The clinic door still said *Quispe Family Practice* in gold paint that had long ago stopped being gold. Someone had stuck a flyer over the second *e* for a pop-up kebab van. Someone else had scrawled across the flyer, in marker, *Doctor was good.*

Nadia stood on the pavement with the key in her fist and did not put it in the lock.

It was ten past five. The lane had that thin grey stillness that comes before the first delivery vans, when the gutters are running and a single bin lid somewhere is knocking itself in the wind. Sol had dropped them at the corner and parked a street away with her hazards off; Kaveh stood a half-pace behind Nadia's shoulder with his hands in his pockets and said nothing, which she was learning was a form of courtesy he took very seriously.

"It's a key," she said. "It's brass. It's cut for a lock that works. There's nothing in it."

"You have said that twice."

"I'm checking."

"Take the time you need. We have until half past seven."

"We have until the sun comes up, and I'm not afraid of that either." She turned the key. The lock went over with a sound so ordinary she felt it in her teeth.

Inside the waiting room the dust had a different smell from the street's. It smelled like a church that had never had a congregation, and under the dust, much fainter, sat something she had not been braced for: the thin antiseptic sweetness of the hand gel her father bought by the drum. Her mind did the thing it did with a result it did not want. It went flat, and began to read.

Floor: lino, sea-green, cracked at the door. Chairs, nine, bolted in a row. A rack of leaflets on hearing loss and a poster of a cartoon kidney with a worried expression. A glass hatch with a sign: *Please take a number.* The counter where Mrs Beaufort had sat for fourteen years, with a plastic fern. Eleven pencils in a mug.

"Nadia."

"I'm fine. Kitchen's through the back."

She went first, because it was her father's, and he went second, because it was her father's, and neither of them said so.

The kitchen was a staff room that had never been intended to be one: a Formica table, two mismatched chairs, a kettle, a fridge with a magnet shaped like a small pineapple. The fridge was dead. The door gaped an inch where the seal had given. Someone, once, had propped it open with a rolled-up newspaper, and the newspaper was dated three years ago on Tuesday.

The dish was on the table.

She had known it would be and it still stopped her in the doorway. It was a plain oval casserole, glazed a deep blue, with a white rim chipped in one place like a bitten nail. Its lid sat crooked. Beside it lay a folded tea-towel, checked, grey with age. The sort of thing you might see in any kitchen on the Floor, which was the point of the sort of thing it was.

"Don't touch it," Kaveh said.

"I wasn't going to."

"Your hand was."

Her hand was. She put it back in her pocket.

He had gloves. Of course he did; a man who went about with a pen for his crosswords had gloves for the unthinkable. Thin white ones from the inside pocket of his coat, drawn on with a small distinct snap. He lifted the lid with two fingers and an economy that made it seem the lid was lifting itself.

A long, soft sigh of ancient smell. Nadia put her sleeve to her nose. It was not as bad as she had expected. The stew had gone to a grey and blue mould that lay over its surface in a perfect velvet skin, and someone, years before, had taken precisely one spoonful out of it.

"One," she said. "He took one spoonful."

"A small one." Kaveh angled his phone torch. "Look at the lip of the dish. There's a drop that ran down. He put the spoon back on the side of the plate and went to answer the door, or the phone, or something. And did not come back to it."

"Or he was already..."

"Or the stew was already doing what it was meant to do."

The words sat in the room.

Nadia got her bag open. She was not a woman who left a house without sample vials, and the habit that had made Toby laugh at her for a year was, tonight, the only thing between her and a very ugly thought. She cut the mould carefully with a plastic spatula, a slice the depth of a coin, and slid it into a vial. Then the rim of the dish, the drop. The spoon, in a second bag. She labelled them in pencil on the side of her palm, because it was easier than hunting for a pen.

"Nobody tested this," she said. "Three years. A man dies in a clinic with a dish on the table, and it goes in the report as a stroke, and nobody puts a spoon in a bag."

"A stroke does not require a spoon."

"No." She sealed the third vial. Her hands, she noticed, were quite steady, and she took no comfort from that. "My GC-MS can do it by noon. If it's a drug, a poison, a vasoconstrictor, I'll find the residue. If it's nothing, if it's only stew, then I'm a woman with a grudge and a bag of old mould."

"You are not that."

"How do you know?"

"I know because you hold the vials as if they might be right," Kaveh said, and for a moment he looked at her with his whole attention, and she looked away.

She turned. On the wall above the kettle, held with a pin, hung the calendar from the dry cleaner's, with its photograph of a lighthouse that had been demolished in the nineties. It was open to the week. Her father's handwriting ran across the squares, cramped and slanting, in the blue ballpoint he had loved and the pharmacy had stopped selling.

Monday: *dentist (L).* Tuesday: *Beaufort holiday. Cover hatch.* Wednesday, a blank. Thursday, the last square, he had boxed in pencil, heavy, so the grey had gone through the paper, and written:

*D. comes. 9.30? Say no.*

Underneath, smaller, as if added later: *Say no. Say it plainly. He will not like plainly.*

And beneath that, in a hand so small she nearly missed it, squeezed into the margin between the box and the Friday:

*N. — call her. Tell her about the approaches. Tell her it was not the money.*

The air in the kitchen changed. She didn't move. She was aware of her breath and Kaveh's, and of a small tick coming from the dead fridge as the compressor remembered itself, or imagined it did.

"He was going to call me," she said.

"Nadia."

"He was going to call me on the Friday. And tell me about the approaches. And that it was not about the money." A laugh got out of her, a short furious one, and she pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "Fourteen months. I would have picked up. I would have *picked up*."

Kaveh did not touch her. He did not say anything that began with *I'm sorry.* After a while she realised that he had moved, very slightly, so that his shoulder was against hers, only that, a pressure she could have stepped out of at any moment, and she did not step out of it. She stood in her father's kitchen with the thin dawn coming in at the window, and let a man she was lying to be a wall.

"Take the calendar," she said at last, thickly. "Take it down. I want a photograph and I want the page. It's evidence."

"Of what?"

"That he said no."

Kaveh lifted the pin out with a gloved finger and took the page down. He folded it once and gave it to her, and she tucked it inside her jacket, against her ribs, where it lay like a second pulse.

The bell over the clinic's front door rang.

Not loudly. A small brass sound, the sound of a very polite person entering a shop. Nadia's whole body went to ice. Kaveh's hand came off his side, an instinct, and found nothing. He had not been allowed a weapon in six years and had never missed one so much.

Footsteps. Unhurried. A shoe with a good leather sole on lino.

"Dr Quispe-Halloran?" The voice was courteous, light, a voice that said *please* the way other men said *now*. "Mr Dastgheib? I'm so sorry to intrude. I wouldn't, but I think you've both been very busy."

He stood in the kitchen doorway. Tall. Long arms, hanging loose. A face like a well-kept knife, with a coffee in each hand in a paper cup, as if the sight of two people and a mouldy dish were the sort of thing one brought refreshment to.

The man from the shoe repair doorway. The man who had come to the door of Okoro-Lund's office with a coffee.

"Teague," he said, by way of introduction, and held out one cup to Kaveh, and one to Nadia. "I'm here on behalf of the Director. He asked me to say how sorry he is. Breakfast is eight, not half past seven; he's been delayed. I do hope you'll have time to get there." He smiled. It was a lovely smile. It went nowhere near his eyes. "He did say it would be a shame if you were late."

Nobody took the coffee.

"How did you know we were here?" said Nadia.

Mr Teague looked at the dish, the vials, the pinprick of daylight on the dusty fridge. His smile did not change at all.

"Oh," he said. "The Director said you'd come back, sooner or later. He's been waiting three years."