Kiera Dlamini had been circling the Tannery Yard roundabout for eleven minutes, and she was crying quietly, the way people cry when they are trying to do it without disturbing the mirrors.

"Third exit," said Imran Haddad from the passenger seat. "Signal now. You've got a gap the size of a bus."

"There's a bus."

"That's the bus I mean. It's stopping. It's a very polite bus." He kept his hands on his knees, where she could see them. Fourteen years of convoys had taught him that an instructor's hands were a form of speech, and that when a nervous driver saw them twitch toward the handbrake, she heard a scream. "Mirror, signal, and then you simply decide you live here."

Kiera signalled. The hatchback they were sitting in, a tired silver thing named Brenda, ticked left like an old clock. Kiera was seventeen, wore a school blazer with the sleeves pushed up, and had failed her test once already, on a Tuesday, in the rain, for stopping at a green light. The examiner had asked her why. She had said she thought the light looked tired.

Imran's phone lit up in the cup holder. Then it lit up again.

He did not look. This was the first rule of the passenger seat: whatever was on the phone was less important than the person holding the wheel. He could see the screen from the corner of his eye anyway, and what he saw was the little green leaf of the Lindenfall Mutual app turning amber. Amber meant a payment had bounced. Amber was also the colour of the sodium lights on the ring road at night, and of a certain kind of whisky, and of every single one of his Tuesdays since March.

"Exit," he said, quietly. "Now, Kiera."

She took it. She took it so cleanly that the bus driver lifted two fingers off his wheel in salute. Kiera let out a breath that seemed to have been waiting since Easter.

"I did it."

"You did. Next one, you do it without apologising to the road."

"Sorry."

"That's the road you apologised to."

She laughed, wetly, and wiped her nose on the blazer sleeve, and for the length of the straight stretch past the paint supplier's she drove like a person who owned her own hands. Imran watched the needle sit at thirty and felt the old, simple satisfaction of a thing delivered. Then he checked his watch, which was cheap and reliable and the only item in his life that had never been late, and saw that they had nine minutes to get back to the unit before Wim's one o'clock arrived and found nobody to teach him.

Haddad Road Ready lived at Unit 4, Tannery Yard, in what had once been a bakery. You could still see it if you knew where to look: a pale rectangle on the brickwork where an old sign had hung, a floor drain in the shape of a keyhole, a smell on wet days of yeast and pennies that never quite left. The new sign, which Imran had hung himself with a spirit level and a certain grim joy, was perfectly straight and said HADDAD ROAD READY, and under it, in smaller letters he now regretted, WE GET YOU THERE. Someone had added, in marker, with an arrow, EVENTUALLY. He had cleaned it off twice. It kept coming back, like a rumour.

Wim was waiting by the van with his hood up and a coffee in each hand, because Wim bought coffee for people the way other people said hello.

"Sorry, sorry, I know I'm early, but actually it's not early, it's the right time, you're late, which isn't a criticism, I only mean the clocks, did you know the clock on the church is four minutes slow because the vicar thinks it makes people kinder?" Wiremu Tane-Vos was twenty-four, long and apologetic, with the build of a heron and the energy of a spaniel. He had failed his own driving test six times, then passed on the seventh in front of Imran, then asked for a job so that, he said, no one else would have to feel like that. He was the only instructor the school had. He was also the only employee. On the payroll, which was a spreadsheet Imran kept in his head like a map of a minefield, he was cheaper than petrol.

"Kiera passed the roundabout," said Imran.

"Oh, that's brilliant, that's actually brilliant, well done Kiera, sorry, you're probably tired."

"I'm fine," said Kiera, who was now bouncing. Her mother's car pulled into the yard and Kiera left at a run, shouting something about telling everyone. Imran stood a moment longer in the damp and watched her go, then took the second coffee, because it was still warm and because refusing Wim a kindness was like kicking a puppy in a hat.

"Right," he said. "Three things. Colonel needs a clutch. Gerald needs a front tyre. And I need you not to mention the amber to anyone."

Wim, who had been about to take a sip, froze with the cup against his mouth. "I didn't know there was an amber."

"There wasn't."

"Okay. I won't mention the amber." A pause, in which Imran could physically see the amber travelling through Wim's face. "Is it a bad amber? Not that I'm asking. I'm absolutely not asking. Some ambers are only little ones."

"Wim."

"Yes. Sorry. Yes."

In the office, which was a plasterboard box with a kettle, Imran sat and opened the banking app properly. In Lindenfall, you did not have a bank so much as a bank had you. Lindenfall Mutual had been founded a hundred and sixty years ago by a tanner with a conscience, and it was still the only place in a city of ninety thousand where a person could open an account, take a mortgage, get a wage paid, or buy a bus ticket. The Green Card was in every wallet. Every terminal in every café and chemist and chip shop glowed green when you tapped, and amber when you did not have the money, and the whole queue could see it. Children learned the colours before they learned to read. Imran had once watched a retired magistrate try to buy a loaf of bread and flash amber, and the shop had gone so quiet you could hear the loaf being embarrassed.

The notification was not a bounced coffee. It was the loan.

The school's loan, a ruinous little thing he had taken out in a hurry and a good mood, had a payment due on the first and a payment due on the fifteenth, and he had managed the first by selling his father's watch. It was now the seventeenth. The text from the bank was polite, and automated, and had a leaf at the top. It said that his account had been referred to Collections. It said that someone would be in touch. It said, in lower, kinder type, that help was available.

Beneath that, there was a second message. This one had no leaf, and was not automated. It was dated that morning, sent from a human being, and it said:

Mr Haddad. I will attend your premises at four o'clock today. Please have your records available. For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a social call. O. Nakamura-Boyle, Head of Collections.

Imran read it twice. The Reaper. He had heard the name the way you hear about weather in a foreign country. In the Old Quarter they said she could repossess a van from under a priest, and apologise so nicely that the priest would thank her. In the pub they said she had never once raised her voice, which was exactly the problem. Nobody had ever seen her cry, or gloat, or hurry. She simply arrived, with a leather folder and perfect sentences, and then your life had a different shape.

He looked at the clock. It was ten past one. Three hours and fifty minutes.

"Operation," he muttered, and then, because there was nobody in the room but a kettle, "God help us."

He did what he always did. He made a list. One: the books, such as they were. Two: the cars, all three, washed. Three: himself, shaved. He found a shirt that had survived two tours and one wedding and ironed it on the desk because the ironing board had been repurposed as a shelf for the learners' log folders. The shirt, ironed, looked like an apology. He put it on anyway. He fetched the shoebox where the receipts lived, tipped it onto the desk, and began to sort them by date, a task that took forty minutes and a quiet, private conversation with the man he had been two years ago, who had said, in this exact office, with a pen in his hand, that running a business could not be harder than running a convoy.

In a convoy, people told you when something was wrong. In a business, the something simply waited for you at the end of the month.

At twenty to four, Wim put his head around the door, hood finally down. "There's a lady in the yard."

"She's early."

"She's not early, she's, sorry, she's been standing there for about six minutes just looking at the building. She's got a very good coat."

Imran went to the window. A woman in a camel coat stood on the wet tarmac with a leather folder under one arm, looking not at the sign, or the cars, but at the pale rectangle on the brickwork where the old bakery sign had been. She was small and straight, with dark hair cut to exactly her jaw, and she held herself like a person who had never once been surprised in public. She did not look like a reaper. She looked like a woman reading a grave.

Then she turned, as if she had felt the glass, and her eyes met his through it. She didn't smile. She lifted her free hand and tapped her wrist twice, politely: you have time, I do not mind waiting.

"Right," said Imran. "Wim. Tea. The good mugs."

"We don't have good mugs."

"Then the least bad."

She came in at exactly four, which, Imran noted, meant she had waited outside for her appointment. She declined the tea, then accepted it, then held it without drinking it, which he understood was a negotiating position. She sat across the desk, put the folder between them, and did not open it.

"Mr Haddad. Odette Nakamura-Boyle. Thank you for seeing me."

"I wasn't aware I had a choice."

"You didn't," she said pleasantly. "But it is better to be thanked than not." She opened the folder. Inside was a single sheet, and on the sheet, in a column, were the numbers of his life. He recognised his own handwriting on a slip stapled to the corner. "You are four payments behind. Your cars are insured to the minimum. Your instructor is paid, if I read this correctly, by cash and apology."

"He's very good."

"I don't doubt it." She looked at him then, properly, and he realised her eyes were an unexpected amber brown, and that she was exhausted, and that she was concealing it with a discipline he recognised from officers on the third day of nothing. "The procedure I am obliged to follow from here is straightforward. A notice, a fourteen-day period, an assessment, and, if nothing changes, a recovery of the assets. The unit, the vehicles, the equipment. I would like to be clear that I do not enjoy it."

"Nobody thinks you do."

"Nobody thinks anything at all about me, Mr Haddad, which is useful." She said it lightly, and then seemed to hear herself, and closed her mouth on whatever followed. In the yard, a car door slammed. Wim, somewhere behind the plasterboard, whispered an apology to a stapler.

Imran placed both hands flat on the desk. It was what he did before bad news, and she watched him do it with an interest that did not feel like pity.

"Fourteen days," he said.

"Yes."

"And the alternative?"

"There isn't one that exists in the procedure." Odette Nakamura-Boyle closed the folder, and did the thing he would come to know as hers: a small, deliberate intake of breath, as if she were stepping off a kerb. "However. In the course of reading your file, I found something that is not in the procedure, and which I have not told anyone. I think it could save your school. I think you will hate it."

"Try me."

"I intend to." She slid the leather folder back, and from underneath it she drew a second page, old, yellowed, with a printed leaf at the top and a line of founder's script that he could read upside down. "Mr Haddad, how do you feel about getting engaged?"