The Vault had been built to make a person feel small and then reassure them about it.

Its steps were grey granite, worn in the middle like a spoon. Its doors were oak and brass, and the brass was polished every morning at six by a man named Clement, who treated it as a vocation. Inside, the hall rose to a glass dome the colour of weak tea, under which two hundred years of Lindenfall's savings had been counted, queued for, and discussed in whispers. A modern touch had been added: a bank of screens above the tellers' windows, showing the Green Card leaf pulsing gently, and below it a ticker that read, in cheerful type, YOUR NEIGHBOURS BANK HERE.

"It's quite something," said Imran.

"It's meant to be." Odette walked beside him at a measured pace, not touching, in her armour of camel coat and folder. "Everything here is arranged so that you think the building is old and trustworthy and you are new and temporary. For the avoidance of doubt, it works on me, too."

"Does it?"

"Every Monday." She nodded at a teller who stared and looked away. "Don't look at the windows. They're all watching."

They were. He could feel it, a kind of temperature. Eight tellers' windows, eight faces with the practised blankness of people who have heard every confession of a town's finances, and every one of them tilted, very slightly, in their direction. As they passed Window Three, a tall woman in a golden headwrap gave a little cough of tremendous innocence.

"Morning, Ms Nakamura-Boyle."

"Bernadette."

"Morning, *sir*." Bernie's eyes shone. "You're looking well rested. For a man in your situation."

"What situation?" said Imran.

"Oh," said Bernie, "any," and passed a stack of paying-in slips to a customer without looking at them. As they moved on, she said, under her breath, in a whisper that carried clear to the dome, "He's taller than I'd thought, darling, and the shoulders on him, mm?"

Odette did not break stride. Her ears, however, were the colour of boiled ham.

The chairman's office was at the top of a staircase that curved like a question, behind a door marked, in discreet brass, W. OSEI-LINDQVIST — CHAIRMAN OF THE SOCIETY. The door was open. A very large man was rising behind a very large desk with both hands extended, and an expression of such boundless pleasure that Imran, who had been briefed by a hundred colonels, felt his guard go up like a drawbridge.

"There he is!" cried Walter Osei-Lindqvist. "The Dancing Sergeant himself! Friend, come in, come in, let me look at you."

He was sixty-three, broad and soft, with silver hair swept in a wave, a waistcoat the colour of ripe plums, and a warm, resonant, folksy voice that seemed to have been grown in a barrel. He took Imran's hand in both of his and held it. His palms were dry. He smelled of expensive soap and peppermint. "My wife showed me the video on her telephone. I laughed till I wept. Four million! My dear boy, you could run for council on that."

"Thank you, sir. It was a wedding."

"The best things are." He turned the beam on Odette, and squeezed her shoulder, and Imran noted how she held still beneath it, like a bird beneath a cat's shadow. "And *this* one. Fourteen years, this woman's been in my building and never once told me a thing about her private life. Not a peep. I said to my wife, I said, that girl will be Branch Director the day she tells me she's got something to go home to, and here we are on a Monday, and I've heard it from my *barber*."

"Chairman," said Odette.

"Walter, Walter, call me Walter. Sit. Sit! Margit will bring tea." He lowered himself into a leather chair behind the desk with the air of a man being tucked into bed. "Now I always say, friend, you can tell everything about a man by how he takes his tea, so I'll be watching."

"I take it however it comes, sir."

"A soldier." Walter beamed, delighted. "My father was in the Pioneers. Used to tell a story about a mule. Do you know the one? A sergeant in his unit had a mule that wouldn't cross a river, and he tried everything, carrots, shouting, a great wide rope, and then one day the sergeant just sat down on the bank, took out his sandwiches, and ate. And the mule watched. And when the sergeant had finished his sandwiches, the mule crossed the river on its own, because it couldn't bear to be left." He chuckled and slapped the desk. "I've always thought that the finest management lesson there is. Don't push. Sit down and let them come to you."

It was, Imran thought, a perfectly warm story. It was also exactly the kind of story a man tells when he intends to eat his sandwiches in front of you.

"Odette tells me you run a school," Walter continued, accepting a tray from a silent woman in a cardigan. "A *noble* trade. I did my driving test four times. Did she mention? Fourth time, I bribed the examiner with a pie."

"She didn't mention."

"Because it's untrue. But it makes a better story." The chairman poured. "And I'm sorry, friend, truly sorry, to hear you're in some difficulty with the Society."

The word *difficulty* sat on the tray beside the sugar. Odette's spine, which had been straight, became a ruler.

"It's a temporary matter, Walter," she said.

"Of course, of course. These things are, until they aren't." He stirred, tapped, laid the spoon in the saucer with a faint chime. "But I have been thinking, and I wanted to put something to you privately, Mr Haddad, in the spirit of friendship, and certainly nothing the Collections team need concern themselves with."

"I'm listening."

"The Society has an interest in the Tannery Yard, long-term. There are plans. Grand, rather boring plans, regeneration, a gateway for the city, you'll have seen the artist's impression, a lot of glass." He gestured vaguely at a framed painting behind him: a tall, shining building, impossibly clean, with a family walking beneath it and a dog that appeared to be smiling. "Your unit sits on a corner we'd very much like to tidy. I can offer you, shall we say, a courtesy. The Society would purchase the remainder of your lease, at a fair figure, plus a modest relocation allowance, and take on the whole of your loan. You walk away free of debt, a decent bit of money in your pocket, and Odette here is spared a most unpleasant duty. Everyone's happy. Win, win, friend. What say you?"

Imran said nothing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Odette's hand, on the arm of the chair, go white at the knuckles. She had not known. He could tell from the angle of her neck: a professional surprise, hidden in a hurry.

"That's generous, sir."

"I'm a generous man. It's a sickness." Walter smiled widely. "Of course, you'd be wise to think it over. The offer's open until the first of next month. After that, the notice period runs its course, and... well. The Society would, I'm afraid, have to purchase the unit from the receiver, at rather less generous terms. I wouldn't wish that on anybody."

"No, sir."

"It's a kindness, you see. Everything I do is a kindness, my dear fellow. It is my chief weakness." He leaned back. "And you'd have time for the wedding."

The word dropped into the room like a coin in a well. Imran counted the seconds until it hit the bottom. "The wedding."

"Engagement, engagement, my apologies. My tongue." Walter spread his hands. "But a man who's engaged should have his house in order. I always say that. You'll want to be settled when you marry, you'll want a bit of capital, a home, a decent roof for the wife-to-be. That's all I'm thinking of. Odette's welfare. She's like a daughter to me."

"I'm very touched, Walter," said Odette, in a voice like polished glass.

"Of course you are, my dear." He patted her hand. She did not flinch. It was, Imran thought, the most heroic non-flinch he had ever witnessed.

The visit lasted another twenty minutes. There was tea and a plate of the Vault's famous almond biscuits, which were cold, and a story about a pigeon in the board room, and a long, affable inquiry into Imran's war service, in which Walter produced several correct regimental names and one incorrect one, and Imran, out of curiosity, let the incorrect one stand. At the end the chairman rose and shook his hand again, and said, in the voice of a man blessing a ship, "You'll let me know, friend. Think it over. Time is a thing we all have, until we don't."

"Yes, sir."

"And bring her to dinner. Both of you. Mrs Osei-Lindqvist insists. She's keen to meet the woman who tamed the Reaper."

They went down the curved stairs without speaking. In the hall, the Monday queues moved like slow weather. Neither of them said anything until the oak doors had closed behind them and the granite steps were under their feet, and the wet wind from the river had struck their faces, and then Odette stopped on the second step and said, very quietly, with great precision, a word that Imran had previously only heard from the quartermaster of 4 Transport Squadron.

"You've gone pale," he said.

"I did not know about the Gateway." She stood with her folder pressed to her chest. "He told the Board it was *aspirational*. He said there were no purchases pending. I've signed forty-one recovery orders in that postcode in three years, and I thought... I never..." She stopped. She started again, with a visible effort at the voice she used on customers. "For the avoidance of doubt, I would like to be extremely angry for approximately ninety seconds, and then I would like us to carry on."

"Take your ninety."

She turned her face into the wind and counted. He looked politely at the river.

She was at sixty-one when the door behind them flew open and Bernie came out onto the steps at a run, without her coat, headwrap askew, phone clutched like a grenade. "Darling," she hissed. "Darling, I'm on my break, I've got four minutes, and I've got something."

"What?"

"Someone's filed." Bernie held up the screen, which showed a bank intranet page with a crest. "This morning. First thing, nine-oh-two. Steadfast Provision. Applicant: *Two Spoons Living Ltd*."

"Two Spoons?" said Imran.

"Tamar and Dex Whitlock-Adeyemi," said Bernie, and Odette closed her eyes. "Married six years. Three hundred and forty thousand followers. They do a thing with sourdough and matching aprons and hold hands in every picture. They've got a *hashtag*." She dropped her voice. "And darling, I looked at the cover note, and the cover note's been drafted by the Chairman's office."