Pippa came down the quay at ten past six in the morning with a casserole dish held in front of her like an usher's collection plate, and the fish basin went quiet to let her through.

Imani watched from the houseboat's deck rail with a mug of Idris's tea going cold in both hands. She had slept in her clothes on a bench that folded out into something Idris called a berth and the rest of the world would call a plank. Her neck felt like a wrung cloth. Wren had gone home at two. Kobi was in the galley, flat on the narrow settle with his bandaged arm propped on a cushion, snoring in the careful, wounded way of a man trying not to wake his own injury.

"Darling," said Pippa, from the gangway, "I have walked past four boats called things like Seas the Day. Yours is the only one that made me laugh."

"It's Idris's."

"Then he's the only man on this water with a brain." She came aboard sideways, duck slippers under her good shoes, the dish steaming through its tea towel. "Lamb and butter beans. I did not sleep, so I cooked. Where is the boy who burned himself?"

"Asleep."

"Good. Let him. Nobody should hear what I have to say while they are lying down."

Idris appeared in the hatch in his cardigan, his plain steel glasses, and an expression of mild alarm that he had clearly decided to treat as hospitality. He took the dish from her without being asked. Pippa looked him up and down, the way she must once have looked at lift passengers who tried to carry their own luggage, and decided he would do.

"Detective," she said.

"Investigator," said Idris. "For the Medical Examiner. I'm not a detective."

"You are a man who made my girl eat a banana. That is better."

They sat at the little table under the skylight, three of them and a lamb stew, and Imani set Piet's phone on the cloth between the bread and the butter, inside a clear evidence pouch. The screen had gone dark. She tapped the pouch and it woke, cracked across the middle like river ice, and the last message was still there. *I've got the songbook. Don't be a fool. Come alone.*

Pippa read it without her glasses, holding the pouch at arm's length. Her mouth moved on the word *usual*.

"The old place," Imani said. "The usual. Does that mean anything to you?"

"It means something to a very large number of people who are dead or in Portugal." Pippa put the pouch down gently, as if it were warm. "Say it again, how he writes. Piet. Please. Don't be a fool. That is Teodor. He never once wrote a message without telling the person what sort of person they were being."

"So it's him."

"It's him or somebody who has read him very carefully. And I do not know which is worse." She tore bread, buttered it, and did not eat it. "The usual is a room. On thirty-four. He called it the Tallyroom, because he was a man who thought a joke was improved by being named. It was a private dining room beside the finance suite. Twelve chairs, a table you could land a plane on, and a lift of its own, a little one, the dumbwaiter's grandmother. Every Friday, he took me up to it from the lobby, singing, and every Friday I let him out and he said, *Philippa, the ledger is closed, and so is my appetite,* and he went in to eat lunch for three hours with whichever person was about to be sorry."

"Sorry how?"

"Sorry that they had not paid something. Or sorry that they had." She finally ate the bread. "They shut it in 2019, the same year they took out the Waltz and put in the woman who announces the floors. Boards over the door. Nobody wanted to say why. I thought it was because a room can hold on to a man's voice."

Idris was writing in the small ruled notebook he kept in his cardigan pocket. He wrote slowly and neatly. "Piet was a night guard on thirty-four?"

"Piet carried him coffee. Teodor liked him, he liked everyone who couldn't do him any harm." Pippa's eyes went to the phone again. "I'd say Piet brought coffee up to the Tallyroom a hundred times. And Teodor would say, *the usual*, and Piet would say, *the usual, sir*, and they'd both be pleased as if they'd made something."

Imani felt the thing in her chest she had trained herself over six years to treat as a reading on a dial, not an instrument. A name at the top of a list. A man who said first names like toasts. He had walked Karrow with a silver mane for thirty years. He had stood at her father's funeral, she had been told, in a good black coat, looking at his shoes.

She slid the pouch back toward herself. "Someone wants Piet to come to the Tallyroom, alone, tonight or tomorrow or whenever he reads it."

"Imani," said Idris.

"I haven't said anything."

"You've done the thing with your thumb." He pointed with his pen at her hand, which was resting on the phone's edge in a position that, she realised, had the exact angle to type with. "You're composing."

"I'm thinking."

"It's the same movement."

Pippa made a small, pleased noise into her bread.

"If I answer as Piet," Imani said, "just *on my way*, and nothing else, then whoever is behind that phone is in a room on thirty-four waiting. We would know where. We would know who."

"We would know a room," said Idris. "And we would have sent a message from the personal device of a dead man, in his name, to a person who may be a witness to his death, or a participant. I have to log that phone as an exhibit. It is already compromised by being carried around by a woman in a delivery jacket. If I let you write to it, I cannot honestly tell a court that it is a record of what happened. It becomes a record of what we did."

"The other side forged a cremation form."

"That doesn't give me a licence." He said it plainly, without heat, as a man might say that the tide was out. "I'm sorry. I know you are trying to get ahead of her. But if you pretend to be Piet, then you are a person who pretended to be Piet. I can't make that sentence better afterwards."

"Then what do you suggest?"

"That we find out who else is reading the phone." He turned a page. "Whoever sent those messages knows Piet's number and knows it is still switched on. They sent the last one an hour before it was found. They are checking."

Imani looked at him for a long moment. There was something in his refusal that she wanted to be angry at, and could not find the handle for. It was like trying to pick up water. In six years, no one had said no to her without a reason she could use against them.

"You're right," she said, and it tasted of metal.

"I'd prefer not to be."

"I know."

Pippa had stopped chewing. "Darling, I do not like this boat's tea, but I like this man."

The boat shifted under them as a ferry went by out in the channel, and a spoon walked a short way along the table and stopped. Idris caught it without looking.

They ate. Pippa told the story of the Tallyroom's lift, a thing the size of a wardrobe that ran in a dead shaft nobody had put on the drawings, because Teodor had paid for it out of a different pocket, and Imani let the lamb and the beans and the old woman's voice move around her until she was nearly warm. At seven, Idris went to find the second pair of clean bandages for Kobi's arm. At ten past, he came back up the steps without them.

"He isn't there," he said.

Imani was on her feet before she knew she had stood.

The galley was empty. The settle held a crushed cushion and a dent. The cupboard Kobi had been talking to in the night had its door shut. On the little fold-down counter, under the edge of a plate that still had two crusts on it, lay a page torn from Idris's receipt pad, written in Kobi's big loose capitals.

*IMI. GONE TO SORT IT. NOT STUPID. DON'T BE CROSS. EAT SOMETHING. K.*

She read it three times. Every word was the way he'd have said it across a kitchen. That was what she couldn't bear. He had even put a full stop after *cross*, which he never did.

"Where would he go?" said Idris, behind her.

"Nowhere stupid," said Imani. "That's what he's telling me. Which means exactly where I'm afraid of."

Pippa had come down the steps with her hand on the rail. She looked at the note, and then at Imani's face, and put her palm flat on the table for balance, the way she must have steadied herself in forty years of lifts that dropped the last half-inch.

"Is it Ruth he'd go to?" she said.

"He thinks he did the forging. He thinks if he says it, in front of her, in his own voice, then everything lands on him and nobody else. The job, the form, the paint. Me." Imani pressed her thumb into the note until the paper creased. "He's trying to pay it. He's bad at sums, and he's trying to pay it in full."

"He's suspended," Idris said. "He has no badge."

"He doesn't need one. He needs to walk up to the lobby desk and say his own name." She found the phone in her pocket, the one that belonged to her, with its sensible cracked case. She had silenced it at the sluice, forgotten it, and not looked since. Three missed calls from a Karrow number she had last seen in a car in Tanner's Wharf Alley. One message, sent at 6:51, while she had been carrying a plate of lamb.

She opened it. She read it aloud, because it was the only way to make it stop being a thing that had happened to her alone.

"*Good morning, Miss Quaye. Your brother has come to see me, quite of his own accord, and I find him much more candid than I expected. I wonder if you would join us for tea. I have the kettle on. Ruth.*"

She set the phone down, very carefully, on the plate with the two crusts.

"Seven minutes," said Pippa, who had been looking at the clock. "He's been up there seven minutes with that woman and a kettle."

"Imani," said Idris.

"I'm going."

"I know." He was already unhooking his coat from the hatch. "I'm only saying that I'm going with you, and that I will not be able to lie to her."

"I'm counting on that," said Imani, and for the first time that morning it was almost true.

She took the evidence pouch off the table and put it in her inside pocket, against her ribs, where Piet's phone lay hard and cold as a second bone. Behind her, Pippa was already putting the lid back on the casserole. Some arrangements, Imani thought, you could trust. The lamb would be there when they came back. The question was who else would.

On the quay, the fog had lifted just enough to show the top thirty floors of Ostrander Tower, standing in clean grey light above the roofs like a ledger left open on a table. A single window, high on the east face, caught the sun and burned.

She did not look at it for long. She had been in debt to that building for six years, and it had never once sent a reminder. Now it had sent tea.