The Annex smelled of warm lint and burnt coffee, which meant the laundromat downstairs was on its noon cycle and Cilla had been drinking from the same pot since five.

Dez climbed the stairs with her left arm held a little in against her ribs, the way you carry a tray you are not sure about. The shoulder was nearly done. Mend had pulled the last of the swelling down on the tram, ten minutes at rest on the bench at Terrace Four with a stranger's elbow in her side, and now it was only a tenderness, a coin-sized bruise that would be yellow by Wednesday. It was the other thing that hurt. The clock-out. She could feel it sitting in her phone like a stone in a shoe.

Cilla was at the long table with the duty roster unrolled under her forearms and a pen in her teeth. She did not look up.

"Door," she said.

Dez shut it.

"Sit."

Dez sat. Chair, table, window, fire door behind the filing cabinet. Her eyes did it without being asked. Cilla's eyes, she noticed, were doing something else: going over her once, shoulder to hip, with the flat attention of a woman checking a vehicle for dents.

"Report," Cilla said, around the pen.

She gave it. All of it, in order: the bond alarm, the break from the detail, the open door, the two men, the notice. She said the younger one had swung a wheelchair and she had been standing near enough to get hit. She said it plainly, in the voice she used for incident logs. She left out the number in her chest, the menu, the credit. She left out why she had known to run. It was getting easier to do, and she did not like that.

Cilla took the pen out of her mouth. "Near enough to get hit."

"Yes."

"From the Rim to Switchback Fourteen in eleven minutes. In a suit."

"There was a tram."

"There's always a tram." Cilla leaned back. She was a compact woman, forty-four, with cropped grey coming in at the temples, who sat as if the chair had been issued to her. "Novak. I put that clause in pen because you asked me to and because I thought you'd use it once a year, for a child under a car. You've used it twice in four days."

"The vigil was a child under a barrier."

"And today?"

"Today was an old woman and a girl of seventeen, and two men who had no business in the flat."

"Process servers."

"One of them swung a steel frame at a kid."

"By accident."

"That's what he said."

"And what do you say?"

Dez looked at the roster. Her name was on it in Cilla's square capitals, MON-FRI 0700-1900 CREST RD, and below that, in smaller letters, the rota for the nights she'd be sleeping in the guest room. "I say he didn't know where she was standing. I say it's still the thing the clause is for."

"I say," said Cilla, "that I have a client who pays a hundred and forty an hour for a detail of two, and one of the two left at eleven forty-two and came back at one twenty with her jacket buttoned wrong."

Dez looked down. It was. She fixed it.

"Mac covered?"

"Mac covered. Mac also did your sandwich. Mac now has a *tab* with me." Cilla breathed out through her nose. "He was good about it. The client was good about it. Mr Abara-Whitfield said, and I'm quoting, 'The long view, Priscilla, the long view, a young woman has a family.' Which is the most expensive sentence I've heard this week, because it's the sentence of a man who is about to ask for something."

"What does he want?"

"He doesn't know yet. That's how they work."

She pulled a folder out from under the roster. Plain buff, the kind they used for contract amendments. She did not open it. She put one finger on it and turned it a few degrees, as if she were lining it up with a grid only she could see.

"This came to me at nine this morning. Courier to the Annex. Not to you. To me."

"From who?"

"From Crown Station. Forty-first floor." Cilla slid it across. "Bethan Oyelowo-Marsh signed for it. She called afterwards to say it was a courtesy copy. Her words. A courtesy."

Dez opened it.

It was one sheet, stapled to a second. The top sheet was on the Authority's letterhead, a polite and bloodless paragraph about supplementary due diligence for principals' protection staff. The second sheet was a table. Name: ADAEZE NOVAK-OBI. Employer: PLUMBLINE PROTECTION. Residence: SWITCHBACK 14, TERRACE SIX, THIRD FLOOR. Household: B. TRAN (LEASEHOLDER); T. IBEKWE (GUEST); H. IBEKWE (GUEST). Under that, a line in a smaller type: *Relationship of guests to Pasadera Street incident: witnesses.*

She read it twice. The paper was cool and slightly rough. Someone had printed it that morning and someone else had stapled it at an angle.

"The notice went out at ten to eleven," Dez said slowly. "This was here at nine."

"Yes."

"Somebody knew who was living in my flat, and knew they were guests, two hours before the men came to say it."

"Two hours and fifty-two minutes. I did the arithmetic." Cilla took the pen out again and tapped the paper once with the cap. "I've been doing this twenty-two years, Novak. Army, then contracts, then this. In that time I've learned there are two kinds of due diligence. There is the kind a client does because he's anxious. And there is the kind someone does *to* him, and then hands him to read."

"You think it's Neil."

"I think it's not Neil. Neil wouldn't know a staple from a trowel." A dry flick of the mouth. "I think it's someone in the building who has access to his letterhead and wanted me to know they know. And I think I'm meant to be afraid for my contract and sack you quietly before the end of the month."

The window behind her had a view of the laundromat's extractor fan, turning very slowly over the Terrace roofs, with a pigeon sitting on the housing like a small attendant.

"Are you going to?" Dez said.

"No." It came out immediately and, Dez thought, with some irritation, as if Cilla had not entirely meant it to. "I don't sack people for the wrong reasons. I sack them for the right ones, with notice and a reference. You're a good operator, you're a *very* good operator when you're not looking at your phone, and you've had a rubbish year, and I am not going to be told by a woman with a lanyard that I should dump you for it." She pointed the pen. "But there are conditions."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't ma'am me. Condition one. The clause stays, but from today it's written. If you break detail, you text me the reason *before* your thumb comes off the screen. Three words if that's all you've got. I'd rather have 'child, canal, now' and be furious than hear it from Mac."

"Understood."

"Condition two. You tell me about anything that touches the client or the contract. Anything. If you hear a man in a lift say Pasadera Street, I want to hear about it. If someone sends you a pretty bunch of flowers, I want to hear about it."

"Understood."

"Three." Cilla stopped. She looked, for a moment, at something that was not Dez, and then at her own hand on the folder, as if checking it was still hers. "Three is not company."

She took a card from the roster tube. Not Plumbline stock; a plain white rectangle with a number written on it in blue biro, ten digits, no name.

"If it's the kind of trouble where you need someone and you don't want it on a log. Don't use the Annex line. Don't use your Plumbline phone. This."

Dez took it. "Whose is it?"

"Mine." A beat. "The other one."

There was a lot Dez could have said. She said, "I didn't know you had another one."

"That's the point of it." Cilla rolled the roster back up and slid it into her back pocket like a baton. "Tell your flatmate his thirty-day statute is correct and the notice is bluff, but bluff works on people with no money, so don't tell him that. Find a tenants' advocate. There's a woman on Terrace Nine, Ama something, she'll do it for a cake."

"I'll bake."

"You will not bake. You'll buy a cake." The corner of her mouth went up and down again quickly. "And Novak. The number of people you've got in that flat. Two witnesses and a cook. If someone's mapping your address, that's three people on a sofa and a girl on a floor who cannot be protected by *you* from nine in the morning till seven at night, because *you'll be on Crest Road.*"

It landed exactly where she had meant it to. Dez said nothing.

"I'm not telling you to quit," Cilla said, more quietly. "I'm telling you the arithmetic doesn't close. You can be the Wall for him or the Wall for them. You cannot be both for forty hours a week."

"I'd rather not have to choose."

"Nobody would." Cilla picked up the phone and looked at it. "Go and eat something. And Novak."

"Yes?"

"If it's complicated, I'm the person you tell. Not the last person."

On the stairs she stopped at the landing, where the laundromat's steam came through the floor in a warm uneven breath. She took out her phone and typed a reply to Yusuf. *Eating. Soup. Hepzibah is supervising.* She deleted the last word and wrote *Hepzibah is a tyrant.* Sent it.

Then she took out the white card and read the number twice, and put it in the inside pocket of her jacket, flat against her ribs, behind the Plumbline badge.

She had Charges now. She had a clock, a clause, a card, a house of people. She had eighteen credits and twenty-two more to find before she could change what she was.

She also had, folded in her back pocket, the table that Bethan Oyelowo-Marsh had printed that morning, and she thought about the last row of it. *Relationship of guests to Pasadera Street incident: witnesses.*

Nobody had called Hepzibah a witness until today. Not in the inquiry. Not in the news. Not in Dez's hearing in any room she had been in.

So who had told them what she had seen?