The Pelican Café opened at six-thirty for the benefit of nurses, bakers and people who had made mistakes, and at five to seven Imran stood outside it in the same ironed shirt, rehearsing a refusal.

He had arrived early. He always arrived early. A lifetime of other people's lateness had taught him that the first person at a meeting owned the geography. He chose the table by the radiator, as instructed, put his back to the wall, and ordered a black coffee from a girl with a pelican tattooed on her wrist, who tapped his Green Card on the reader and lit it a clean, impartial green. He let out a breath he hadn't noticed holding. Not yet. Not today.

Odette came in at seven exactly. The coat, the folder, a scarf the colour of wet slate. She saw him, saw the radiator, nodded as if he had passed an examination, and sat. She did not order. A cappuccino arrived in front of her anyway, brought by the girl with the pelican, who said, "The usual, Ms Nakamura-Boyle," in the voice of a person addressing a bishop.

"You have a usual," said Imran.

"Everyone in this city has a usual. It's the only way they can tell who's lying." She took a sip and her shoulders came down a quarter of an inch. "Thank you for coming."

"I came to say no in person. You seemed the type who'd appreciate the courtesy."

"I do. Say it."

He opened his mouth. Behind her, on the wall, the café's TV was running the regional morning programme with the sound off: a presenter with a pelican-coloured sofa, a ticker saying LANTERN WEEKEND: SIX WEEKS TO GO, and then, as he watched, a clip of a car park flooded to the wheel arches. Cars up to their doors in brown water. A queue of learners' cars in the middle, bobbing, one of them his own.

"That's my Colonel," said Imran.

"I thought it was Tuesday's weather."

"That was Tuesday's weather. I got stuck. Kiera's cousin put it on RoadRated and it got two thousand views." He rubbed his face. "One star. 'Instructor was calm but the van was a boat.'"

"It's an excellent review," said Odette. "You can't buy that kind of honesty." Then, as if the sentence had escaped her, she put her cup down. "I'm sorry. I'm not usually flippant at this hour."

"What hour are you usually flippant?"

"I haven't established it. It's possible I'm never." She looked at her hands. "I'll be brief. I need you to understand why I am asking, so that you can decide whether I am a lunatic or merely a desperate person."

"Those are different?"

"The desperate ones have a plan." She drew a notebook out of the folder, a real paper one with a red elastic band, and turned to a page of small, exact handwriting, and slid it across. There were three columns. He read the headers: THE BOARD. THE CHAIRMAN. NANA.

"The Branch Director's seat at the Vault falls vacant in June," said Odette. "I've worked there for fourteen years. I am, by any measure of results, the best candidate. I am also, by the Board's measure, a woman with no one at the dinner table. Walter Osei-Lindqvist, our chairman, said to me at the Christmas lunch, in front of nine people and a trifle, 'We like our directors settled, friend. A person with somewhere to go home to makes better decisions.' He patted my hand."

"That's not legal."

"It's not written down. That is a much sturdier kind of unfair." She tapped the second column. "Walter is also the sort of man who will choose a candidate because she brought a husband to a gala. I have seen him do it. It took him four minutes."

"And Nana?"

"My grandmother." The word came out with a kind of weary reverence, like the name of a weather system. "Teruko Nakamura. Eighty-one. Plays bingo three evenings a week and has never lost a game she wanted. Since March she has been arranging for me to meet men. Last Friday it was a periodontist. He explained his hobby, which is fixing unwanted gums at parties."

Imran's mouth twitched. "That's a lie."

"I wish. She leaves their numbers in my coat. This morning I found one in my glove, and the glove was on my hand." Odette straightened. "She is not malicious. She believes that if I am not married before she is gone, I will turn into a cautionary tale. She told me so. Quite calmly. Over soup."

He looked up, then, and for the first time saw her face without the folder or the coat to interpret it. There was a small tiredness around the eyes that looked old, and a straightness around the mouth that looked older. She was not asking for pity. She was giving him an inventory and watching him count.

"So you need a fiancé," he said.

"I need a believable one. A Board member, a chairman and an eighty-one-year-old woman, all of whom think they are cleverer than me, must each be given a thing to believe. You, Mr Haddad, are a man with no connection to my circle. You have a business that needs the grant. You are, I'm told, respected by teenagers, which is a hard currency. You are also, if I may say, quite unlike anyone I'd choose. This makes you extremely convincing."

"Thanks."

"It's a compliment. Nobody believes a woman like me would pick a man like you. So when she does, it looks like love."

Imran laughed, a short bark, and a man at the next table looked up from a croissant. He lowered his voice. "Right. Three things."

"Three?"

"One: if I do this, I do it properly, and that means rules, in writing. Two: there's an end date. We say when it stops, up front, so we're both going home on the same day. Three." He paused, because three was the one he did not know how to say. "Nobody gets hurt. Not you, not me, not the learners, not Wim. If anything starts to go sideways, we pull out, no questions."

She was already writing. She wrote fast, upside down to him, in a hand like a row of tiny fence posts. "I'd like a fourth."

"Go on."

"No feelings." She said it matter-of-factly, to the page. "For the avoidance of doubt. It is a commercial arrangement, with performance elements, and neither party shall develop, nurture, or permit to develop any feelings of a romantic nature, under penalty of... I haven't decided the penalty. Something proportionate."

"A fine."

"Or a forfeit." She looked up, and a muscle moved in her cheek. "I would like it noted that I do not expect this to be difficult."

"Noted."

"I think it's very unlikely I'd fall for a man who irons his shirt on a desk."

Imran looked down at the shirt. "How do you know it was a desk?"

"There's a crease like the edge of a log folder." She was almost smiling. It transformed her face the way a lamp transforms a room: nothing moved, everything became visible. "I notice things. It's my only talent. I would be extremely good at the grant and extremely bad at actually liking anyone, which is why I think it will work."

Something in that sentence sat down in him and stayed. He pushed it aside, as he'd pushed aside a hundred things at the roadside, and reached across the table. "Then we're in business."

"We're in a negotiation."

"I'd say the handshake is the first public performance."

"Oh, of course." She took his hand. It was small, dry, and surprisingly warm, and she held it exactly three seconds. "That was extremely well done. We'll need a great deal more of this. Eye contact. Casual touch. A shared vocabulary. Have you ever been engaged?"

"No."

"I've been engaged, once, for eleven weeks. It ended with a very polite email and a rug." She released him and he felt, absurdly, the cold in his palm where the warmth had been. "We should rehearse. What colour are my eyes?"

"Brown."

"Try again."

"Amber," said Imran, and his own voice surprised him. "Not the bank's. A kind of tea one."

Odette held his gaze a beat longer than was professional. Then she looked at the table. "That's... accurate."

"I'm a driving instructor. I spend my life studying faces for signs of panic."

"And do I show signs?"

"Not one." He drank his coffee. "That's the worry."

It was then that the café door opened, letting in a gust of cold air, a pair of wet umbrellas, and a voice that carried like a market trader's. "Mornin', Marguerite. The usual, mm? And I'll take a pastry for my friend who forgets to eat." A tall woman in a green Vault lanyard, with a laugh like a dropped tray of spoons and a huge golden headwrap, came striding past the counter. She was already scrolling her phone with her thumb. She looked up, saw the radiator table, and her whole body stopped as though a switch had been thrown.

"Oh, no," said Odette, very softly.

"Who is it?"

"Bernadette Achebe. Senior teller. My best friend. The most dangerous woman in Lindenfall."

Bernie had begun to walk. She walked as if on a very slow red carpet, eyes round, lips parted, phone raised like a torch. The pelican girl, to her credit, did not look up. Imran did the only sensible thing a man could do in a long career of ambushes: he lifted Odette's hand off the table and held it, between both of his, and looked straight into her eyes.

For one second Odette's face did something he had not catalogued, a quick slackening, as if someone had cut a string. Then she rallied. "Darling," she said, in a voice she had plainly never used, "this is my friend Bernie."

"Mm," said Bernie, in a tone of immense delight. "Is it."

At 7:41, as Imran stood outside the Pelican Café scuffing his boots on the kerb and trying not to look like a man who had accidentally entered a contract with a hurricane, Odette's phone began to buzz in her coat. It buzzed for eleven seconds. When she took it out, the screen read: VAULT GIRLS (47). Beneath it, the preview: WHO IS HE, and a string of seventeen eyes.

Then a call came through. The screen said NANA, and below it, because Odette had never changed it, a photograph of a tiny woman in a tracksuit holding a bingo dabber like a sword.

"Don't," said Imran.

"I have to." She answered. "Nana. It's seven-forty in the morn..."

The voice that came back was loud enough for him to hear from a metre away, and it said, in an accent clipped like a bamboo shoot, "Odette. Bernadette's mother has told Mrs Sato who has told me. You have a man. A man with a van. Bring him to Sunday lunch, and do not let him wear that shirt."