Sunrise Court was a low beige building on the Fallow Road, with a sloping car park, a sensory garden nobody had yet sensed, and a front desk where a sign said PLEASE SANITISE AND SMILE.

They went on Sunday at eleven, because Odette had spent the night at her desk at home composing, and abandoning, nine different ways to say *I'm sorry*, and Imran had spent it replaying a house auction on the steps of the Vault, three years ago in March. At seven, a van had pulled up at the unit, and Rory Castellanos-Finch had walked in without a word, laid a fresh slab with a bag of ready-mix and a pair of kneepads, and walked out again, leaving behind a floor so level it could have been used to calibrate a spirit level. He hadn't looked at either of them. Imran had stood by the kettle and felt like a man being forgiven by a weather system.

"Visiting?" said the woman at the desk. She was fifty, round, in a pale blue tunic, with a badge that said FOLASADE — SENIOR CARER — ASK ME ANYTHING. Her smile faltered when she saw Odette. "Oh. It's you."

"Good morning," said Odette, in the stiff voice of someone who has been recognised in the wrong place. "We'd like to see Mr Alfredo Finch."

"We've no booking."

"No. We're, ah..." She glanced at Imran.

"Friends of the family," said Imran.

Folasade's eyes narrowed, then drifted from one face to the other, and softened by about a degree. "You're the Dancing Sergeant. My grandson does your dance. He broke the dishwasher." She sighed. "Room fourteen. He'll be in the chair by the window. Don't startle him and don't ask him questions, he gets frustrated. Say who you are, say what day it is, and then sit. He likes people to sit."

The corridor smelled of toast and floor cleaner. Voices drifted from the day room: a quiz show on low volume, a woman singing very slightly flat. Room fourteen was at the end. The door was ajar. Inside, in a high-backed chair by a window with a view of the car park, sat a heavy old man in a cardigan, his left hand curled in his lap like a fallen leaf, his right resting on the arm of the chair. A photograph on the sill showed a young woman in an apron, laughing. A plastic tray held a cup of tea, untouched, and a small round loaf wrapped in paper.

Imran knocked. "Mr Finch? My name's Imran. It's Sunday. The second of November."

The old man turned his head. The right side of his face was slack, the left alive and heavy-lidded and very dark, and his eyes took in Imran from boots to crown in a slow, complete inspection, like a sergeant major's.

"Oven," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Oven." He lifted his good hand and made a small, flat gesture over the arm of the chair, a smoothing, a patting, as one pats the neck of a horse. "Hot."

"Hot," Imran agreed. "That's right. The third one."

Alfredo Finch's face did something then that Imran would remember for a long time: it lit, abruptly and from within, like a window in a house where someone had just come home. He nodded. Nodded again. He said, with enormous effort, "Third," and then his eyes slid past Imran to the door and he said it again, differently, in a tone of pleased surprise. "Third."

Odette stood in the doorway. She had stopped there as if on a threshold she'd been told not to cross. In her hands was the leather folder, which she held with both fists, and her face had gone very pale and quite blank, the face of a woman waiting to be told the sentence.

"Mr Finch," she said. "My name is Odette Nakamura-Boyle. I work for the Society."

Alfredo looked at her for a long time.

Then he raised his hand and, with a slowness that cost him dearly, pointed one thick finger at her left hand, at the garnet ring.

"Pretty," he said.

"Thank you."

"Pretty. Marry?"

"I..." Her voice failed. "We're... yes. We're engaged."

"Good." He nodded, with great satisfaction, as though a wager had been settled in his favour. "Good. Make bread."

"We don't make bread," said Odette, helplessly. "Imran teaches people to drive."

"Make *bread*," said Alfredo, severely, and closed his eyes, and the corner of his mouth lifted, and for the first time in a long while Imran saw what Rory must have seen every morning: a father who had once been the loudest man in the building, who had sung to the ovens at four a.m., and who still, somewhere in the damaged house of his head, believed that anything could be mended with flour and heat.

They sat. They sat for forty minutes in two hard chairs by the window while the old man dozed and woke and dozed, and the car park filled and emptied. At one point Odette took out the folded page and looked at it and put it back. At another she reached out and, very lightly, straightened the blanket over Alfredo's knees, and Imran saw her hand tremble, and looked away.

Folasade came in with two paper cups of tea and the air of a woman who had decided something on the stairs. She set them down on the sill without a word, glanced at the sleeping man, and lowered her voice.

"Does the son know? About the fees?"

"Know what?" said Imran.

"The Goodwill Fund." She said it as one says the name of a distant relative who sends cheques. "The Chairman pays a third, from his own pocket, so he says. Sixty-odd pounds a day. He told the manager it's a personal kindness and nobody's to mention it, so I'm mentioning it. He's very good to Mr Finch. Comes every month. Brings cake." Her mouth went flat. "I've worked in this building eleven years. I've never seen a man so good to somebody so frightened of him."

Odette stared at her. "Frightened?"

"Every time he walks in, love. Mr Finch goes stiff as a board and won't eat for two days. We put it down to the stroke. But I've had the stroke ones, and the frightened ones, and they look different." She straightened her tunic. "I've said nothing. I've said it to nobody. You didn't hear it from me."

"We didn't," said Imran.

"And the fund stops at the end of the month, he's told us. Company policy. Which would put the son in a right hole, wouldn't it, with his bread." She looked from one to the other. "I'd think about that, if I were two people who were marrying into this."

She went out. Neither of them said anything. The tea was weak and sweet. On the other side of the glass, a man in a puffa jacket was washing a Fiesta very slowly, and in the quiet it came to Imran that he had been mistaken, all week, about the shape of the thing he was in. He had thought it was a contract. He had thought it was a favour. It was a door, and they were already through it.

"I wrote him a letter," she said, later, in a whisper. "Three years ago. It said, *The Society regrets.* I've sent four hundred letters that said it. I thought it was a kind of..." She searched. "Grammar."

"It's a decent grammar. It's the people who use it."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be."

She almost laughed, and swallowed it. The door opened behind them. A cart rattled, and Folasade's voice said, from the corridor, in a bright, warning tone, "Mr Finch? You've got another visitor! It's your friend the Chairman. Isn't that nice? He comes every first Sunday."

Imran felt it happen in his own body before his mind caught up: the cold plunge in the stomach, the narrowing of the eyes. He rose from the chair. Odette was already standing, with the folder against her chest, and in the doorway, beaming, with a white cake box in his arms, stood Walter Osei-Lindqvist.

"Friends!" he cried. "What a delight! What a *providence*! I said to myself, on the stairs, I said, Walter, someone's already at old Alfredo's side, I can smell the goodwill." He bustled in. The room, which had been small, became smaller. "Odette, my dear. Sergeant. Isn't this beautiful? Look at the three of you."

"Chairman," said Odette.

"I told you, Walter." He set the box on the tray, beside the cold tea. "I've brought lemon drizzle, Alfredo. Mrs Osei-Lindqvist made it herself. She says it's a poor second to yours but we try." He bent, put a large hand on the old man's shoulder, and spoke very slowly and clearly, like a man directing a child across a road. "Alfredo. Old friend. It's Walter."

The effect on Alfredo was extraordinary. The slack half of his face did not move, but the other half contracted, as a fist closes. His good hand gripped the arm of the chair until the knuckles went white. His eyes, which a moment ago had been dim and peaceful, snapped open, black and fixed. He made a sound, a low, thick, wordless sound deep in his throat, like a dog's growl, and then, with the whole of his strength, he said:

"*Tin.*"

"Tin?" Walter smiled benignly. "Yes, yes, Alfredo, I know. Your little biscuit tin. We've talked about it. It's safe." He patted the shoulder. "It's quite safe, old friend. No one will touch it. You rest."

"*Tin,*" said Alfredo again, and his eyes went, for one terrible instant, to Odette's bag.

It was hardly a movement. Imran might have missed it had he not been trained for forty-one kinds of watching. But Walter, who had spent fourteen years learning where eyes went, did not miss it. He turned his head. His gaze rested gently on the leather folder that Odette held to her chest, and on the bag at her hip, from which, in the draught of the open door, a corner of folded paper had slipped.

It was white, with a green leaf.

"Odette, dear," said Walter, in a voice like warm honey on a very sharp blade. "You've dropped something."

He bent. He picked it up. He unfolded it, slowly, with a connoisseur's care, and read it through, all of it, moving his lips very slightly. Then he refolded it along its creases, and slid it into the inside pocket of his waistcoat, patting it flat.

"Ah," he said, fondly. "The Finch file. Terrible business. I'll see it's properly archived."

"Walter," said Odette, "that's a document I was..."

"Of course it is." The beam did not waver. He put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. "You've been working far too hard, my dear. Too much on your plate. It's the nerves of the season." He turned to Imran and extended his other hand. "Sergeant. A pleasure. We'll see you at the Green. And I should *so* like to see that ring in the lantern light."

Behind him in the chair, Alfredo Finch had begun, very softly, to cry.