Yusuf Demir came up the stairs of Switchback 14 at nine on Wednesday night with a laptop under his arm, a bag of oranges, and the expression of a man who had been told the flat was a small one and had decided to believe it.

He had come straight off a shift. It was in the green uniform trousers with the mud dried to the knee, in the lanyard still round his neck, in the faint, specific smell of disinfectant and engine oil that she had last smelled on a stretcher. His beard needed trimming. He looked at the door as if it might ask him a question.

"You said eat something," Dez said, from the threshold. "I'm eating. I'm going to be eating for the next week. You can come in."

"It's a medical instruction."

"It's an *order* from a woman who is seventy-one and has seized the kitchen. Hide the oranges."

He didn't. Hepzibah took one look at the bag and said, "Citrus. Good. For the blood," and took it from him with the air of confiscating a weapon. Then she turned him round by the shoulder, tilted his face to the lamp with two cool fingers under the jaw, and said, "You are not sleeping."

"No, ma'am."

"How long?"

"Since," Yusuf thought about it honestly, "Tuesday. Last Tuesday."

"Sit," said Hepzibah. "Eat. You will sleep on that sofa tonight."

"The sofa's hers," Dez said.

"It will be his." She was already ladling. "I will sleep with the cook."

"With the *cook*?" said Bao, from the whiteboard, in a pitch usually reserved for kettles.

"On the air mattress. Do not be dramatic."

Dez watched Yusuf take the bowl without arguing. He sat in the dent of the sofa where Hepzibah slept and ate with the tired focus of a person refuelling. Tamar, drifting in from the bedroom with her hair in a towel, saw him and stopped dead. "You were in the ambulance," she said. "You gave me the mask."

"I gave a lot of people masks that night."

"You said I was doing really well."

"Were you?"

"I was throwing up."

"Then you were doing very well," Yusuf said gravely. Tamar laughed, a small, startled bark. It was the first time Dez had heard it in a week.

It took twenty minutes for the room to settle. Hepzibah subsided into the armchair with her cane and a rosary she was not using. Tamar went back to her homework, which was a folder of revision notes for a night course she was supposed to be studying for. Bao pushed the whiteboard across the floor on its squealing castors until it stood facing the sofa like a very small cinema screen, and Yusuf, who had put down the bowl, opened the laptop on his knees.

"I need to say something first," he said. "I'm not supposed to have this."

"Then why do you?" said Bao.

"Because I sit at a dispatch terminal one night a month. I'm a trained call-taker. I have a log-in." He glanced at Dez. "I looked at the call on the morning after the fire. I thought, if it comes from a prepaid number, there's a metadata trail. I was wrong. The metadata's wiped. But the audio isn't. Dispatch keeps audio for ninety days."

"You copied it," Dez said.

"I *listened* to it. Six times. I wrote it down. I," he cleared his throat, "may also have exported a clip to a stick."

"Yusuf."

"I know."

"That's, that's data theft," said Bao, with enormous respect.

"It's a public service recording, with a minor access irregularity." He turned the laptop to face them. "I'd like to play it. I'd like all of you to listen. Not for the words. I've been listening for the room."

He hit the key.

For a second there was only a hiss, a sheet of white. Then a man's voice, very close to the phone, level and unhurried, with the clean flat vowels of someone who had been trained in elocution as a child.

"Floor Dispatch." That was the call-taker, a woman, weary.

"Good evening. I'd like to report a fire on the third floor of twenty-two Pasadera Street. The corner with Weir."

"Sir, can you see flames?"

"I can see the window. It will be quite significant shortly."

"I'm sorry, sir, can you —"

"There are people on that floor. I would send an engine. Thank you."

Click.

The clip ran two minutes and eleven seconds. The call itself took forty. The rest was what Yusuf had pulled from the long tail of silence after the line went dead: the call-taker typing, a chair scraping, a colleague asking *did he say significant?* and the answer, *they always say significant.* Dez found she had been counting the seconds with her fingers against her knee.

"It will be quite significant shortly," said Hepzibah, slowly.

"Yes."

"A man who sees a window does not say it will be. He says it is."

"Yes, ma'am."

"He said it before it was." She crossed herself. Dez had never seen her do it. "God forgive him."

No one spoke. Dez looked at Yusuf's face in the glow of the screen, the dark smudges under the eyes, the line of a muscle at the corner of his jaw, and thought: he is going to put this in a drawer, and then in the right drawer, and then he is going to be hurt for it. She did not know how she knew. It was the same sense that told her where the exits were.

"Play it again," said Bao.

"I've played it six times."

"Play it with the volume up. Not the voice. The, the *under.*"

Yusuf played it again. Bao got up and stood very close to the laptop with his hands on his knees, like a boy at the glass of an aquarium, and his eyes went out of focus. A kitchen thing: he did it when he was listening for a pan to turn.

"There." He held up a finger. "There. Under the hiss. Three notes."

None of them heard it. He made Yusuf put the volume up as far as it would go and the room filled with the sound of the inside of a telephone. A low hum. A rustle. And then, very faint, almost under the floor of the recording, a falling chime: three notes, descending, then a woman's recorded voice, flat and cheerful.

*— the next service to Crown Station departs from platform two. Please stand clear of the doors. Mind the —*

The recording cut.

"That's," Bao said, and stopped, and swallowed, and said it again. "That's the platform announcement at Crown Station. The Rim one. The three-note one. I take the lift from Terrace Six to there every Sunday. It's the only station that has it. The others go *bing-bong*. That one sounds like a little falling staircase."

"The caller was at Crown Station?" Tamar said.

"The caller was within earshot of a Crown Station platform speaker at about five past two in the morning." Yusuf shut his eyes briefly. "On the Rim. Nine hundred metres above Pasadera Street, in a building where nobody could possibly have seen a third-floor window."

"Neil's building," Dez said.

"It's a big station."

"People keep telling me that."

She stood up, because sitting had become impossible, and went to the window. The airshaft was a vertical well of blue light and drainpipes. Her reflection hung in it, tall and unlit. The pulses in her chest ran along at their quiet rhythm, three small lamps with the faintest tremor in them: Tamar a clean four, Hepzibah five, and under it, farther off, steady, small, Dario, a long way below the soft sleep of a six-year-old.

The man had been in Crown Station at five past two. Fourteen floors below, by Bao's count, there was a platform; above it, forty-one, there was an office. And somewhere between the two, a person with a clean voice and a prepaid phone had watched a clock, waiting for a window to catch.

"Dez," said Yusuf, behind her.

"I'm fine."

"You're gripping the sill."

She looked. She was. She let go.

"I want to say something," he said, lower, so that only she heard. "I'm not asking about the other thing. The healing. I said I'd wait. But I want you to know that whatever this is, I'm already inside it. I made that choice when I copied the file. You don't have to do any of it alone."

It was the kindest thing anyone had said to her all week, and she heard herself answer in a perfectly steady voice, "I know where the exits are."

He smiled, a tired crooked smile. "That's not what I said."

"I know."

They stood there, with the smell of oranges and rice, until his phone buzzed in his pocket.

He looked at it. The smile did not go, but something under it shut like a drawer.

"Work?" Dez said.

"Dispatch supervisor." He turned the screen to show her. A single line, in the flat grey of an automated message: *ACCESS REVIEW. Your credentials were used to open archived call 9-OCT-0205 on four occasions between 0610 and 1405 on 9 and 10 October. Please report to Operations at 0700. Do not use your terminal in the interim.*

"Four times," he said, mildly. "I thought it was three."

"They'll take you off the engine."

"Probably. Desk. A week, maybe two." He put the phone away. "They'll say I did it for the paramedic ethics. I'll say I did it for the paramedic ethics. And then we'll both be right, and I'll spend a fortnight filing forms."

"Because of me."

"Because of a man who said *significant.*" He shrugged. "Honestly, I've done worse for less. I once gave a drunk my coat."

Behind them Bao was whispering *Crown Station, Crown Station* to the whiteboard in a rising hiss. Hepzibah, in the armchair, had fallen asleep with her rosary slipping out of her fingers, and Tamar had put a blanket over her without a word.

Dez took the clip off the laptop with her eyes, the way she took in the room. A man in a clean voice. A chime like a falling staircase. And a timestamp.

Someone at the top of the city had known, at five past two, exactly what was going to happen at twenty-two Pasadera Street.

And someone else had known, within the hour, that Yusuf Demir was the kind of man who would go looking.