At twenty past seven on a Wednesday morning, Imani Quaye was standing in the loading bay on basement level one of Ostrander Tower, holding a clipboard she did not need, waiting for a man named Ferdie Nwosu to stop pretending he was on a call.

"Take your time," she said. "I'm paid by the visit."

Ferdie turned his back and said "yeah, yeah, no, tell him Thursday" to a phone that had gone dark in his hand. He ran Parcelhound, a courier depot wedged between the bins and the generator cage, and he owed Tallow & Dray eleven thousand four hundred in unpaid bay fees. Around him eight riders in rain jackets sat on their scooters with their phones propped on the handlebars, watching the job board on the Hopper app and pretending not to watch her. A girl near the shutter, nineteen or twenty, with a braid down her back and a phone case covered in stickers, was filming the whole scene with the casual contempt of someone whose audience was already waiting.

"Wren," Ferdie said over his shoulder, "put that away."

"It's a public bay," said the girl.

"It's a private bay," Imani said pleasantly. "Publicly owned. Which is part of the problem." She looked at the girl. "Is that for a group chat?"

"Dock Rats," said Wren Okpara, and held up the phone like a badge. "Forty-one members. Nobody likes you, by the way."

"That's the correct amount of liking." Imani clicked her pen. It was a good pen. It had never been used to write anything that made a man happy. "Mr. Nwosu. I'm not here to shout. I'm here to remind you. You have until Friday to settle the arrears, or the bay licence is suspended and Parcelhound delivers to the pavement. I've printed the figure. I've also brought a payment plan, which is the kindest document I own."

Ferdie finally looked at her. He was a soft, rumpled man with a lanyard that said CONTRACTOR in red. "My brother-in-law is in Tallow's office. Bea Calloway's a friend."

"Bea Calloway is a friend to everyone who pays." She tore off the plan and held it out. "She'd be delighted to hear you used her name."

He took it. That was how you won, mostly: not with threats, but by making the paper easier to hold than to refuse. Imani turned to go, and her phone buzzed, and she did not look at it, because the buzz was her calendar, and her calendar said nineteenth floor, nine o'clock, a dental practice with a nasty habit of paying invoices in pistachios.

The service lifts were along the back wall of the bay, three of them, steel doors dented by forty years of pallet trucks. Every adult in the tower knew the rule about those lifts, and most of them thought it was a joke until it was applied to them: nothing moves in Ostrander Tower unrecorded. You tapped your badge on the black panel inside, and the panel spoke to you in a woman's voice, flat and pleasant, and said where you were going and who you were and what time it was. If you were not on the list for a floor, the lift took you to the lobby and waited for you to explain yourself to a man in a grey blazer. Parcels were scanned. Rubbish was weighed. Imani's father used to say that the tower could tell you how many times a person had coughed in a stairwell, and he had been prouder of that than of anything he built.

She pressed for Service Lift Three, because Service Lift Three had the bigger mirror, and the doors opened.

There was a man sitting on the floor in the corner.

He was sitting upright with his back against the steel and his legs stretched out and slightly crossed, one polished shoe over the other, as if he had decided to rest for a moment on the way to a dinner. A good charcoal suit. A silver pocket square, folded with care into three points. His head had dropped to the side against the wall, and his mouth was a little open, and his eyes, which were half shut, held no one at all.

Imani had not seen that face in five years. She had looked at it on her phone, regularly, in a locked folder, and had looked at the print of it pinned inside her wardrobe door before that. She would have known it in the dark.

"Teodor," she said, before she could stop herself.

Behind her a rider laughed at something on his phone. The sound stayed in the bay. In the lift the air smelled of lemons and cold metal. She stepped inside, and the panel said, in its pleasant woman's voice, "Imani Quaye. Tallow and Dray. Seven twenty-four," and she crouched and put two fingers under his jaw because decency required it. His skin had the temperature of a window. No pulse. The jaw did not move when she touched it, and she took her hand back as though it were a fact she had not asked for.

Teodor Marchetti. Sixty-one, if he was anything. Chief Financial Officer of Ostrander Tower until the autumn after her father fell, when he had retired to a villa in the south of Portugal with a letter of thanks signed by the Ostrander family and, according to the staff rumour she had once paid forty euros to confirm, a sizeable check from the reserve account he had been charged with protecting. His name was the first of nine in the notes app on her phone, saved under a heading that read Shopping List.

His left hand lay palm up on his thigh. On the third finger there was a pale ring of skin, and no ring.

She stood up. She breathed once, slowly, in the way she had learned to do before a man opened his front door in his dressing gown and called her a vulture. Then she took her phone, and pressed the red handset icon on the lift panel, and the panel said "Connecting to Security, thirty-one," and a voice she knew answered on the second ring.

"Floor thirty-one, Quaye."

"Kobi."

"Imi?" Her brother's voice came into the lift full of crumbs. He was eating something. "Why are you calling the lift phone? Your own phone's broken? I told you, you have to turn it off and on, you can't just —"

"I need you in Service Lift Three, basement one. And I need you to bring someone senior. There's a man. He's dead."

The chewing stopped.

"Don't touch anything," said Kobi. He said it fast and low, with all the jokes gone out of it, and she noticed that, and filed it where she filed things. "Is the door shut? Close it. Don't let anyone see him. Don't let anyone film."

She looked out. Eight riders on their scooters, all turned toward the open lift. Wren Okpara, braid and stickers, was holding her phone at chest height with the camera lens neatly aimed at the dead man's feet.

"Too late," Imani said.

* * *

Security came down in the fourth minute. Not by the service lift, but by the one with the key, the one that opened onto thirty-one and nowhere else, so that the first sign of them was a quiet chime and four people in black jackets stepping out like waiters at a funeral. They moved the riders back behind the yellow line painted on the floor with a sort of weary courtesy. One of them took Wren's phone from her hand, said "I'll look after that for you," and put it in a grey pouch. Wren said something unrepeatable. The pouch zipped.

Kobi came last but one. Kwabena Quaye, thirty-six, six foot two, with their father's wide shoulders and their mother's laugh lines and a Security jacket that never quite sat flat because he kept a sandwich in the left pocket. He came across the bay with his hands out and his face arranged, and for one moment before he reached her he looked, absurdly, as though he wanted to hug her.

"Are you all right?"

"I found a dead man in a lift. I'm splendid."

"Imi."

"I'm fine."

He took in the lift. She watched him do it: the shoes, the suit, the face. He stopped breathing for the length of a blink, and then something went smooth in his expression, like a hand passing over a bedsheet.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, that's Piet."

"That's what?"

"Piet Lindqvist. Night shift. He's one of ours." He said it carefully. Each word came out with an edge on it, and the voice was not his voice. Kobi talked the way other people breathed, in loops and detours and food. This was a man reading from a card. "He was reported missing Monday. We've been looking. I'm sorry you had to — I'm sorry, Imi."

"That isn't Piet Lindqvist," Imani said.

"Imani —"

"I've met Piet. He's forty and he has a beard. That's Teodor Marchetti."

"Miss Quaye."

The voice came from behind her and was so gentle that she turned at once, the way one turns to a kindly teacher. Ruth Abelard-Singh, Director of Security for Ostrander Tower, stood at the edge of the yellow line with her hands folded in front of her. She was fifty-eight, small, silver-haired, in a navy trouser suit with a lanyard so plain it could have belonged to a cleaner, and she had attended Imani's father's funeral and held her hand through the whole of the committal. She had never raised her voice in thirty years. She had never needed to.

"I wonder if you'd step away from the lift," said Ruth. "Kwabena, would you take your sister to the bench? Someone fetch her a tea."

"I don't want a tea. I want you to look at his hand."

"I have," said Ruth. "He wore a wedding band, which has been removed. Piet was widowed two years ago. He was a very private man." She looked into the lift with an expression of grave, practical sorrow. "I'm afraid he's rather changed, hasn't he? That does happen."

Imani felt the full weight of it settle on her, not as panic, but as a kind of arithmetic. Two people, one body, two names. One of them was lying. Possibly both. She said, "Mr. Marchetti is in Portugal."

"Mr. Marchetti," said Ruth, "has been in Portugal for five years. I had a postcard at Christmas." She smiled slightly. "You've had a shock. The mind does these things. You were fond of your father's colleagues."

"I was not fond of Teodor Marchetti."

A pause, in which the generator behind the cage ticked and caught. Kobi had gone very quiet and very precise beside her, and in the voice that was not his own he said, "Imi, let's sit."

"Do you know how many people could tell you who that is?" Imani said. She kept her voice level, because she had been taught by experts that the voice is the last thing to give. "Everyone in the Annual Report for twelve years. Every photograph in the lobby gallery. Look him up."

"We will," said Ruth. "Of course we will. Now. Can I ask you a small thing? How did you come to open this lift?"

"I was going to the nineteenth floor."

"At seven twenty-four."

"Yes."

"Service Lift Three." Ruth turned and nodded at one of the black jackets, who held up a tablet. "It's curious. I've asked the system for the overnight movements in this car, because it's the first thing one does. The car has been in this bay since a delivery at half past three. Door sensors, weight sensors, badge taps. Nothing since you." She lifted her eyes to Imani's with the same kind, patient attention. "No one has entered this lift with a badge or without one since three-thirty a.m., Miss Quaye. Nobody has come in. Nobody has gone out."

"Then someone carried him in before three-thirty."

"I'd like that to be so," said Ruth. "But he was reported missing Monday evening, from the lobby, and I have the lobby footage, and the footage ends with him leaving through the revolving door at eleven minutes past six, alive and well and on foot. He never came back in." She paused, and then said the thing, almost apologetically, as if it were a fact about the weather. "By our records, this man never entered the tower at all. And yet here he is. I wonder if you could help me understand that. Upstairs, perhaps, where it's quiet. Kwabena, bring your sister up to thirty-one."

Kobi's hand closed on her elbow. It was warm, and it shook, just once.

Behind the yellow line Wren Okpara had stopped swearing. She was watching Imani, and in her face there was something new, a calculation, and she mouthed three words that Imani read perfectly across twelve feet of concrete.

*I sent it already.*