that was the other thing she had inherited. But the anger she had been carrying for three years had found its address at last, and somewhere under it, quietly, she felt the unbearable relief of a result that finally agreed with the model.

"A casserole," she said. "In a dish with a lid."

"Blue," said Imelda. "With a white rim."

"My father hated casseroles."

"I know," said Imelda. "I thought that was strange too."

Kaveh got slowly to his feet. He looked at neither of them, but at the window, where the dark was starting to go the colour of dishwater. "Imelda," he said. "The dish. Did you see it again?"

A long breath. "The next morning. When he came with the ring. He had no dish."

"So it was left," Kaveh said. "At the clinic."

"It was left."

Nadia felt the idea arrive, cold, like a coin dropped down a well. "The clinic's been shut for three years," she said. "Nobody's let it. It's still in the lease. There was an evidence tag on the door for a month and then they took it off." She looked at Imelda, and for the first time that night, she let herself look at her properly. "Did you ever clear the kitchen?"

Imelda's mouth worked. "I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't go in."

Somewhere beneath them an oven door slammed, and the smell of the first loaves rose through the floor, warm and ordinary, the smell of a city beginning again without having been asked.