Piet Lindqvist had lived on the second floor of a converted ironmonger's on Corbel Walk, in Dunmore, over a shop that sold second-hand bicycles and, from the look of the sign, loyalty. Imani found it at ten to six, by phone map and by the number she had pulled from Tracer in the back of a taxi, and stood across the street in the drizzle for a while with her hands in her pockets. A lamp was on in the upstairs window. It had not been on a moment ago.

She had no plan, only the habit of going to where a person had lived, because people keep their real lives in drawers. The door beside the bicycle shop was open on the latch, and the stair beyond was narrow and smelled of fried onions, and at the top someone was moving about with the sound of a drawer being emptied onto a floor.

"Hello?" Imani called.

The noise stopped.

"Who's that?"

It was a woman's voice, low and abrupt. A second later its owner appeared at the head of the stairs, framed in lamplight: forty-four or so, broad-shouldered, with a short cap of hair bleached the colour of straw, a navy ferry-company fleece with a name badge reading G. LINDQVIST — DECKHAND, and a heavy brass torch held up like a truncheon.

"I'm not a burglar," said Imani.

"That's what a burglar says."

"I'm not Security either."

"Even more of what a burglar says." The torch did not move. "I've had two of them already today. Two polite men in black jackets knocking on the door, asking if I'd like any help with my brother's belongings. I said I would like them to go and boil themselves, and they stood on the step and *smiled.*" Her eyes narrowed. "Do you smile? Because if you smile, I'll hit you."

"I'm a debt collector," said Imani. "I don't smile on a first visit."

Something in Greta Lindqvist's face quivered, and it might have been the beginnings of a laugh or a flinch. "That's the first honest thing anyone's said to me since Tuesday."

"May I come up?"

"Why?"

"Because I think I have some news about your brother, and I'd rather not give it on the stairs."

The torch came down an inch, then another. A silence. Somewhere below, the bicycle-shop man was dragging a rack of tyres across the pavement, and the sound came up the stairwell, a long metallic scrape. "Is he dead?" said Greta. She asked it conversationally, in a voice Imani knew very well, because she had heard it from other mouths in other doorways: the voice of a person who has already done the arithmetic and is hoping you will correct it.

"Haven't they told you?" Imani said.

"They told me he was *missing.* Tuesday afternoon, a very polite woman rang from the tower and said Piet hadn't come in for his shift, and was I aware of any reason, and I said no, and she said they'd be in touch." The torch clicked off. "Nobody's been in touch. I took Wednesday off. I took Thursday off. I've been sitting in his flat since eleven this morning with the radiators on, trying to work out where he'd gone. I thought he'd had a woman. He always said he'd never have a woman again, after Anneliese, but I thought, well. Or a bender." She drew a breath. "I was going to ring the police at six if he wasn't back."

"Ms. Lindqvist."

"Greta."

"Greta. I'm so sorry. I think you should sit down."

* * *

It took four minutes to say. Imani had done it eleven times before. She knew its architecture: the plain first sentence, the pause, the second sentence that answered the question before it was asked. *Your brother was found yesterday morning. He's dead. I'm sorry.* She did not dress it. She had learned, in her first year at Tallow & Dray, from a woman who ran the cheque-recovery desk and had buried two husbands, that cruelty in these matters usually took the form of decorations.

Greta Lindqvist sat on the arm of a cracked brown sofa and said nothing. Behind her was a small neat room that a man had lived in alone: a bookcase of paperbacks with the spines creased white, a framed photograph of a woman with a gap-toothed smile, a ferry-timetable calendar on a nail, a coffee mug with a thumbprint of dried tea in the bottom. On the table, a laptop with a sticker of a lighthouse. On the floor, the drawers Greta had been emptying, their contents laid out in tidy rows, because even in desperation she had sorted them.

Greta looked at her then. It was a long, plain, assessing look, the look of a deckhand deciding whether a rope will hold. "You," she said. "You're the one on the clip. The collector. My neighbour sent it to me this morning. *Is this your brother?* with a skull. I looked and I thought, that's not Piet. That man has no beard." Her voice shook very slightly, and she steadied it. "He hasn't been without a beard since he was nineteen. He said his chin looked like an apology."

"It was Piet. He'd been shaved. Someone —" Imani chose the words with care. "Someone altered his appearance. I'm very sorry. I thought it was someone else. It's partly why I'm here."

"What do you *know,*" said Greta, quite softly, "that I can hold on to?"

Imani sat down opposite her on a hard kitchen chair. Her wet coat creaked. "I know he didn't leave the tower on Monday night. I know he was alive at half past eleven. I know that the people at Ostrander Tower told you he was missing, and have not told you he's dead, and that this morning they took the trouble to produce a form with your signature on it, dated Tuesday, agreeing to cremate him on Friday."

Silence.

"My signature."

"Greta Lindqvist, sister. Signed, quite beautifully."

"I didn't sign anything." Greta stood up. "I've been in this flat since eleven o'clock. I've not signed a thing since my mortgage. I've not signed for my own brother's *body,* I didn't know I was *allowed* to." She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye. "Is that legal? Can they do that?"

"No."

"Then I'm going to the police."

"You should," said Imani. "I'd like you to do it with a man called Idris Nakagawa. He's an investigator at the Medical Examiner's. He's the only person I've met in this business who has never told me a lie. He'll take you to see Piet properly, and he'll want to ask you some questions. May I ask you one first?"

"Ask."

"Did Piet ever break a finger?"

Greta stared at her. "What kind of question is that?"

"A kind I need to ask. The left little finger, I'm told. It set crooked."

"The ferry hatch," said Greta slowly. "The *Marguerite,* nineteen ninety-nine, when he was seventeen and showing off for a girl. It slammed on his hand and he said it didn't hurt, and then he went round the back of the funnel and was sick. The doctor said it'd set wrong if it wasn't pinned and Dad couldn't afford the pin." She held up her own hand, the little finger bent outward at the second knuckle, in the shape of a question mark. "He's got one like mine. Ours is a family of bad hatches."

So that was settled. Imani had been told it by Kobi, in his misery, on the customs-house steps, and had believed him with her head and not with her stomach. Now she believed it with both. The man on the steel table was Piet Lindqvist, and he had been handed to the world with another man's nose, and nobody in the whole city had come to tell his sister.

She watched the knowledge arrive in Greta's face. It came in two waves. The first was grief, a flat gray tide that took the colour out of her lips. The second was fury, and it came up behind the first one, hot and quick, and found something to hold.

"They knew," Greta said. "Tuesday afternoon. That woman rang and said *missing,* and she *knew.*"

"Maybe she didn't. Not on Tuesday."

"They knew by Wednesday night, when they printed my name on a form." She got to her feet. She went to the kitchenette, a strip of laminate and a two-ring hob, and stood with her back to Imani and her hands flat on the counter. "He was frightened, you know. On Sunday. He rang me. He never rings. He said, *Gret, if I ever ask you to mind something, will you mind it,* and I said what, and he said *a notebook,* and I said you're a grown man, buy a drawer. I thought he was being soft." Her shoulders moved. "I said, *call me tomorrow.* He didn't."

"A notebook."

"He always had one. Little black thing, for the doors. He said a man who watches doors all night has to remember which ones opened. He kept it in his jacket." She turned. "It wasn't on him, was it? When they found him."

"I don't know," said Imani. "I haven't seen his effects."

"No. They'll have taken it." But Greta was frowning, and her eyes had gone to the freezer. It was a squat white under-counter model with a dented door and a magnet of a lighthouse. "Unless..."

"Unless?"

"He had a thing. After Anneliese died. He hid things from himself. Letters he couldn't read yet. Photos. He put them in the freezer, under the peas, because he said no one ever looks there and he'd know when it was time to defrost." She laughed, a wet, broken, helpless sound. "God. I came here this morning and went through every drawer. I never looked in the *peas.*"

She knelt, and pulled open the freezer door, and the light came on, dim and cold. A bag of peas. A bag of garlic bread. A half-eaten tub of ice cream. Greta lifted the peas by their corner, and underneath, flat against the frost, wrapped in a freezer bag with a note stuck to it in pencil that said *FOR GRET IF NEEDED*, lay a small black notebook, its cover furred with ice.

Neither of them said anything for a while. Greta held the bag against her chest like a bird. Then she handed it over, with both hands, to the woman she had met twenty minutes before.

"You read it," she said. "I can't yet. I'll cry on it."

It was an ordinary cheap notebook, squared paper, the corners soft. Imani put it on the kitchen table under the lamp and opened it with two careful fingers while the frost melted in beads along the spine. The hand inside was square and neat, in capitals. Dates down the left margin. Times. Door names. *E. GATE. 23:40. NOBODY. LIGHT ON AT STORE.* *B1 EAST. 01:10. MAINT HATCH CLICK. NO BADGE.* *LIFT 3 SERVICE. 02:05. DOOR OPEN, NO CAR.* Page after page of small unexplained events, written by a man who had been trained to notice what the system did not.

She turned to the back. The last entries were in a different pen, as though he had written them quickly, standing.

*Sun 22:15. East stair 62. Sound of someone walking. Not family. Family is in Lisbon.*

*Sun 22:40. Gardener's shed. Light under door. Smell of cooking. Not the staff.*

*Mon 15:50. Told K. He says come up the hoist. Have not told D. Don't want to tell D.*

*Mon 16:30. I am sure now. Someone is living on 62. A man. I have heard him singing.*

And beneath it, in handwriting that had grown larger and slanted, the last line, written in the margin and underlined once:

*He sings the same song every night. It is a song they used to play in the lift.*

The lamp hummed. Imani looked up. Greta, kneeling by the open freezer, had not moved.

"What song?" said Greta.

"I don't know," said Imani. But she did. She knew exactly who would. Somewhere in a terrace on Marram Road, a woman in duck slippers who had spent forty years in a steel box going up and down a tower, who had been trained to hum along to the Muzak because no other thing kept her sane, was at that moment putting a kettle on.