"Put down the chisel," said Imran.

"It's a bolster, technically. A chisel's thinner." Rory did not put it down. He turned it over in his glove, affectionately, like a pet. "My father used it to cut the vents in the proving cupboard. He was a man of tools. I only borrowed it."

"You broke into my premises."

"Did I?" Rory glanced at the padlock, hanging neat on its hasp, and then at the key he produced with a flourish from his scarf: a long brass thing on a loop of blue baker's twine. "I let myself in. It's a different verb entirely. I've had this since I was nine."

Odette had stopped at Imran's shoulder. In the torchlight her face was bloodless, and very still. "That key shouldn't work," she said. "The locks were changed at repossession."

"The locks were changed on the front door, madam. Nobody changes the back." He gestured with the chisel at a narrow metal door half hidden behind a stack of tyres. Imran had taken it for a cupboard. "My father put in a second door, in 1988, when the Society was going through one of its charming phases of burglary. He didn't tell the Society. He told me." Rory sat back on his heels, in the hole in the floor, and the beam found his face, and there was nothing theatrical in it now. He looked like a child caught in the larder who had decided to be brave. "I used to come in through there to steal the ends of the loaves."

The bakery came back into Imran then, all at once, as if someone had turned up a dimmer. The pale rectangle on the brickwork. The keyhole drain, which was not a keyhole at all but the old bakery's outfall for washing the troughs. The smell of yeast and pennies. The great, bare patch of floor in the corner where there'd been, he now saw, an oven. Four of them, in a row. He had parked Brenda there for two years.

"This was your father's bakery."

"This is my father's bakery," said Rory. "It has the misfortune to be your driving school."

"I bought the lease at auction."

"I'm aware. Sold on the steps of the Vault, three years ago in March, at a quarter of its value, to a retired soldier with a good smile and a loan from the very institution that was conducting the sale." He had not raised his voice. He said it all in a tone of gentle, exhausted instruction, like a man reading a recipe to a child. "You didn't know, of course. Nobody ever does. That's the beauty of Lindenfall. Everyone's guilt is perfectly invisible, because everyone banks in the same place."

Imran said nothing. In his head, a line of dominoes was falling at the speed of light. The auction. The estate agent who'd said *a very motivated seller*. The remarkable, miraculous price. He had gone home that night and drunk to it, a half-bottle of cheap rum in his flat above the launderette, saying aloud, *it's about time something went right.*

"I didn't know," he said.

"No."

"If I'd..."

"You'd have bought it anyway, Sergeant. It was a bargain." Rory was smiling, but it was a terrible smile. "I don't blame you. I blame the *machine.* It's a hungry machine. It needs a boy to do the signing and a boy to do the buying and a boy to do the living above the shop, and then it's all so clean."

"Mr Castellanos-Finch," said Odette.

Rory's gaze moved to her. It took its time, travelling up from the coat to the face, and when it arrived it settled with a kind of grave courtesy, as it might on a cathedral. "Ms Nakamura-Boyle. I've admired your penmanship."

"I don't..."

"Of course you don't." He lifted the biscuit tin, a battered tartan thing that had once held shortbread, and weighed it in his palms. "This is what I came for. I've been looking for it for three years. My father hid it the night before the bailiffs came, under the base of the third oven, and then he had a stroke on the step, and he's never been able to tell me where. For three years I've been on my knees in that lane trying to remember what he said the day before. *The third one, Rory. Where the heat goes.* And last month, I found the plinth. And then you two began playing at engagements on the internet, and I thought: not yet. Wait. Let them stand there, all lit up. Let the whole town see them first."

"See us do what?" said Imran.

"Be what they are."

"And what's that?"

"Comfortable," said Rory, softly. "In a house that's not yours."

There was nothing to say to that. The yard dripped. Far off, a night bus sighed past the ring road, and a fox screamed in the dark like a baby in a bin. Odette's phone was shaking slightly in Imran's hand; he realised it was hers, and that the torch beam was shaking because she was close, and trembling, and trying to look as though she was not.

"Is your father alive?" she said.

"Alfredo Finch lives at Sunrise Court, room fourteen, second floor, with a view of the car park." Rory's voice cracked a hair, and repaired itself. "I sell bread to pay the fees. A hundred and ninety pounds a day. He doesn't speak much. He says *oven* sometimes. And on Sundays he says my mother's name."

"I'm so sorry," said Odette. The words came out of her in a whisper, unlike anything she'd said in the Vault, unlike the voice of the folder. It was just a person speaking to another person across a dark floor. "I didn't..."

"Please." Rory held up a hand. "Don't apologise. I'm saving my appetite."

"Then let me give it back," said Imran.

It was out before he had weighed it. Rory's eyebrows rose. Odette said, "Imran," in a warning voice, and he lifted a hand without looking round.

"The lease. I'll sign it to you. Whatever the Society will allow."

"Will you?" Rory seemed genuinely interested, like a man examining a fish that had volunteered to be eaten. "And the loan that goes with it? The one you took out for the privilege? Will you sign that over as well, so I'm in debt to the same hungry machine, with a school of learner drivers in the way? Because I've sat in the Vault, Sergeant. I've been told, with great kindness, that a lease can't be transferred while an account is in arrears."

"Then I'll clear the arrears."

"With what?"

Imran opened his mouth, and the true answer, *a fake engagement and a hundred and thirty-eight pounds of ring*, sat on his tongue like a stone.

"Quite," said Rory, gently. "Don't make me an offer you can't afford. It's a peculiarly Lindenfall form of cruelty, and I've been on the receiving end of it too often to enjoy being on the other."

He rose, stiffly, with the tin clutched to his chest, and brushed the dust from his knees. The beam found the hole behind him: a shallow cavity of black earth, a few brick ends, a rusted hinge. There was nothing else in it. He stepped over the square of broken slab with the air of a man leaving a graveside and walked to the narrow back door, where he turned with one hand on the frame.

"I'll replace the slab," he said. "I'm not a savage. Tomorrow, before your first lesson. And you'll let me, Sergeant, because you're a soldier and you understand the point of a debt."

"Rory."

"Yes?"

"What's in the tin?"

"Oh, a lot of things." The moustache lifted. "Photographs. A recipe for bread with a memory. A date-stamped note from a man in a waistcoat, written in a kindly hand, which I intend to read aloud on Lantern Weekend, in front of the whole of the Cathedral Green, with the cameras running. I'd come, if I were you." He tipped an invisible hat. "It'll be better than the dancing."

He was gone. The metal door clicked behind him. They stood in the wreckage of the floor for what felt like a very long time, until Imran, mechanically, lowered the torch, and crossed to the hole, and crouched. He had no idea what he thought he'd find. Soil. A hinge.

There was a piece of paper in the earth.

It lay half-buried in the loam where the tin had rested, a single folded sheet that Rory must have torn loose in his haste, creased, damp and brown at the edges. Imran drew it out with two fingers. It was a printed form, with a little green leaf at the top. NOTICE OF RECOVERY. Unit 4, Tannery Yard. Account: Finch & Son. Reason: Persistent arrears. Authorised by:

He couldn't read the rest. Odette had already knelt beside him, and taken the page, and was holding it up to the torch with both hands. The small clean signature at the bottom was familiar. He had seen it on a nine-page contract with a flourish under the O.

"I signed it," she said.

"Odette."

"I signed this one." She sounded oddly calm. "Of all the forty-one. I don't remember it. I don't remember *him.* I read a file, I signed a form, I went home and I ate my cereal." Her fingers had gone white on the page. "And he's in a room with a view of a car park, and his son sells bread to pay the fees, and the whole town thinks that I am a very sad, very pale woman who has never done a wrong thing in her life."

"It's a record of what you knew."

"That's the problem." The torch dipped. In its small light the page trembled. "It's a record of what I *didn't.*"

For a time neither of them said anything. Imran stood the slab upright against the wall, because the job needed doing and his hands wanted one, and swept the grit into a dustpan, and set the chisel's gritty print on the floor into a neat square with the side of his boot. It was the sort of thing you did after an ambush: tidy the ground, count the heads, defer the feelings.

"I can't go to Walter," Odette said at last. "Not now. He'd know within the hour that I'd seen this. He would be so kind about it."

"Then we don't go to Walter."

"What do we do?"

"Three things." He heard his own voice come out flat and ordinary, and was grateful. "One: we keep the page. Two: we go to Sunrise Court and see a man about an oven. Three: tomorrow morning, I teach a lesson at nine, because a girl called Kiera is retaking her test on Thursday, and I'm not letting a bank, a baker or a crisis put her on a roundabout without me."

She looked up. In the poor light her face was wet and bewildered and, for an instant, so helplessly hopeful that he had to look away.

"That's a very good list," she said.

"I'm told it's my only talent."