Pippa did not hum. She sang, and she sang badly, and she did it with her whole chest, standing at the kitchen sink with her sleeves pushed up and a tea towel over one shoulder while a pan of oxtail soup ticked on the hob behind her.

"*Down at the quay the lamps are lit,*" she sang, "*and every ship has found its berth—*"

"Pippa."

"*—and I've a seat that's warm for you, the sweetest place on earth—*"

"Pippa, I'm trying to find it."

"You won't find it, darling, it's not on the phone. It was in the walls." But she stopped, wiped her hands on the towel and came to the table where Imani sat with the black notebook open under the lamp, a bag of frozen peas defrosting in a bowl beside it for want of any better evidence. "Play me yours."

Imani held up her phone. She had spent forty minutes in the taxi from Dunmore tapping a search box with her thumbs, and had found, at last, a video on a retro-music channel called Lobby Hours, three hundred and twelve views, an upload from a man who collected old elevator recordings. The picture was a still of a brass lift panel. The title said *Ostrander Tower Passenger Lift Loop (1991-2019), Track 4: "Harbour Lights Waltz".*

A thin synthesiser began to play. A pleasant, mournful, slightly sea-sick melody in three-four time, with the glossy wobble of a tune built to be forgotten in eleven seconds.

Pippa closed her eyes.

"Oh," she said.

"You know it."

"I know it in my *bones.* I heard it sixty times a day for twenty-eight years." She sat down heavily. "They changed the loop in 2019 to a woman saying the floors. You can't imagine the relief. The Waltz had a bit in the middle where the cellos went flat, and we all used to say it was a fault in the tape, and we all pretended not to hear it." She opened her eyes, and in the lamplight they shone. "Who's singing it?"

"A man on the sixty-second floor, according to Piet Lindqvist. Every night."

"Singing."

"Humming. Singing. He doesn't say."

Pippa was silent. Outside, a bus went by on Marram Road, and the windows shivered in their frames. Imani watched her face with the grave tenderness one gives to a person at the edge of a memory, and did not prompt.

"Everyone hummed it," said Pippa finally. "That's the first thing. I hummed it. Every lift attendant hummed it, you couldn't *not.* The cleaners did. The old chief engineer, God rest him, whistled it through his teeth. Your father did. He used to do it with the wrong ending, so it went up instead of down, to annoy me."

Her voice caught on the last word. Imani looked at the notebook.

"But," said Pippa, "only two people ever *sang* it. With words."

"Who?"

"Me. For the children. I made up a verse about a boy who got lost in the arcade." She held up two fingers. "And Teodor Marchetti, who had a verse of his own that went rather differently. I heard it every Friday afternoon for eleven years, from the lobby to thirty-four, in the voice of a man who thinks he's at a banquet." She cleared her throat and sang low, in a hideous unctuous baritone, with a wicked glint:

"*Down at the quay the books are lit, and every debt has found its berth, and I've a fortune made of you, the sweetest place on earth.*"

Imani laughed. She couldn't help it. It came out of her like a hiccup, helpless, and then it turned halfway into something else, and she put her hand over her mouth. "Oh, he did *not.*"

"Every Friday, darling. For the whole length of the car. It was the nearest he ever came to a joke, and it was about money."

"A man who sings his own verse to a lift song."

"A man," said Pippa, "who has never in his life been able to leave a thing unsigned. It's why I knew him in the dark. He'd tell you who he was whether you'd asked or not." She folded her hands. "You've asked me whether it's him. I can't tell you. A song in a notebook is only a song in a notebook. But there's a man who has been singing the Waltz on the roof of Ostrander Tower, and I only know one man who would put words to it, and I don't like what that does to my stomach."

Imani turned the pages of the notebook again, not reading, only feeling the soft corners. "I stood in that lift," she said, "and I said his name out loud. In front of nine people with phones. I'd have told you I'd put money on it. I'd have put the flat on it."

"Darling."

"I've spent six years learning to be right about people. It's my entire trade."

"Mm." Pippa stirred the soup, tasted it, added salt with a pinch of her fingers. "I once sent a man to the wrong floor for eleven years."

"That isn't the same."

"Wasn't it? He was a very nice dentist. I assumed he was a solicitor. Every morning I took him to the nineteenth, and he never said a word, because he was shy, and one day he fainted in my car from sheer embarrassment and I found out he'd been going to the *twelfth.*" She tapped the spoon on the pot. "People who are good at faces get fooled by faces, Imani. It's the price. The ones who can't see anything are never fooled, they just never know."

It was not comfort, quite. But it loosened something under Imani's ribs that had been clenched since the mortuary, and she bent to the notebook again with her shoulders a quarter-inch lower.

* * *

The Lift Ladies' group chat was called *Going Up.*

At a quarter past eight it contained thirty-two members, a pinned photograph of a brass floor indicator with a ribbon around it, and a history that scrolled back in a long tide of voice notes, thumbs-up emoji, recipes, funeral dates and furious arguments about the correct way to pronounce the name of a pastry. Pippa thumbed her phone with two fingers, very slowly, tongue between her teeth, like a woman defusing something.

"I'm going to ask them," she said.

"Ask them what?"

"If anybody's heard singing."

"Pippa, you can't—"

"I can and I will. Thirty-two women who spent their working lives noticing what happens above the ground floor." She hit the microphone. "Ladies. Pippa. Quick question. Has anyone, in the past month or so, seen or heard anything strange on the roof terrace of Ostrander? Anything. A light. A smell. A man. Please don't speculate. Please answer by voice." She let go and sat back with an air of pained responsibility. "That's called discretion."

"That's called a public announcement."

"It's a *private* group."

"It has thirty-two members."

"And not one of them could keep a secret if you put it in a safe." Pippa smiled grimly. "Which is why it's the best surveillance network in Karrow."

The replies began within the minute. A dozen of them, sprinkled over the next quarter of an hour, voice after voice from kitchens and bedrooms across the city: *Pip, love, I haven't been up there since the third Tuesday of the Nineties. I heard the Waltz was on the radio last week, nice, though.* *Is this about that poor boy in the lift?* *Is it true the Director's on a diet?* *My cousin says they've painted the east terrace white.* *Nobody asked about the east terrace, Dolores.* Imani drank soup. She listened to a woman with an accent from the north coast describe, at length, a vase.

Then, at twenty to nine, a note arrived from Marguerite.

"Pippa, darling." A cracked contralto, sharp as a pin, with a television blaring somewhere behind. "I've been holding on to this since Tuesday, I didn't like to say. It's my son-in-law Dev. He does the windows. Rope work. Seventeen years on the glass at the Ostrander, for the cleaning firm, he's up and down that building like a spider on a drainpipe. He says he saw a man on the sixty-second floor last month. Four, five in the morning, on the east terrace. In a dressing gown. Standing by the olive trees with a cup of something, looking at the sea. He thought it was one of the family and waved. The man didn't wave back. Dev took a picture to send to the wife, to be funny. He said *look, the master of the house.* I've got it here." A pause. "I'm sending it now. Don't show it to the police, they'll make a fuss."

The picture arrived with a small soft chime.

A second note followed the picture at once, because Marguerite could not keep to one. "He's working the east face at six tomorrow, Dev is. He told the wife. If you want to ask him anything, Pip, he's very sweet, he'll talk to anyone on a rope. Don't tell him it was me."

Pippa put the phone on the table between them and turned it toward the lamp, and they both leaned in. It was grainy, taken from a rope seat at some distance with a phone not meant for the purpose. A pale dawn behind the glass, the sea like pewter. The terrace, a long line of olive trees in tubs and a low white wall. A man in a dark robe stood with his back to the camera, holding a mug. Tall. Broad across the shoulders. A head of thick, silver hair that the wind had lifted, so that it seemed for an instant to wear a halo.

Imani didn't breathe.

"Pippa," she said at last. "Is that —"

"Zoom," said Pippa, in a voice like a cut wire. "Zoom on the door."

She enlarged it with two fingers, careful, until the picture broke into squares. Behind the man, at the edge of the frame, the door of the gardener's shed stood open, a rectangle of dark. A figure was just stepping out of it into the dawn. Small, neat, in a navy trouser suit. Head bent over a tray. They could not see a face. They could see, pinned at the chest in the grey light, a plain lanyard, the sort that might have belonged to a cleaner, and a gleam of silver in the hair.

"Imani," said Pippa Tuilagi softly. "I think we have just seen who's paying for the rice."