Wim's tea was so bad that it brought two enemies together in a single shared wince.

"What," said Rory, lowering the mug, "is in this?"

"Tea bags," said Imran. "Water. Possibly the kettle's history."

"It's tannic. It's practically a legal document." But he drank another mouthful, as a man does who has not eaten since the day before, and set the mug down on the desk beside the biscuit tin with a clink. They had retreated to the plasterboard office at half past four, with the unit door locked and the blind drawn, and sat on either side of the desk like two negotiators from a very small war. The only light came from the desk lamp. It lit Rory's hands, which were scarred with burns and pale with flour. They lay on the lid of the tin like those of a man about to be told a diagnosis.

"Before I open it," said Rory, "you should know that I don't forgive you."

"Understood."

"I don't forgive her either."

"Understood."

"But I find I don't hate you as much as I'd planned to, which is deeply inconvenient. I had a *speech.*" He sighed. "I had it in three acts. I'd been polishing it for three years."

"You can still give it."

"Not now. You've ruined it by being decent." He lifted the lid. The stack of papers sat in its tea towel, a faded red-and-white check, tied with baker's twine. He undid the knot with the slowness of habit and laid the cloth open. "My father kept everything. He was the kind of man who kept the receipt for the receipt. My mother used to say he'd have filed his own funeral. Look."

There was a ream of paper, soft with age, tabbed with torn strips of masking tape in a heavy hand: *OVEN REPAIRS. FLOUR. WAGES. SOCIETY.* Rory drew out the last bundle and fanned it. It was letters, mostly, on thick Society paper, with the green leaf at the head. Imran read the top one upside down. *Dear Mr Finch, we write to remind you...* Beneath it, another. *Dear Mr Finch, we regret...* There were a dozen. They grew shorter as they went.

"These are the arrears letters," said Rory. "Here. And this."

He slid across a small brown envelope. In it, a bank stub, a receipt, the corner of a cheque. Imran held the receipt to the lamp. It was stamped in blue, with a date from the previous June, three years ago, nine months before the auction. *Lindenfall Mutual. Received with thanks: forty-one thousand, three hundred pounds. Account FIN-0071. Final settlement of charge.*

"Final settlement," said Imran slowly.

"My father paid it off." Rory's voice had gone quiet. "He sold my mother's ring. He sold the van. He got a cousin to lend him the rest. He took a cheque to the Vault, to the counter, to a girl he knew from the choir, and he said *I'm done. I owe nothing. Take it.* And she stamped it. And three months later the letters began."

"The letters said he was in arrears."

"The letters said he was in *arrears.* On a charge that had been settled. For a debt he'd paid." He pressed the receipt flat with two fingers. "He went down to the Vault with this in his hand. And the Chairman came out of his office, and put an arm around him, and said, *Alfredo, my dear fellow, how dreadful. A misfiling. We'll sort it at once.* And they didn't. They sent a bailiff."

"Because Gateway needed the unit."

"Because Gateway needed the unit." Rory looked up. His eyes were rimmed with red. "And this, my darling Sergeant, is the note."

He took the single sheet from the top of the stack, with the green leaf at the head and a few lines of looping green ink. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had begun to tear. Imran took it. He read it with his lips pressed together.

*Alfredo,*

*I am so sorry for the muddle. The cheque was received, and I have it safely in my possession; the error is the Registry's, not mine, and shall be put right as soon as it can be done without disturbing the arrangements. In the meantime I beg you, old friend, to go quietly. The papers, the neighbours, young Rory. It will do none of you any good. I shall see to it that the Society treats you generously when this is over. Burn this. W.*

Below the signature, someone had written, in different ink, and a more cramped hand: *received by me, 14 Mar, 11.40am. Registry copy under H-77. A.F.*

"H-77," said Imran.

"It's a reference. A shelf, a file, I don't know." Rory spread his hands. "My father wrote it on the day. He knew. He wasn't a clever man, Sergeant, but he knew when someone was lying to him in a kind voice. He hid the tin that night. He got as far as the step the next morning. And then he fell down, and the paramedic's boots were red with brick dust, and I stood on that pavement in my pyjamas and watched the Society's van unload a man with a clipboard."

Imran sat back. The lamp buzzed. In the quiet he could hear the yard outside, a lorry, a gull, the distant percussion of the ring road. He thought of a girl with a stamp and a choir, and a counter, and a cheque, and of Odette on a step with a folder and a pen. *I signed it.* And he thought: *the document was never lost. It was kept.*

"That's fraud," he said.

"It's *extremely* fraud."

"It's not just the Finch lease. If the charge was cleared, the repossession wasn't lawful. If the repossession wasn't lawful, the Society had nothing to sell at the auction." He heard his own voice come out in the tone he used on a map. "And the lease I bought..."

"Is a lease on a building the bank didn't own." Rory smiled thinly. "I've been to a solicitor, you know. A very nice one, in a very small office. She said that in an ideal world it was a matter for the courts. She said that in this world, it's a matter for a man with deeper pockets than a baker."

"And the courts are in Lindenfall."

"And the judge banks at the Vault, and the solicitor's rent is paid by the Vault, and her clerk has a mortgage with the Vault. *Everyone banks in the same place.*" He ran both hands through his hair. "That's the entire problem. It isn't a conspiracy, it's an ecosystem."

Imran found, to his surprise, that he was smiling. It was small and tight and rueful, and he could feel the shape of it on his face, like a muscle he hadn't used. "I've been in an army, Rory. I know what it is to be inside a system that does its job."

"And?"

"It's very hard to beat from outside. It's easier from within, and slower." He tapped the receipt. "There's a recording. A woman called Bernie, a teller, got Walter on her phone last night. Eight minutes forty. He talks about Gateway, and the baker, and a plan for the Provision. It's not enough. But it's a start."

Rory stared. "You recorded the Chairman."

"I was hiding in a cellar. Bernie recorded him."

"In the *cellar.* Where the Registry is." The baker went very still. Then, slowly, as if a lamp had come on in a back room, his face changed. "Sergeant. There's a shelf in the cellar, H-77, you said it yourself, you were *in the room*..."

"We weren't looking for the Finch receipt. We were looking for the Gateway files."

"And did you see any shelf marked with an H?"

Imran thought. The aisles, the iron frames, the dust and mouse droppings. Torchlight on cardboard. He saw it, suddenly, a letter on a metal plate, high on the end of an unreachable rack. *H.* "There was an H," he said. "Aisle nine. At the back. It was locked behind a mesh."

"There you are." Rory's fingers drummed on the tea towel. "There's the other one. The one Father marked. I can't walk into the Vault, I'm persona non grata, I've been banned from the premises for throwing a baguette."

"At whom?"

"A pigeon, in fairness. But it landed on a manager."

A phone buzzed on the desk. Not Imran's. It was Rory's, an ancient cracked thing, and it buzzed again, in a long rattle. Rory squinted at it, frowned, and swore in Italian. Then Imran's own phone rang, a loud, ridiculous Dancing Sergeant ringtone that Wim had installed as a joke, and he dived for it. It was Bernie.

"Darling," she said, in a voice thick with horror. "Are you near a screen?"

"I'm in the office."

"Look at the Vault's page. Look at it now."

He turned the lamp. Rory had already pulled his phone to the light, and was scrolling, white as chalk. The Vault's feed was a cheerful scroll of green: coffee mornings, a tombola, a grinning cashier holding a giant cheque. At the top, posted four minutes ago, was a photograph of a woman in a camel coat on the granite steps, smiling beside a broad man in a plum waistcoat. The woman was Odette. She was smiling the smile of a person who had been told to. The caption read:

*Delighted to announce that OUR OWN Odette Nakamura-Boyle is appointed Branch Director-designate, effective immediately! Odette, pictured with Chairman Walter Osei-Lindqvist, says: "A new chapter. I'm so grateful." A private matter has been settled: Odette and Mr Haddad have, by mutual agreement, decided to part ways. We wish them both every happiness. #VaultFamily #NewChapter*

Imran looked at the photograph. Her left hand was folded over her right. The ring was gone.