The mortuary was in the basement of the customs house and smelled of floor polish and cold. There was a window, high up, with a grille, through which the lower half of a lamp-post was visible, and the lamp had come on though it was barely one o'clock. Idris led her down a short tiled corridor to a room with a steel table, a sink, a wall of small square doors, and a drawer already drawn halfway out, like a tongue.

"You don't have to," he said.

"I know."

"I'm asking because you've been up all night, and you've told me you identified this man once already, under stress, and I think it's only fair to say that I'd like you to do it again. Calmly. In proper light." He stopped. "That sounds like an accusation. It isn't. It's a method."

"I know what a method is, Idris."

"Yes. You collect debts." He opened the drawer all the way. "I'd like you to look at his face. I cleaned it this morning."

She had thought she was ready. People who say that, she reflected, have never been ready. She stepped up to the table, and Kobi, waiting outside in the corridor under the eye of the cardigan receptionist, with a mug in his hand he wasn't drinking from, drew breath audibly through the open door.

The man on the table lay under a green sheet to the collarbones. His hair was dark, cropped short, with an ashy line at the temples where something grey had been sprayed on and washed away, and a strip of untouched dark brown beneath. His eyebrows were thin and a little crooked, as though they had been thickened with a pencil and then rubbed. His skin was the colour of candle wax. And his face was not Teodor Marchetti's.

It was the nose that did it. She stood and looked at it, and the thought arrived slowly and then all at once, like a tide coming over a flat beach: Marchetti's nose had a high, proud bridge, a Roman nose, a nose that had once appeared on a commemorative plaque. This man's was short and blunt and slightly flattened, the nose of someone who played rugby at school. The chin was square. There was a small mole under the left ear. The mouth, even slack, was shaped to smile.

"He's about forty," she said. Her voice came from some distance.

"Thirty-nine, if the records are right."

"That's not him."

"No."

"That is..." She swallowed. "I looked at him for six or seven seconds. And I said his name. In front of everybody. I said it out loud."

"You did."

"It wasn't *his face.*"

"No," said Idris. "It was a face that had been persuaded." He moved to the end of the table, to a tray where a dozen small swabs lay in labelled bags. "When I first examined him in the lift, I noted the skin of the nose and forehead was oddly shiny. I took samples. This morning I found residue on the bridge of the nose: a kind of putty, theatrical grade, a wax-and-silicone compound that actors use to build up features. Someone had added a bridge to his nose. They had thickened the brows and sprayed a silver-grey colour into his hair, and they had parted it at the other side. They had put a pale foundation on him to take out the colour of the lower face where the beard had been. And then they sat him under the one strip light in a service lift, in a charcoal suit and a silver pocket square, wearing the aftershave of a man who is famous in this city for smelling of it."

"And I walked in."

"And you walked in," said Idris, "expecting him."

She turned and looked at him.

"I'm not saying it as criticism." He said it very quickly, with a trace of alarm. "I'm saying that's how it works. A mind that has looked at a face for six years in a locked folder on a phone will find it in any set of features that has the right three signals. Hair. Suit. A pocket square. You didn't see Teodor Marchetti. You saw the three things you would have been looking for, and your mind supplied the rest. The best forgers know this. They don't copy the face. They copy the *expectation.*"

"Whoever did this knew me."

"Or they knew that someone would come. In which case you were the most likely person. A collector. Wednesday, seven twenty. On a published schedule."

She put a hand on the edge of the steel table, feeling the cold come up through her palm. It was not grief that she felt, or not only. It was something more private and more degrading, a rinsed, sick sensation like finding out that you have been shouting at a stranger across a street.

"I was *sure,*" she said.

"Yes."

"I have never been so sure of anything."

"That's what makes it work," Idris said, quietly.

She stood a long time without speaking. The lamp outside the window went from white to amber, which meant it was beginning to rain. She became aware that he had moved a stool near her elbow, and that he was not looking at her, and not at the body either, but at some neutral point on the wall, in an attitude of such scrupulous tact that she was moved to give him something back.

"I'll sit," she said.

"Please."

She sat. After a moment he fetched a mug from the sink, rinsed it, filled it at the tap from the kettle on the draining board, and put a tea bag in it with a tiny fastidious motion. Then he stood holding it, and finally held it out. She took it. It tasted of metal and chamomile.

"I'm sorry," said Idris. "It's the only kind I have. It's meant for the nerves of the bereaved."

"Is it working?"

"I don't know. I've never tried it."

She laughed, a short, cracked sound she hadn't intended, and put the back of her wrist to her mouth. He looked at the wall with great concentration. She thought, with a kind of astonishment, *he is giving me time,* and understood that it was a gift she had not been offered since the afternoon she buried her father.

* * *

"Show me the clip," she said at three.

They had moved upstairs to Idris's office, to the desk with the cold pizza. Kobi had been sent back to the tower by Ruth's assistant at half past two, with a polite message that the Director would see him at five, and had gone, white and compliant, looking at neither of them. Imani had the sense that she ought to run after him. She also had the sense, sitting here with a rented mug of tea warming her hands, that she could not stand up yet.

Idris propped his laptop between them and found the file: Wren Okpara's nine seconds, recovered from the Dock Rats channel before it was taken down. He ran it at quarter speed. The scooter riders. The yellow line. Her own back, bent over the lift. And in the dead man's face, the light: that hard overhead strip, bleaching everything flat.

"Stop," she said.

He stopped. The face hung on the screen, the shaped brow, the false bridge, the grey at the temple. It looked like Marchetti. It looked like Marchetti so strongly that her stomach turned again. And then, with the slow cold clarity of a woman who has been given the answer and is now reading the question backwards, she saw the seams. The line where the putty met the skin above the brow, a faint pale edge. The wrongness of the nostrils. The flat way the light fell on the cheek where a real Marchetti would have had a pouched jowl.

"It looks the same."

"It looks like what you wanted. That isn't the same thing."

"Don't be wise at me."

"I'm trying not to be," said Idris, and she heard the strain of it, a man who was very bad at being wise on purpose. "I find I'm much better at being useful. May I try?"

"Please."

"The portrait you photographed in the lobby. May I see it?"

She found it in her phone, in a locked folder with a padlock icon: Teodor Marchetti at the unveiling of the east atrium plaque, a big man with a silver mane, one hand outstretched, beaming like a lighthouse. Idris held the phone beside the clip. He did not say anything. He simply moved his finger from one nose to the other, the proud one and the blunt, and let the silence do it.

"Oh," said Imani.

"There."

"He was never even *close.*"

"No," said Idris. "But the person who made him knew you would want it. So we must ask who knows that you want it." He tilted his head. "The Director does. She's watched you for fourteen months."

"Kobi does."

"Mr. Quaye did not know who you'd choose to photograph. He didn't know you wanted to." He considered this. "Is there anyone else?"

She did not answer for a moment. The list in her phone was four lines from the end of the screen. Nine names. A date. She thought of the lobby gallery, of eleven visits, of a boss in a green blazer saying *the thing with your jaw.*

"Bea," she said. "Possibly. I've never told her. But she's not stupid."

"And Pippa Tuilagi?"

"Pippa knew by Wednesday lunchtime. She knew from my face."

"Then it's a smaller circle than the tower," said Idris. "That's a useful thing to learn."

He bent over the laptop and made a small adjustment to the image, and enlarged a patch of the dead man's nose. The putty's pale edge shone on the screen. Embedded in it, small and perfect as a stamp in wax, was a whorl of tiny ridges.

"I almost missed it," he said. "I found it with a lamp this morning when I was cleaning the bridge. It's a partial print, a left thumb, pressed into the putty while it was still soft, by the person who applied it. It's a very good one." He looked at her. "Whoever built this face wore no gloves. They were careful with everything except their own hand."

"Can you run it?"

"Through the national system, tonight. It'll take until tomorrow. It may find nobody." He paused. "It may find someone who works on the thirty-first floor."

Imani looked at the whorl on the screen, a small bright coil, as clear as a signature on a cheque. Somewhere in the city there was a thumb that had pressed a nose into a stranger's face, to make a man who would tell her what she wanted to believe.

"Run it," she said. "And, Idris."

"Yes?"

"Don't tell Ruth."

He did not answer at once. He took off his glasses, polished them on his tie, and put them back, and she saw, for the first time, that his hands were not entirely steady.

"I can't lie to her," he said. "If she asks, I'll say."

"Then we'll hope she doesn't ask."

"Yes," said Idris. "I'm afraid I'm one of the worst people in Karrow to hope with."