The video was eleven seconds long and had been watched four million times.

Imran had not known this until Saturday night, when Wim, who could not hold a secret but could hold a phone, turned up at the launderette door with his hood down and the face of a man delivering a diagnosis. "It's from your old unit's reunion. Somebody's cousin filmed it. It's got a soundtrack. Sorry. It's got a *filter*."

On the screen, in a function room with a carpet the colour of regret, a man in a bright blue shirt was performing what appeared to be a controlled demolition of a dance. His arms went one way. His knees went another. His face, though, was the thing. His face was a face of perfect, innocent, military commitment, as if the choreography had been issued in triplicate and he meant to follow it to the end. Underneath, someone had typed: THE SERGEANT DOES NOT KNOW SHAME. Three hundred thousand likes. Seventy thousand shares. A brand-new account had stitched it next to a clip of a cat falling off a sofa.

"That's the wedding in Colchester," said Imran faintly.

"They call you the Dancing Sergeant. There's a sound. People do a thing where they do your dance in car parks." Wim fiddled with his sleeves. "Forty-one people have asked on RoadRated if you're still teaching. One of them wants a lesson specifically in how to dance like that. I told them you were, sorry, unavailable."

"Well done."

"I also told them the shirt was a gift from your mother."

"It was a gift from my mother."

"Oh. Then that's actually all right."

So on Sunday, at twelve fifty-five, Imran stood on the step of a narrow terraced house in the Old Quarter, in the blue shirt, holding a bunch of supermarket tulips and an unexpected sense of being reviewed. The house had a green door and a brass cat for a knocker. Beside him Odette stood in a navy dress and flat shoes, as upright as a flagpole, with her bag held in both hands in front of her like a shield.

"She'll test us," said Odette, without moving her lips. "She asks questions in the order of the most devastating."

"Such as?"

"Last time it was whether my last boyfriend still had his own teeth."

"Did he?"

"He did not, and I resent that she knew." She drew breath. "We met at the roundabout."

"What?"

"The Tannery Yard roundabout. I'd been inspecting a repossession at the paint supplier's, I was crossing, you were teaching a learner, and the learner stalled, and you got out and held up the traffic with one hand. I looked up. You were like a lighthouse in a fleece."

He stared at her. "That's very good."

"I wrote it on the bus. Don't say *lighthouse*, it sounds as if I invented it."

"You did invent it."

"I invented it in good faith." The door opened.

The woman who stood there came up to Imran's chest. She wore a purple tracksuit, a perfectly set grey bob, and a pair of tiny gold-rimmed glasses through which she looked at him as an auctioneer looks at a vase. The house behind her smelled of rice and miso and floor polish. Behind the glasses her eyes were black and ferociously bright.

"This is the man," said Teruko Nakamura.

"Nana, this is Imran Haddad."

"I know what his name is, I have seen it written. Come." She reached out a small, strong hand, took the tulips, sniffed them, and looked at him again. "Supermarket."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. Honest. The ones from the florist are a lie." She turned and went down the hall, calling over her shoulder in a voice that could have called a tide in. "Take off your shoes. Not those socks. Those socks have a hole."

They did. They had. They were issued slippers that were at least four sizes too small, and Imran spent the next three hours walking like a man in a hostile sandal. The kitchen was the size of a lift. Every surface held something: a rice cooker, a tin of fish, a bingo dabber in a mug, a framed photograph of a young man in a naval cap. A television muttered in the other room. Nana set three bowls on a table barely wide enough for them and began ladling.

"So," she said. "When did you two meet?"

"At the Tannery Yard roundabout," said Odette.

"What day?"

"A Tuesday."

"Which Tuesday?"

"The... eleventh." Odette's voice went up a note. "Of September."

"It rained on the eleventh. I remember, I went to the doctor. You said you were at work." Nana tasted her soup. "How did he look?"

"Like a lighthouse in a fleece," said Odette, and shut her eyes.

"He wears a fleece?" Nana turned the glasses on him. "You wear a fleece?"

"It's practical, ma'am. Three pockets."

"Hm." She chewed a pickle with the intense concentration of a safe-cracker. "Do you have your own teeth?"

"Nana," said Odette.

"All of them," said Imran, and showed her, because it seemed the polite thing. Nana looked at the display for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, as though a customs officer had stamped a form.

"Do you have debts?"

The kitchen tilted slightly. Odette set down her spoon. Imran watched the question travel across the table, picking up speed, and understood that this was it: the trap in the corridor, the checkpoint that wasn't on the map. If he lied, he would be lying to the one person who was, in the strict sense, an innocent. If he told the truth, he'd stand in Odette's grandmother's kitchen in the wrong shoes and describe his own ruin.

"Yes," he said.

"How much?"

"Nana, that's not..."

"Quite a lot," said Imran. "More than I'd like. I borrowed to open a school, and the school hasn't earned what I said it would. There's a notice on the door. Your granddaughter put it there herself." He held the black eyes. "She did it kindly. I've been talked out of bad decisions by worse people."

For a second no one breathed. The television in the next room announced a sale on conservatories. Then Nana Teruko reached across the table, with great economy, and took his empty bowl and filled it.

"Eat," she said. "Men who confess should eat. It keeps them from doing it again."

It was a long lunch. There were dumplings, and grilled fish that Nana filleted in four strokes with the air of a surgeon, and a conversation that moved between topics with the nonchalance of a rally driver: bingo, the periodontist, the price of rice, whether Imran knew how to reverse a van. ("Seventeen metres, through a gap the width of my own wing mirrors, in the rain, with a corporal shouting," he said, and she said, "Good, I need someone to park the Corolla.") At one point she called Odette *Michiko*, and then, after the faintest hesitation, *Odette*, and neither of them remarked on it. At another, ten minutes later, she asked if he had eaten rice, and he said that he had, and she nodded, and a quarter of an hour later asked again, and he said, "Yes, ma'am, it was excellent," and Odette's hand under the table closed lightly on his sleeve, a signal he did not at first understand and then did.

It was after three when Nana ordered Odette to the corner shop for milk.

"We have milk," said Odette.

"We do not have *good* milk. Go." The old woman did not look up from the sink. "And take your time. He can dry."

Odette looked at Imran. He gave her what he hoped was an expression of calm. She hesitated, then took her coat, and the front door closed with a soft click that echoed through the narrow house.

Imran picked up a tea towel. The kitchen smelled of lemon and steam. The water ran. Nana Teruko washed a bowl, rinsed it, handed it to him without turning, and said, in an entirely ordinary voice, "She is lying to me and so are you."

His hand did not stop moving. It was a mercy of his training: the hands kept doing the next thing. "Ma'am?"

"You met on a Tuesday, you say, but you looked at the *wall* when she said it. Neither of you knows the other's middle name. She has never once, in thirty-seven years, held a man's hand under my table. She held yours as if it were a cheque." Another bowl, rinsed, handed over. "Nobody falls in love in a week with a man in a fleece."

"Ma'am, I..."

"Be quiet. I am speaking." She turned off the tap. In the sudden hush he could hear her breathing, light and quick, and the clock above the cooker, and the muffled television. "I am eighty-one. I forget things. This morning I forgot where I put my own spectacles, and they were on my face. I do not forget my granddaughter. I watched her marry her work and divorce her laugh. She has not been happy in a long time. Tonight she was almost happy and she was lying to me." The black eyes came round and fixed him. "So. A fake man is better than a periodontist."

Imran put the bowl down very carefully. "What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Go on. Be her fake man. Be a good one." She took the tea towel from his hand and dried her own with a flick. "But you will not tell her I know. She is enjoying herself. It is the first time in many years she has had a project that was not a funeral."

"Mrs Nakamura..."

"Nana. If you are to be the fake man, you will call me Nana." She smiled then, and it was a savage, delighted thing, like a fox tasting a hen. "And if you hurt her, Imran Haddad, I will know where your van sleeps."

The front door opened. Cold air, a rustle of plastic, and Odette's voice, a little breathless, calling down the hall, "I got the *good* milk! They had the good milk!"

"Of course they did," said Nana, and began drying a bowl that was already dry.

They left at half past four. On the step Odette took a long breath, as if the air had been different inside, and said, "That went extremely well," and he nodded, and neither mentioned the middle names. As they reached the gate her phone chimed. She read the screen. The colour went out of her face in one clean sweep.

"What?"

"Walter." She turned it around so he could read. The message was from a contact saved as CHAIRMAN (DO NOT REPLY BEFORE COFFEE), and it said:

*Odette, friend! Hear wonderful news from the grapevine. Do bring your young man to the Vault, ten sharp, Monday. I'd love to shake his hand. W.*