The lift to thirty-one would not take them.

Imani had known it wouldn't. She had only wanted to watch the panel decline her, a small red ring around a number she had stood under for six years, and she watched it now with the polite interest of a woman reading her own overdue notice. Idris stood beside her in his good coat with the surgical tape on his glasses. The lobby behind them smelled of floor polish and the first coffees of the day, and a Security officer at the desk was pretending very hard to check a screen.

"Miss Quaye," he said. "Investigator. The Director asks that you wait."

"We were invited," said Imani.

"Yes. She asks that you wait for the escort."

They waited for four minutes, which Imani spent working out that the lift was not broken, only paused. A pause was an instrument. You made a person stand under a clock and let the clock make the offer.

The escort was the assistant: a tidy young man in a grey waistcoat, with a lanyard, a tablet, and the face of someone who had been trained not to have one. *Mr. Hallam,* said the little brass pin on his lapel, or possibly Hallett; the engraver had been unkind to the second half. He walked them to a different lift, a small one behind the arcade's cleaning cupboards, and keyed it with a card he wore on a coil at his wrist.

"I wonder if you'd mind," he said, and Imani almost smiled, because he had caught it from her, the Director's phrase, like a cold. "Phones."

"No," said Imani.

"It is only a courtesy."

"Then it's a courtesy I'm declining." She held her coat shut over the inside pocket. "I'll switch it to silent, Mr. Hallam. It's the best I do."

He considered this and let it go. Idris, beside her, said, "I have mine. I'd rather keep it. I'm happy to tell you it isn't recording," and Mr. Hallam said that this was very kind, in a voice that suggested it was the first time anyone had ever answered the question honestly and he did not know where to put it.

Ruth Abelard-Singh's office was on thirty-one, at the end of a corridor of grey carpet and closed doors, and it was exactly as Imani remembered it, which was the first thing wrong. Nobody keeps an office the same after the week Ruth had had. The silver-framed photograph of the Ostrander family was dead centre on the credenza. The bonsai had been watered. The tea tray stood on the low table with the good cups, the rose-coloured ones, and a pot under a quilted cosy knitted, Imani would have bet money, by someone who owed the Director a favour.

Kobi sat in the visitor's chair with his bandaged arm across his lap and his Security jacket buttoned wrong by one hole. He did not look up when the door opened. He looked at the carpet, and the line of his jaw said that he had decided what to say and had said it, and that the saying had cost him more than he'd budgeted.

"Imi," he said to the floor. "Don't."

"I haven't."

"You were about to."

"I was about to sit down." She sat, in the chair next to his, so that their shoulders almost touched. His arm smelled of antiseptic and of Idris's boat. "Good morning, Director."

"Miss Quaye." Ruth rose from behind the desk. She wore the navy suit and the plain lanyard, her silver hair pinned back, and she seemed to have slept about as well as everyone else, which was to say she had arranged her face over the gaps. "Investigator Nakagawa. How good of you. Please. Milk?"

"Yes, thank you."

"And you, Miss Quaye?"

"Black."

"As you like." She poured. The steam climbed straight up, and the rose china chimed softly against the saucer. "Your brother has been extremely candid with me this morning, and I should like to say first that I think it does him credit."

"He's not well," said Imani.

"He has a burn. The Medical Examiner's office, I'm told, is very good with burns." A glance at Idris, mild as milk. "He came up at half past six, without a badge, and asked the desk to say that Kwabena Quaye had a statement. I have it here."

She laid a single sheet on the low table. It was handwritten, which was somehow worse. Kobi's block letters marched down the lines in a hand that had been taught by a man who made labels for a living: *I, KWABENA QUAYE, WROTE OUT THE CREMATION CONSENT FORM FOR PIET LINDQVIST AND FORGED THE NEXT OF KIN. I BACKDATED IT TO TUESDAY. THE DIRECTOR DID NOT KNOW. I TOOK THE CREST AND STAMP FROM MR HALLAM'S DESK. NOBODY ELSE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS.* Below, a signature that had been made twice, the second time with more pressure.

Imani read it to the end and put it down. She did not look at her brother. She was afraid of what would happen to the room if she did.

"It's a good statement," she said. "It's got everything in it except the truth."

"Imi."

"You've spelled *Lindqvist* right. You couldn't spell it on Monday, you told me so yourself. Somebody's been practising it with you."

"I wrote it right because I wanted it to be right," said Kobi. "That's allowed."

"The Director's own assistant knows you were in a taxi at twenty past twelve on Thursday carrying a paper bag. You didn't have time to go down to his desk."

"I did it Wednesday night."

"The form's booking was made Wednesday at half past six. By telephone. From this floor." She did not take her eyes off Ruth now. "You were on the roof with a tin of masonry paint, Kobi. By your own account. By the Director's own order."

Ruth set the teapot down with a small, exact movement. "I wonder," she said, "if you'd allow me to speak plainly."

"Please."

"I do not want to refer your brother to the police. I would prefer, in fact, that this letter remained a letter. A man may be foolish in loyalty, and I have always valued loyalty, even when it costs me." Her eyes moved to Kobi, and something passed across her face that was almost tenderness, which Imani found, to her surprise, she could not hold against her. "He is a good officer, and he has spent the week afraid, and he came here to tell me a thing he thought would make that stop. I accept it as given. If it remained between us, nobody would ever need to examine the question of who drafted what."

"In exchange for."

"In exchange for nothing. In exchange for a pause." Ruth lifted her cup. "I am looking for something, Miss Quaye. I think you are, too. I think we may have been looking in the same corners, and getting in each other's way."

It was said gently. That was what made the hair rise on Imani's arms. She had spent ten years in other people's front rooms, and she knew the sound of a creditor changing tone because the debtor had something she needed.

"What are you looking for?" she said.

"Mr. Marchetti."

Nobody moved. The bonsai dripped once into its saucer.

"He didn't fly out of Marl Hill," said Ruth. "I told you that on Friday because it was what I had been told, and because I thought, for a day or two, that it might be true. It is not. The airstrip's log has an aircraft departing at ten past five on Wednesday morning with a passenger list of two, neither of whom is him. I have spoken to the pilot. He is very frightened of me and very sure." She turned the cup in its saucer, a quarter turn. "Teodor Marchetti walked out of the east terrace door of the sixty-second floor sometime between midnight Monday and dawn Wednesday, and I do not know where he went. I do not know who helped him. And I cannot find him in my own building."

"You said he was the family's guest."

"He was. He is. Mr. Winston has been rather insistent that I keep him comfortable." Her mouth flattened. "Mr. Winston is not, at present, taking my calls. So you see, Miss Quaye, when I say that I'd like a pause, what I mean is that I'd like a week in which nobody goes up to the roof and nobody takes a photograph of the olive trees. I'd like to find a man before a great many other people do. For his sake, and the family's. And for the tower's."

Imani thought of the phone against her ribs. *I've got the songbook. Don't be a fool. Come alone.* Somebody in this city was writing to Piet with Marchetti's thumbs. If Ruth was telling the truth, Ruth did not know that. And if she was lying, she had just given Imani the first honest-sounding thing she'd said all week, which was a splendid way to lie.

She kept her face still and drank her tea.

"One more matter," said Ruth, "and then I shall let you all go to your breakfasts. Investigator Nakagawa."

"Yes."

"Since you are here, I wonder if you could help me with a question that is, I'm sorry, a formality. Has anything that originated in this tower come into the possession of your office, in the past three days, by any route other than my own release?"

Beside her, Imani felt it as a small cold step on the stair, the one that bites. Idris did not shift in his chair. He lowered his cup to its saucer. He took a very long time, in the way she was learning he took time, as if the sentence were a heavy tray he was carrying across a polished floor.

"Yes," he said.

"I see."

"Two items. A quantity of dried material, scraped from a surface and found in a waste area of the building. And a quantity of hair." He met Ruth's eyes. "They were given to me by a member of the public. I recorded it so. I'm sorry. I can't tell you I haven't got them."

"And their provenance?"

"I have recorded that too."

"Idris," said Imani, quietly.

"I know." He did not look at her. His hands were flat on his knees, the thumb with the surgical tape on it very white. "I said I couldn't lie to her. I'm sorry. I'd have liked it to be a different question."

Ruth lowered her eyes. For a moment she looked as though she were genuinely sorry, which was the cruellest part. "Thank you," she said. "That is more than I'd have had from most men in your position. I shall be sending the coroner's officer to your boat at noon, under the Private Estate Incident Protocol, to collect the scrapings, the hair and any associated notes, and to take receipt of a phone and a bag that I understand are on your premises. They are the family's property, and they will be returned to the family. I wonder if you would see that they are ready."

"The phone is in my coat," said Imani.

It came out before she'd decided, flat and clear, and she watched it land. Ruth's eyes went to the pocket. Mr. Hallam, by the door, stopped breathing.

"Is it?" said Ruth, very softly.

"It's an exhibit in a death investigation. It's not the family's property. It's Piet Lindqvist's, and his sister's, and when you come for it I'll expect you to bring a magistrate."

Kobi made a sound beside her, a half-laugh that was mostly relief. She put her hand over his bandaged one and held it, hard, without looking down.

"Quite right," said Ruth, and poured herself a second cup of tea with a hand that did not shake at all. "How very like your father you are."