Dev Pillay was already forty feet up the east face of Ostrander Tower when they found him, a small bright figure in an orange harness swinging in front of a pane of glass the size of a tennis court, with a squeegee in one hand and a coffee in the other. It was ten to six on Friday morning. The sky behind the tower was the colour of dishwater and the first ferry was sounding at the quay. Pippa stood in the shelter of a delivery van in Tanner's Wharf Alley in her black raincoat and woollen hat, her phone held up like a lantern, and pressed the green call button.

"Marguerite's Dev," she said, when it rang through. "Devarajan, it's Pippa Tuilagi, from the lifts, you came to your mother-in-law's seventieth. I'm in the alley. Wave if you can see me."

A gloved hand waved from the glass.

"Good boy. Come down, I've got a flask."

"I'm on a rope, Auntie Pip!"

"Then be on a rope *lower down.*"

Imani watched him come down with the odd, helpless tenderness of someone who had spent her life looking up at that building. As a child she had thought of it as a person. It had stood over the harbour with a hundred lit eyes and a kind of weary patience, and her father had patted its walls, when nobody was looking, the way a man pats a horse. She had not looked at the glass from outside in years. From the alley it was less a tower than a promise made by people who had never had to keep one.

It took him eleven minutes. He descended in short, practised bounces, unclipping a tool bag here and a bucket there, till his boots found the cobbles and he stepped out of his harness like a man shedding a second skin. Early forties, brown-skinned and wiry, with a grey-flecked beard, a woollen cap pulled down to his eyebrows and the amiable, slightly stunned expression of someone who spends his working life being looked at through glass by people who do not see him. He took the flask without a word, drank, shut his eyes, and said, "Oh, that's *good.*"

"Ginger and honey. My mother's." Pippa put her hand on his arm. "This is Imani Quaye. She's my lodger. She's the one on the clip."

"I know. I've seen it." Dev opened his eyes and looked at Imani with plain, anxious respect. "Mate. I'm sorry. I'd have told you Piet wasn't himself. I know Piet. He makes the guys on the glass a flask every Christmas. I couldn't believe it. And that nose, they said was somebody else's —" He stopped himself. "Sorry. Marguerite said you wanted to ask about the roof."

"I want to see the pictures you took."

"They're on my phone." He fished it out of a zipped pocket, wiped a smear off the screen with his sleeve, and began to scroll, frowning with concentration. "The one I sent my wife was a joke. I took the picture for a laugh. But I took more than one, because he did something odd. Here."

He held out the phone.

Imani took it in both hands. It was a video, six seconds long, shot through a pane of glass on a diagonal, from a rope seat swaying in the wind. The light was low, the colour of wet slate. A tall man in a dark robe stood at the low white wall of the terrace, a mug steaming in his hand, the olive trees dark behind him. He was looking out over the sea. Then, as if he had heard something, he turned.

It was a big head, with a magnificent mane of silver hair. A heavy jaw. Deep-set eyes in puffy lids. And a nose, a long, high, proud and faintly beaked nose with a bridge like an arch, in profile against the dawn like the prow of a ship. A nose that had once been struck on a commemorative plaque. A nose that had no business anywhere near a dead body in a lift.

The man raised the mug, to nobody, to the sky. His lips moved. He might have been singing.

Then the clip ended, and Imani realised she had stopped breathing and let it out.

"Play it again," she said.

Dev played it again. She watched it a second time, and a third, and she felt no triumph at all, only a great flat stillness, like the moment after a sound has stopped and you find you are still listening for it. It was him. It was Teodor Marchetti, alive, in a dressing gown, at five in the morning in the garden on the sixty-second floor, drinking something hot, on a morning when his Portuguese bank account had not moved and the whole city believed him retired.

"That's him," said Pippa, quietly, over her shoulder. "That's the bergamot man."

"When was this?"

"The twenty-third of September." Dev leaned over and tapped the corner of the screen where a date glowed in grey. "Sixteen days ago. I'd have thought it was one of the family, honestly. Nobody up there shows their face. But I've been on that glass seventeen years and I've seen every Ostrander go up and down in a rope-seat looking for their own reflection. I'd never seen that one. He was too —" He searched for the word. "Settled. Like he lived there."

"Have there been others?"

"I've seen him three times. Always at dawn. Always the same dressing gown." Dev thought. "And the last time, he wasn't alone. There was a bloke with him. Younger. Big beard. He had a plastic bag with a takeaway in it and he was laughing. The older one slapped him on the back."

Imani's head came round. "A big beard."

"Like a hedge."

"When?"

"Last week. Thursday, maybe, the sixth." Dev frowned. "I thought he was staff. He had a jacket with a crest on it. A Security one."

"Piet," said Pippa.

"Piet was *friends* with him," Imani said slowly. "He wasn't a witness, hiding. He wasn't frightened. He knew." She looked at the notebook, still folded in her inside pocket. "Or he knew by Sunday and it frightened him."

"Dev," she said. "The painting. Have you seen anyone painting up there?"

"Painting?" He blinked. "No. That's the odd thing, I looked on Thursday when I was on the north face. No scaffold, no sheeting, no tins. Nothing." He frowned, remembering. "Just the top rail on the east terrace. The low one, by the wall. Somebody's slapped white on a bit of it, about a yard long, and left the rest. Looks like a dab. Like when you touch up a scuff."

"A yard of rail."

"Fresh. It was still wet at ten."

Imani thought of a black boot on a stone step in front of the customs house, and a pale smear on the left toe. She thought of a brother who said, *it's wet and you'll slip.* The back of her neck went cold, one small vertebra at a time.

"What would you paint a yard of rail to hide?" Pippa asked, to no one.

"A mark," said Imani. "Something that got on it. Something somebody didn't want a window cleaner to see from a rope."

Dev wasn't listening. He was looking up at the tower, the whole sheer glass cliff of it, and all the colour had gone out of his face. "Auntie Pip, I think I've done something. I sent that picture to Marguerite. And Marguerite sent it to the Ladies. And you've got thirty-two of them there, and one of them's Colette, who does Security's catering, and she'd tell her cat."

"Colette's gone on a cruise."

"Colette's got a phone."

"Dev," said Imani. "Who told you the roof is closed?"

"What?"

"You said it to Pippa at the start. You said, 'I'm on the east face today.' Not the roof. I want to know who told you."

He stared at her, bewildered. "Nobody. The firm told us at four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon there'd be no access to the upper terraces from Thursday. Security order. Because of the painting." He scratched his beard. "Is that bad?"

"Wednesday afternoon," said Imani. "Before I'd said a word on the thirty-first floor. They closed the roof before they knew I'd looked at it."

"So they knew," said Pippa.

"They knew someone would." She handed back the phone. "Dev, I need you to send that video to me and then to nobody else. I need you to delete it from your cloud, your wife's phone and Marguerite's. Is that possible?"

"It's possible," he said. "It'll just hurt."

"Why?"

"It's the only good photo I've ever taken."

She smiled for the first time that morning. It surprised her. "Then print it. Hide it in your kitchen."

Her phone buzzed. The sound startled all three of them. It was a text from an unknown number, a Karrow mobile, and the preview showed only the first line: *Miss Quaye. I hope this finds you well. I am parked at the end of the alley, and I have breakfast.*

"She's got a flask," Pippa said, in a flat whisper, at her shoulder. "Don't drink a drop of it. Ginger's the only thing that goes in a flask, in my book, and anything else is a threat."

"She's going to be kind," Imani said.

"That's what I said."

Dev had gone quietly pale and was winding his rope with the speed of a man who suddenly remembers an appointment in another county. "I'll just," he said. "I'll go and be on the glass."

"Do," said Imani. "And delete it."

He fled, harness clanking. Her phone, still warm in her hand, showed the text one more time, and its small cheerful punctuation. *And I have breakfast.* Ruth had a way of making an ambush sound like a kindness, and it worked because it usually was one.

She read it twice. Then she looked up.

At the mouth of Tanner's Wharf Alley, forty yards away, a grey Security saloon sat at the kerb with its engine off. A small woman in a navy trouser suit stood beside it, one gloved hand on the open door and the other holding a tartan flask, her silver hair neat in the early light. A plain lanyard. A pair of sensible shoes. Behind her, in the back seat, a paper bag sat on the cushions with the steam still rising out of it.

Ruth Abelard-Singh raised her flask, in a courteous little salute, like a hostess greeting a guest she had been expecting for some time.