The Saturday market filled the cobbled square like a held breath being slowly let out, and Imran went into it with a dozen reasons not to and one that outweighed them all: a bread emoji.

He had slept badly, which was normal, and then lain awake with the pinned comment, which was new. *Ask what's under his floor.* Under his floor there was a keyhole-shaped drain, a damp patch, and an old sink somebody had concreted over. He had checked on Friday after closing, on his knees with a torch between his teeth, tapping the slab like a safe-cracker. It sounded like a floor. That was exactly what a floor would sound like if it had something to hide.

The orange van was parked at the north end, between a man selling antique keys and a woman selling soap that looked like cheese. The side had been rolled up into an awning, and under it stood a trestle table piled with loaves: sourdough, rye, braided things dusted with poppy seeds, cinnamon rolls the size of a baby's head. A hand-painted board announced FINCH & SON — BREAD WITH A MEMORY, and below that, smaller: *Since 1971. Since the Bank. Since Everything.* The queue was twelve deep and cheerful. At its head, with flour on his moustache and a tea towel over one shoulder like a toreador's cape, stood Rory Castellanos-Finch, delivering a monologue to a pensioner about the moral nature of crumb.

"...and that, madam, is why you must never refrigerate a loaf. It is a living thing. You wouldn't put your *grandmother* in the fridge."

"Mine's in the fridge at Whitmore's," said the pensioner, "but only till the funeral."

"Then I'm sorry for your loss and I'll throw in a bap." He looked up, saw Imran, and went completely still, the way a stage actor pauses before the line he has been waiting for. A slow, glittering smile spread across his face. "Ladies and gentlemen. The Dancing Sergeant. In the flesh. Do step aside, I'm afraid this is a gentleman of *means*."

The queue turned. Phones were raised. Someone began, hopefully, to hum the sound from the video. Imran walked up to the table with the unhurried gait of a man crossing a minefield he had personally mapped.

"Morning."

"Is it? I'd have said it was a *reckoning*." Rory leaned on the table with both hands. In daylight he was younger, and more tired, and had very dark eyes, ringed with sleeplessness and a dangerous intelligence. "What can I do for you? A sourdough? A bap? A small, sweet apology?"

"You left me a pastry."

"I did. How was it?"

"Excellent. It's why I'm confused." Imran kept his voice low, level, a tone he had used on a bridge to a frightened sapper. "Last week you wrote on my door. Then you wrote on a bag. Yesterday you left a comment under a video. I'd like to know what I've done."

"Done?" Rory spread his arms to the square. "Who said you've done anything? A man can't compliment a stranger's lease?" He lowered his voice theatrically, so that everyone within ten metres leaned in. "You live in a *house of bread*, Sergeant. Every house has a story. Yours has a very long one. You'd know it if you cared to look."

"I'm looking."

"Not hard enough."

"Then tell me."

"And spoil the ending?" Rory straightened, picked up a loaf, and began to wrap it in paper with the dramatic precision of a priest preparing a sacrament. "No, no. I find it's more nourishing when people discover things for themselves. Particularly *people with the bank in their pocket*."

"I'm not in the bank's pocket. I owe it money."

"Same thing, in Lindenfall." He tied the string. "Eight-fifty."

"For a loaf?"

"For the memory."

Imran paid. He tapped the Green Card, and the little reader lit a clean green, and from somewhere in the queue a woman sighed with something between relief and envy. The loaf was warm through the paper. It smelled so good it felt like an insult.

"You know her, don't you," said a voice behind him. It was a thin, tired voice, belonging to a woman in an anorak, maybe fifty, with a basket of herbs. She was looking at Imran with the avid, wary look of someone who has been waiting for a spokesman. "The Reaper. They say you're with her."

"I'm engaged to her."

The word turned over in the air like a coin and landed on the cobbles. He heard it land. Two or three phones tilted.

"She took my sister's flat," said the woman. "Fourteen years it was in the family. Two missed payments after the operation. Two. She came herself, in that coat, and she was so polite, and my sister cried on the step and said *thank you*, because the Reaper had been so nice about it. *Thank you*. As if she'd done her a favour."

"I'm sorry."

"You will be. You'll be sorry the first night you're woken at three by the knowledge that you're lying beside the woman who evicts old people." She was trembling slightly, though not from cold. "What kind of person does that? What kind of person *marries* it?"

The square had gone quiet in the way that squares do when they have decided to become an audience. Twelve people in the queue. A man with a key in each hand. Somewhere a toddler wailing in time with a pigeon. And Rory Castellanos-Finch, behind his table, with his chin on his hand, watching Imran with an expression of rapt, almost tender attention, like a man at the theatre who had come to see the villain's undoing and is not quite sure of the plot.

Imran did not mean to speak. He meant to take the loaf and apologise and go. He had been trained for forty-one kinds of conflict, and in none of them was it advisable to respond to a crowd. But his mouth had been opened by something older than training, by the sight of her chin trembling on the step of the unit door while she smoothed the corners of the notice, by the flicker of her face when Walter patted her hand.

"She does her job," he said.

"That's what they all say."

"I know. I've said it. I was in the army, I know what it is to be the face of something you didn't write." He turned, so that the whole queue could see him. His voice was low, but it went out, as a sergeant's does, to the back row. "She came to my unit with a folder and told me the truth. That was kind. Do you know how many people in this city have told me the truth about money? I'd say two. One was my mother. The other came in a camel coat and sat in my office and said, I do not enjoy it. And she didn't. I watched her not enjoy it. It took a lot of effort."

Silence. A pigeon landed on the soap woman's table and took a long look at the cheese.

"I can't speak for your sister's flat," Imran said, more quietly, to the woman in the anorak. "I wasn't there. But I know she was there for it, because she's been there for every one. She's carried every single address. If it matters, I'll tell her what you said. I think she'd want to know your sister's name."

The woman stared at him. Her mouth opened, then closed, and then, strangely, her face crumpled slightly, not in anger but in something harder to name. "It's Corinne," she said. "Corinne Pardoe."

"Thank you. I'll tell her."

"Well," said Rory, into the hush, in the voice of a man greatly cheated of a climax. "That's rather unexpected."

Imran took his bread and left.

It took him until the far side of the square to understand what he'd done. He had made a speech. He had made it in front of fourteen phones. He stopped beside the man selling keys and watched a teenager in a bobble hat lower his screen, grinning, and say to his friend, loudly, "Bro. *Bro.* The Dancing Sergeant just went full general."

By noon the clip was up. By one, it had a title: THE SERGEANT DEFENDS THE REAPER. By two, Wim was phoning every ten minutes with an increasingly strangled commentary: "Eighty thousand, sorry, ninety, a woman in Leeds has made it into a song..." Imran was in Brenda, out on the ring road with a learner named Deirdre who gripped the wheel like a drowning person, and he ignored the phone and said, "Mirror, Deirdre," and she checked it, and he said, "Excellent," and she said, "My nephew sent me the video," and he said, "Signal," and she said, "Are you really engaged?" and he said, "Roundabout."

At five his phone rang, once, and a text arrived from a number saved only as O. It read:

*Corinne Pardoe. Flat 3, Hallam Court. Repossession, 14 March, eighteen months ago. I remember her. I remember every one of them. I remember that her sister brought her a cup of tea and I couldn't drink it. Thank you for asking her name. For the avoidance of doubt, this was not in the contract.*

He looked at it for a long time. A learner's car in front of him braked unnecessarily, and he did not notice.

At 5:22, a second text.

*Walter has called an emergency Board lunch. Dr Lund, who sits for the community, has seen your clip and was moved. She has moved the first round of Provision interviews forward to the opening night of Lantern Weekend. Public. On the Cathedral Green. With lanterns and cameras and the whole town. That's eleven days.*

And at 5:23, a third.

*They will expect a ring.*