"Odette, my dear," said Walter, rising with a small grunt, both hands outstretched. "There she is. Come, sit, I've a crate."

"I'll stand."

"Of course you will. You always did." He sank back down, entirely unoffended, and patted the crate beside him. In the wedge of torchlight he looked like a benevolent uncle at a campfire. "You'll forgive the dinner jacket. Mrs Osei-Lindqvist and I were at the Mayor's reception. A very dull affair. A harpist. I escaped on the pretext of a headache and came here instead, which is rather what a headache is for."

"You said you knew I was in the cellar."

"I said I knew the log, my dear. You have an honest face; it does the rest." He smiled. "And when you came, you came to find the Finch file, naturally. I was sure of it after Sunday. I said to myself, she's a bloodhound. Give her a scent and she'll follow it into the sea."

From his gap between the shelves, Imran could see only a strip of her back, rigid in the navy jumper, and the edge of her hand, curled against her thigh. The cellar had acquired a terrible, humming stillness. Beside him Bernie's breath was shallow and quick. Her phone, he noticed, was in her fist, its screen dimmed to the faintest glow and tilted toward the aisle. She caught his eye in the dark, and slowly, deliberately, tapped the red dot.

*Recording.*

He could have kissed her. He settled for a nod.

"You've read my little note," said Walter, "about assignments."

"Yes."

"And you're angry."

"I am extremely angry," Odette said evenly. "For the avoidance of doubt."

"Quite right. I would be." He steepled his fingers. "Let me say how sorry I am to have deceived you. It was shabby. I should have been open. But I knew your conscience, you see, and I knew what you would do with the whole picture, and I could not afford the delay. Gateway is the best thing to happen to this city in a hundred years, Odette. Four hundred jobs. A school. A bus interchange that works. And the price is a few little firms in a yard that has been dying since the tannery shut. A bakery. A tyre place. A man who paints signs."

"A man who bakes bread."

"A man who couldn't pay for it." Gently. "I did not enjoy that, my dear. I sat with Alfredo Finch in his kitchen and I said, *old friend, take the offer, take the money, retire.* He wouldn't. He threw a tray at me. A *tray.* I've still got the scar." He touched his eyebrow. "The Society is a bank, not a charity. You taught me that, on a hundred spreadsheets."

"I never taught you anything."

"Oh, you taught me everything. You taught me what a fair eye can do." His voice softened to near tenderness. "I chose you because you are the best I have. Because you do your work with such terrible, beautiful honesty that no one would believe the system could be wrong if you were the one holding the pen."

Imran saw her flinch. It was only a movement of the shoulder, a minimal retraction, but he felt it in his own.

"Well," said Walter, brisk now. "We can sit here and you can hate me. It's your right. Or we can be adults. Which would you prefer?"

"What are you offering?"

"Ah." He smiled, a broad, relieved smile, like a man who has watched a child choose the correct door. "The Branch Director's chair. Not in June. Now. I'll tell the Board tomorrow that the seat is yours, that I've had a sudden crisis of conscience and wish to do the right thing before the new year. You'll have the office with the window. You'll have a salary I'd rather not say out loud in a cellar. And you'll never have to sign a recovery order again, I give you my word. The unpleasant business will be done by others."

"And in exchange?"

"In exchange, nothing you couldn't do in your sleep." He spread his palms. "Drop the Finch matter. It's a sad business, it's finished, and all it can do is hurt you. Return the file to its box. Say nothing to the baker. Say nothing, particularly, to the press." A pause. "And allow your engagement to end, quietly, after the Provision has gone to its rightful winners. A break-up is a cruelty, I know. But it would be kinder to him, my dear, than the alternative."

"What's the alternative?"

"Having a wife-to-be who is a party to the burglary of her employer's cellar." The beam did not waver. "He is a good man, your sergeant. I'd hate to see his record sullied. A soldier. A war-weary man with a bad knee and a small business. How bleak, for the papers, to say *former sergeant charged.*"

The silence in the cellar was now so perfect that Imran heard the far pipes tick. He felt a thing go through him that he had last felt in a ditch outside a village whose name he refused to remember: a cold, slow, entirely rational lowering of the temperature, like the first frost on a pond. His hand closed on the edge of the shelving. Bernie's fingers found his sleeve and held it.

*Not yet.* Her lips shaped it. *Not yet. Let her.*

"I see," said Odette, after a very long time.

"I knew you would."

"And my grandmother?"

For the first time, something in the chairman's face changed. It was a little thing: a settling, a quiet readjustment of the eyebrow. "Your grandmother?"

"Teruko Nakamura. Seventy-six Linnet Row. Her mortgage was refinanced nine years ago through the Society, for my flat deposit, on an interest-only basis, on a signature of yours. I looked it up this afternoon on a library computer." Her voice was very level. "I would like to know if that is also part of the arrangement."

Walter's smile did not fade. It deepened, if anything, with a dreadful, paternal admiration. "My dear girl. What an excellent mind. No, I'd never... I wouldn't dream of troubling an old lady. Not in my wildest thoughts." He picked a thread from his lapel. "But she is eighty-one, and the Society's terms, you know, do have a review clause, and it would be so very sad if the review came at the wrong time. I should hate that. I would be devastated. All it needs is a little cooperation."

"I understand."

"I knew you would." He rose. The crate creaked. He closed the briefcase, took up the green pen, and smiled at her over his shoulder in the torchlight, a tired, loving smile, like a vicar's. "Lantern night, Odette. You'll tell the Board you're stepping back. You'll let Tamar and Dex win, and the sergeant will have my sincere sympathy, and a handsome sum for his lease. I can keep him out of it. I'll keep you out of it. Everyone goes home."

"I need a week," said Odette.

"You have until the Green."

"And I want the copy of the Finch notice you took on Sunday. I want it in my hand before I decide anything."

He looked at her for a moment. Then he laughed, delighted, and withdrew from his waistcoat the creased green-leafed page, and gave it to her with a small bow. "That's my girl. Of course. Burn it, if you like. It's only paper." He patted her shoulder, once, as one pats a pony, and Imran saw her not move. "Shall we go up? Clement will lock up. He's the worst liar, but the best locker."

They went. The torch beam wavered along the aisle and was swallowed by the gate. The gate clanged. The key turned. The humming resumed, fainter and fainter up the spiral stair, a cheerful man's song about being rich. A last distant door boomed shut. The dark settled over the Old Registry like a lid.

For a full minute nobody moved. Then Wim emerged from beneath his table with his hood askew and dust on his eyebrows and whispered, in a voice of pure suffering, "I held it in. I held it in the *whole time.*"

"You were magnificent," said Bernie, and burst into tears.

Imran took out his own phone. The screen lit his face, grey and unreadable. He did not know what he was looking for. He had the oddest sense that he had been holding his breath since the Colonel stalled. The cellar was freezing. The box lay open on its side, the six folders in a fan. Bernie wiped her eyes with her headwrap, tapped her screen and held up her phone as one holds up a trophy.

"I got him," she said. "Every word. Eight minutes and forty seconds. Mm?"

"And the folders?"

"Photographed each one before he came, darling. I'm a teller. We photograph *everything.*" She hiccuped. "Priyanka from Mortgages will never recover."

"Bernie," said Imran. "You're a genius."

"I know." She sobbed again. "I'm also going to be sacked."

It was Wim, helping her to her feet, who said what none of them had. "Where's Odette?"

"Upstairs, with the Chairman."

"But she said yes."

"She said she needed a week."

"She said yes to *him.*" Wim's face fell. "She's going to let him win. Sorry. I'm not saying she'd *mean* it, but she said, *I understand.* And she said it nicely. She says everything nicely. That's the problem with her."

Imran's phone buzzed in his palm. It was a message, from a number he now knew by heart, sent at 11:41 from somewhere above their heads.

*I said yes. I'm sorry. I am going to say it to the Board as well. Do not follow me, and do not tell Bernie to follow me, and for the avoidance of doubt, trust the table of contents.*

He read it three times. He turned it, wordlessly, to the others. And above them, a long way off and muffled by stone, a door shut, and a car started, and a woman in a navy jumper was driven away into the dark in the back of a chairman's limousine.