On Monday morning Odette discovered that she had been quietly moved to the other side of her own life.

It was not dramatic. Nothing in the Vault ever was. She arrived at seven fifty-five, as she had arrived for fourteen years, and tapped her pass on the staff door, and the reader glowed amber. She tried again. Amber. A security guard named Dennis, who had been buying her a flapjack every Friday since 2019, came out of his glass booth looking as though he had stepped on a kitten.

"Sorry, Ms Nakamura-Boyle. It's been... there's been a change to your access."

"What kind of change?"

"The kind where I'm told to say there's been a change." He swallowed. "There's a note from the Chairman's office. You're to go straight up. I'm to let you in the front. Like a customer."

So Odette went in through the great oak doors with the pensioners and the pram-pushers and a man in a tracksuit carrying a bag of coins, under the glass dome and the ticker that said YOUR NEIGHBOURS BANK HERE, and every teller's head swivelled toward her as she crossed the marble, as sunflowers follow a lamp. At Window Three Bernie half-rose from her stool, face stricken, and mouthed something that looked like *darling* and ended in several vowels. Odette gave her the smallest nod. Not here, it said. Not now.

Margit, Walter's assistant, was waiting at the top of the curved stairs in her cardigan, holding a cup of tea and a sealed envelope. She had the pale, stricken look of a woman who had been given a task she disliked and had resolved to be pleasant about it. "Good morning, Odette. He's on a call. He asked me to give you this and to say that you're to read it before you come in."

It was a letter on thick cream paper. It was typed. It said, in the warm, flowing tone of a man who had never said no to anyone in his life, that in view of the demands of the season, the Society's duty of care to its senior colleagues, and the great honour of the forthcoming Steadfast Provision, it had been decided that Ms Nakamura-Boyle should take a period of *restorative leave*, on full pay, with immediate effect. Her caseload would be reassigned. Her systems access would be paused. This was *in no way a reflection on her exemplary service.* He looked forward to seeing her radiant on Lantern night. It was signed, in a green felt-tip pen, *Walter*, with a smiling face.

She read it twice, with the face she used for contracts. Then she folded it into her pocket, and handed Margit her pass, and said, with perfect courtesy, "Please tell the Chairman I'm very grateful."

"Odette," whispered Margit, "I didn't..."

"I know you didn't." She smiled. It was a horrible, bright smile, and it made Margit look at her shoes. "None of us ever do."

She walked out through the main doors she'd walked through for fourteen years. The granite steps were wet. The river wind snatched at her scarf. On the second step, a hand closed on her elbow, and a body smelling of coffee and cocoa butter and fury steamed up beside her.

"Not in front of the Vault," hissed Bernie. "Walk. Left. The lane."

The lane was Cooper's Passage, a gap between the bank and a dry-cleaner's where the bins lived and the smokers went. Bernie had not stopped to put on a coat. Her headwrap, which today was the colour of a plum tart, had come loose on one side. She pressed Odette against a drainpipe and held her by both arms and said, without drawing breath, "Is it true?"

"What?"

"That you're to be sacked after the interview. That the Chairman's got you on leave so he can pass your desk to Priyanka from Mortgages. That you're a security risk. That there's a note on your file. Mm? It's all over the staff room. Mm? Darling, answer, I've only got six minutes, Gareth is covering and Gareth cannot count."

"Who said I'm a security risk?"

"Priyanka. Who heard it from Margit's friend. Who heard it from the Chairman's *barber.*" Bernie's eyes were wet. "Is it the engagement? Is it him? Have you gone and done something terrible, Odette? Because if you have I will help you hide the body, I've got a boot and a cousin with a van, but you have to *tell* me."

Odette looked at her friend of eleven years, who had sat beside her at her mother's anniversary, and had held her hair at three Christmas parties, and had never once, in all that time, failed to be on the right side of the door. Something in her chest gave way, politely, like a shelf.

"I'm going to tell you something," she said, "and you must not tell a living soul. Not Gareth. Not the staff room. Not your mother."

"My mother?"

"Especially your mother."

"I swear on the Holy Trinity and a very good scone." Bernie crossed herself with the hand that wasn't holding Odette's arm. "Speak."

So Odette told her. Not the first part, the nine pages and the Pelican Café and the soup. She could not yet. She told her the second: the Finch file, the signed form, the biscuit tin in the dark, the empty hole. The Restricted flag. The Chairman, with his hand on a frightened old man's shoulder, slipping a page into his waistcoat. She spoke fast and flat, in a voice that sounded to her like somebody else reading out an insurance claim. When she reached the part about Alfredo Finch, the word *Tin*, Bernie's hand tightened on her sleeve until it hurt.

"Gateway," said Bernie, when she had finished.

"What about it?"

"It's the word on the files. The *restricted* ones. I've seen them on the tellers' screen, a little grey padlock on four accounts in the whole branch. Four. I thought it was a glitch." She was staring at the dry-cleaner's back door, at a rail of plastic-wrapped coats turning slowly in the draught. "Odette. They're all from Tannery Yard."

"What?"

"Mrs Pardoe's sister's flat, no, that one's Hallam Court, but there was a batch, three years back, I remember. Four, five, six accounts. Chairman's office came down with a list. We weren't to ask. They came off the system and onto paper." Bernie's voice dropped to a murmur. "Paper. In the cellar. In the Old Registry. You know the cellar. Under the vault proper."

"That room is sealed."

"By a lock that's older than both of us, and a key that sits on a hook in the porter's lodge, and the porter is my Uncle Clement." Bernie smiled with every tooth. "Darling, I have a *family*."

Odette began, quite helplessly, to laugh. It came up through her like water through a floorboard, a great helpless wet gulp, and she put her hand over her mouth and leaned against the drainpipe, and Bernie, after a startled second, began to laugh too, and for a full minute two women in good coats stood in a bin alley shaking with silent hilarity at the end of a very bad morning.

"What's so funny?" said Bernie, wiping her eyes.

"I'm on restorative leave."

"Oh, that's *vile.*"

"And I've never been so well rested," said Odette, "in my life."

She found him in the yard at ten, hosing down Brenda, in the damp, in his shirt-sleeves, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and the watch on his wrist catching the weak sun. He saw her over the roof of the car. The hose dropped. He turned off the tap, which seemed to take a very long time.

"They've put me on leave," she said.

"I thought they might." He wiped his hands down his trousers. "How long?"

"Indefinite. On full pay. Cleverly worded. If I fight it, I'm ungrateful; if I don't, I'm gone." She set her folder on Brenda's bonnet, a thing she had never in her life done to a folder. "Imran, I have a week. I have no desk, no system, no pass, and a friend with a boot and a cousin with a van. I am, for the first time in fourteen years, free to be as unprofessional as I wish."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning there's a cellar under the Vault. Meaning Bernie's uncle has a key." Her chin lifted. "Meaning that on Wednesday night, after closing, I would very much like to burgle my own bank, and I need a getaway driver."

Imran looked at her. Behind him the yard was bright and wet. In the unit, Wim could be heard singing something about a lighthouse at the top of his voice. The sergeant who had run convoys through two valleys in the dark, who had learned to expect the worst and plan for it and then be quietly, privately surprised by the world, opened his mouth to say *no*.

"I'll bring Brenda," he said.

"Brenda's silver. It's not subtle."

"Then I'll bring the Colonel. Nobody ever notices a van."

"Nobody ever *wants* to," Odette agreed, and smiled, and it was the smile she had given the ring.

"Is it a heist?"

They both turned. Wim stood in the unit doorway with a mop bucket in one hand and an expression of radiant horror, a lighthouse of his own. "Sorry, sorry, I wasn't listening, I was bringing the bucket, but the word was *burgle*, and I've seen every heist film ever made, so technically I'm a specialist."

"Wim," said Imran.

"I could be the lookout. Lookouts get a lot of the best lines. Or the man in the van who says *we've got company.* Or the inside man, but I haven't got an inside, sorry, I don't even have a bank card, I have a building society thing from when I was nine." He put the bucket down. "I'd need a code name."

"You'll need to shut your mouth," said Odette gravely, "in a manner that has until now escaped you."

"I can do that." Wim looked at his shoes. "I mean, I can't, sorry, historically. But I can try, and I'll write the plan on my hand so I don't say it. In my mouth I'll keep only the word *Tuesday.*"

"It's Wednesday."

"Then I'll keep *Wednesday.*" He picked the bucket up again. "Do I get a torch?"

Imran closed his eyes. In the dark behind them he saw a convoy, a very long convoy, winding up a very steep road, and every vehicle in it was driven by someone who had never passed a test. "You get a torch," he said.

Wim punched the air, softly, in the manner of a man who does not want to wake a baby.