They got out the way they had come in, which is to say, by being counted.

The guard with the torch reached the bottom of the stairs as the fire door swung shut behind Wren. He saw a rider in an orange jacket carrying a blue crate of parcels, a second rider with a bandaged arm leaning on the first, and a third in a hoodie who was holding her stomach and whispering "sorry, sorry, so sorry" in a voice of such genuine and visceral suffering that he took two steps back. Wren was extraordinary. She did the whole performance without once looking at him: the sway, the grey face, the little hiccup of the throat. Imani had seen debtors fake a heart attack. This was better.

"You can't be down here," the guard said. He was a heavy, tired man with a moustache and a tablet strapped to his forearm. "This is a restricted area."

"We got a parcel," said Imani, in her flattest voice, and held up Ferdie's order on the phone. "Priority. B1 east, sluice, collect two items. Customer's very particular."

"Who orders from the *sluice?*"

"I'm not paid to ask."

He studied the screen. He looked at the crate. In the crate, under a layer of brown paper, lay a split bag of paint flakes and a lost-property pouch, but the guard saw only a crate. "Alarm went off," he said slowly.

"It's the incinerator, it's had a funny turn," said Kobi, from under his hood, in an alarming falsetto. "Smells like a barbecue."

"Do I know you?"

"No," said Kobi.

"You sound like Quaye."

"Everybody says that," said Kobi, "it's a terrible burden," and at that moment, with the timing of a miracle, Wren vomited. She did it without any warning, convincingly and magnificently, all over her own trainers. The guard recoiled with an exclamation and flung up one arm. By the time he had finished retching in sympathy, the three of them were halfway down the corridor.

* * *

"I want it understood," said Idris Nakagawa, "that I find this very difficult."

It was twenty past midnight. He lived, it turned out, on a houseboat. It was moored in the old fish basin behind the quay, at the end of a floating walkway lined with crates and fairy lights, a long dark hull painted the green of a pickle jar, with a stovepipe, a row of window boxes and a name stencilled on the stern: MISS CALCULATED RISK. He had opened the door in a cardigan and striped pyjama trousers, with a pair of glasses she had never seen, plain steel, and the weary patience of a man who had been woken by a ringing phone and had said yes to everything before he understood what.

Now he stood in the cabin's galley with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, watching a stranger's blistered forearm run under the cold tap, and his face was the face of a man negotiating with his own principles.

"It was found in a waste room," said Imani.

"Which you entered unlawfully."

"With a key that belonged to my father."

"Which you retrieved from an administrator who had no authority to return it." He turned off the tap. "Mr. Quaye. Hold still. This is a second-degree burn, not a deep one, I think, but you should be seen by a doctor in the morning. I'm not a medical man. I mostly see the opposite problem."

"I'll live," said Kobi, grey with pain. "That's the opposite problem, actually."

"Quite so." Idris began to wrap the arm in a clean tea towel, then a roll of gauze from a cupboard marked FIRST AID (APPROXIMATE). His hands were careful, impersonal, deft. "I need to say the next sentence aloud, and I need both of you to listen to it. Anything I examine tonight, I will have to record as received from a member of the public who found items in a waste area. I will not say what I know about how they were found. If anyone asks me directly, I will say. I can't lie. I'm sorry. It isn't a matter of principle. It's a matter of function. I'm no good at it."

"Understood," said Imani.

"Is that acceptable?"

"It's more than I'd get from most people."

"Good." He tied off the gauze with a neat bow. "Then I'll look at your paint."

She put the split bag on the galley table. The boat rocked gently on the swell of a passing ferry; a pan swung from a hook; somewhere in the dark a halyard tapped a mast. Idris set a lamp low over the table, took out a small steel case from under the bench, and opened it with the care of a priest unwrapping a relic. Swabs. Dropper bottles. A white ceramic dish. He used tweezers to lift a single flake of white paint, curled like a petal, and turned it over, and on its underside they saw a reddish-brown crust, thin as rust.

"The paint went on top," he said. "The thing underneath was there first. Look at the layering. Dried, cracked, then painted over." He took a swab from the case, wetted it with a clear liquid, touched it to the crust, then added two drops from a second bottle. They stood in silence. Then, slowly, as if a hand had pressed a button, the swab flushed a bright, defiant, violent pink.

"Blood," said Idris. His voice was quite level. "Presumptive. It could be an animal's. I can't tell you whose it is, or how it got there, or whether it's Mr. Lindqvist's. A lab will have to do that, and a lab will need a reason, and I'm afraid the reason will depend on whether I'm allowed to explain where I got the sample." He looked up. "But it isn't rust."

Kobi sat down on a bench, abruptly, as though someone had cut a string.

"I painted over him," he said. "Didn't I? I thought it was a scuff."

"You painted over *a* stain," said Idris, with a gentleness that surprised even Imani. "Mr. Quaye. You did what you were told, by a person with a reasonable claim on your trust. That isn't nothing. But it isn't murder, either."

"It might be helping."

"It might. We'll find out." He bent over the table again.

Imani let them be. She went up the three steps onto the afterdeck, into a night that smelled of weed and diesel and distant frying, and stood there with her arms crossed, looking at the lights of the water. The tower stood across the basin, sixty-two floors of lit glass in the fog, and from here it looked small and quiet, a lamp left on in a house. She took the evidence pouch from her inside pocket. The glasses. The paperback. The lanyard. The phone.

It had been buzzing all the way down the corridor, against her ribs, like a trapped moth. She had not looked. She did now.

The cracked screen was alive with small grey rectangles, stacked one on another. *T: Piet. Please.* *T: I know you're angry.* *T: I should not have said what I said about your wife.* *T: I'm in the old place. The usual. Come when you can.* The last was an hour old. Under them a new one slid down as she watched, the little cheerful chime of the ordinary world, as if there were still someone at the other end who thought he was going to be answered.

*T: I've got the songbook. Don't be a fool. Come alone.*

She stared at it. She had a very clear sensation of cold air going down her throat.

Behind her, the cabin door opened, and Idris came out onto the afterdeck, blinking, with the sleeves of his cardigan pushed up and a cup of tea in each hand. He gave her one. She took it without looking.

"I wondered what you'd found," he said. "You went quiet. I've learned it's a sign."

"Of what?"

"That you're about to do something brave and unwise. I've seen it twice. I've counted." He lifted the corner of a blanket from the back of a deckchair, looked at it with doubt, and then put it round her shoulders, with the stiff formality of a man draping a flag. "I'm sorry about the boat."

"What's wrong with the boat?"

"The name. My sister painted it on while I was away. She thought it was funny. I haven't had the heart to remove it, and now it's the only thing the harbourmaster remembers about me." He picked up his cup. "I'm told it's a very good pun. I've been unable to see what it is."

She almost laughed. She did not know how that was possible, with a dead man's phone in her hand and her brother bleeding through a tea towel in the cabin below. But the blanket was warm. He smelled of soap and gauze and, faintly, burnt toast. She put her chin in the collar and let herself have the moment for exactly as long as it took him to sip his tea.

"The man who's texting Piet doesn't know he's dead."

"I see." He set down his cup on the rail and took the phone in his gloved fingers, looking at the screen. "May I?" He scrolled up through the whole stream. "He's called *T.* No surname. No picture. Is there a way to find out whose number it is?"

"There's a number at the top of the thread."

"I can see it."

"I know it."

He looked at her.

"It's a Portuguese mobile. Plus three-five-one." She felt her lips shaping the digits the way a person recites an old prayer. "I've had it in my head for five years. It's on page one of a file in the office. It's the number I've been watching, with a program that costs nine hundred a month, since the day he left." She breathed out, a thin white thread. "Teodor Marchetti's phone is sending messages to a dead man, Idris. From inside Karrow. Tonight. And he's asking where his friend is."

The ferry's wake slapped the hull. Somewhere below them, in the galley, Kobi was telling the first-aid cupboard something in a low, cracked voice, and nobody answered.

"Ruth said he flew to Faro on Wednesday," said Idris slowly.

"Ruth lied."

"Or someone is using his phone."

"Both, probably." She turned the screen toward him, and the new line glowed. "*Come alone.* He wants Piet to come alone. To the old place. The usual."

"What's the old place?"

"I don't know," said Imani. "But somebody does."