The lift to thirty-one had no buttons. It had a slot, and a brass-coloured key on a coiled cord that Kobi turned without looking, the way a man opens his own front door, and then there was a long soft rise during which nobody spoke. Imani counted the floors on the display because counting was cleaner than thinking. At nineteen the dentists would be unlocking their waiting room. Someone would be wondering where she was. She decided that she would let them.

Thirty-one was quieter than the rest of the tower, and warmer. She had been to the floor exactly once, at twenty-seven, to sign a form about her father's personal effects, and she remembered the carpet more than anything: grey, expensive, soaking up all footsteps. Now the doors opened on a corridor of frosted glass, and behind the glass she could see shapes bent over screens. A woman in a headset said "Copy, bay one is secured" to nobody. Someone had left a birthday card on a filing cabinet and a half-eaten slab of cake beside it, still in its foil, and a sticky note that said KOBI THIS IS YOURS DON'T LET ASHLEY EAT IT.

"That's yours," Imani said.

"It's complicated," said Kobi.

"It's a cake."

"It's a very serious cake." But he did not smile, and she noticed that too.

Ruth's office was at the end of the corridor and was not an office so much as a living room that had been taught discipline. A low sofa. Two armchairs. A kettle on a tray, with real cups, and a window that looked out over the river and the grey ferries sliding in toward the quay. On a side table stood a framed photograph of the tower's topping-out ceremony, forty years ago, rows of hard hats cheering in the sun. Imani's father was in the third row. She had known that before she looked.

"Sit anywhere," said Ruth. "Kwabena, you can stay, or you can wait outside. I think she'd prefer you stayed."

"I'd prefer a lawyer," said Imani, "if this is the sort of thing where I'd prefer a lawyer."

"It isn't. But please do, if you feel it would help." Ruth poured tea into two cups with great ceremony, one for each of them, none for Kobi, and sat down. "I'm going to be very frank with you, because I think you're a frank person. A man is dead in a lift in my building. That is bad. A man who is on my staff is dead in a lift in my building, which is worse. And a young woman I have known since she was a girl has told me he is somebody else. I would like to understand why."

"Because it's his face."

"People mistake faces."

"Not this face." Imani took the tea because refusing it would have been rude, and rudeness was a luxury she saved for debtors. "He was chief financial officer. He signed every payslip in this tower for eleven years. He signed the notice freezing my father's pension the morning after my father fell. I have a very good memory for him, Ruth."

"I know you do," said Ruth gently, and drank her tea.

Something in the way she said it made the skin on Imani's arms tighten. Kobi shifted on the arm of the sofa.

"You've been in the lobby gallery eleven times in the past fourteen months," Ruth went on. "I looked, before you came up. It's no crime. Anyone may look at photographs of the people who built their place of work. But you stood for a long time in front of one particular photograph, and on two occasions you were seen taking a picture of it with your phone. It's a small portrait of Mr. Marchetti, unveiling the plaque for the east atrium. I wonder if you'd tell me why."

So that was how it was done. Not an accusation. A kindness with a hook in it. Imani put down her cup very carefully on its saucer and looked at the framed hard hats on the side table, and at her father in the third row, and chose.

"Because I'm a collector," she said. "We keep records. It's a habit."

"Of what?"

"Of who owes what."

"And Mr. Marchetti owed you something."

"Mr. Marchetti owed the tower a financial statement. I'm a recoveries agent. I'm employed by the firm the tower pays to recover its money. I have a professional interest in anyone who left with a pension and an explanation missing."

It was a decent answer. It was even true, as far as it went. Ruth studied her, with her head slightly to one side, as though weighing a gift.

"I wonder," she said, "if I could see your phone."

"No."

"Only the photographs."

"You can see the photographs with a warrant." Imani smiled at her, pleasantly, as at a man holding a bill. "I know how this works. I do it for a living. A cooperative witness hands over her phone. A suspect says the word no, and the nice woman writes it down. I'll leave it in my pocket. If you want it, say so, and I'll ring my boss and she'll ring a solicitor who is sleeping with the magistrate."

"Imi," said Kobi.

"I'm fine."

"You're being scary."

"I'm being polite."

"Both," said Ruth, and put down her cup, and for the first time there was a flicker of something that might have been humour or might have been appraisal. "Very well. We'll leave the phone. I'm going to tell you why, because I want you to understand that I'm not your enemy. In the last twenty minutes a short video has been circulating." She turned a tablet on the table so Imani could see it. "The courier girl. Okpara. Her phone was seized, but she'd already sent it to a group chat of forty or so friends, and one of them shared it into a larger channel. It's been viewed four thousand times. Do you want to see?"

She did not. She looked anyway.

Nine seconds of shaky footage. The bay, the yellow line, Imani's own back as she bent over the lift; and then the cut to the dead man's face, and the caption someone had stamped across it in white letters: TOWER GUARD FOUND DEAD?? DONT TRUST THE LOGS. Below it, comments rolling up as the tablet refreshed. Someone had written *my cousin works nights there, that's not a guard*. Someone else: *looks like the old money man tbh*. A third: *wait is this the 31st floor thing from the podcast*. And a fourth, which Imani's eyes stopped on and then could not leave. *ask the maintenance chief's daughter, she was there*.

"They know who I am," she said.

"The comments, yes. It's a small city." Ruth slid the tablet back to herself. "You see what I'm facing. In an hour there will be a podcast host standing outside my revolving door. In two, the Ostrander family's lawyers. I need to know who that man is, and I need to know how he came to be in a lift that never recorded him, and I need to know it before I know anything else. If you can help me, I will be more grateful than you can imagine. If you cannot, I'll need you to stay on this floor until the Medical Examiner's investigator has had his say. He is on his way."

"I'm being detained."

"You're being given tea."

"I can leave?"

"You can leave," said Ruth, "and I will be so sorry to see the tower's lifts take a very long time to descend."

That, Imani thought, was the other thing about kindness. When it was done properly it left no mark, and no one would ever be able to say it had happened.

* * *

The investigator came at ten past nine. Imani had spent the forty minutes in between on the sofa with a second cup of tea she did not drink, and a phone that buzzed with nine messages from the dental practice, which she answered one by one with the same four words (*Delayed. Apologies. Rescheduling today.*) while Kobi stood by the window with his back to her, eating a biscuit as though it were a duty.

"Say something," she said eventually.

"I'm eating."

"Say something with words in it."

"Imi." He did not turn. "I'm asking you, as your brother, to say it was Piet. Say you were wrong. Say it's the shock."

"Why?"

"Because it will be easier."

"Easier for whom?"

He did not answer. The door opened.

The man who came in was tall and narrow-shouldered, in a raincoat the colour of wet pavement that dripped quietly onto Ruth's carpet. He had close-cropped dark hair with the first grey in it, and tortoiseshell glasses held together at one hinge with what appeared to be a paperclip, and he carried a small black case in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other, with the air of a person who had been awake since the previous afternoon and did not think it worth mentioning.

"Idris Nakagawa," he said. "Karrow Medical Examiner. I'm sorry I'm late. The ferry was held at the quay."

"Director Abelard-Singh," said Ruth, standing, and shook his hand. "Thank you for coming so promptly."

"I'd like to speak to the person who found him."

"That's Miss Quaye."

He looked at Imani for what felt like a very long time. It was not rude. It was the look of a man reading a label. Then he set down the coffee on the arm of a chair, and said, "Hello. You identified the deceased as Mr. Teodor Marchetti. The Director has identified him as Mr. Piet Lindqvist. I've examined him in the lift. Before I give you my opinion I'd like to ask a question. Is that all right?"

"You're allowed to ask."

"How did you know him?"

"I didn't. I knew his face."

"That isn't the same as being wrong," said Idris. "It's the same as being right with a gap in it." He turned to Ruth. "The dental plan on file for Mr. Lindqvist is held by the tower's insurer. I've asked them to send the records. I'll compare. I'd like also to take prints from the body at the mortuary and match them to his staff badge enrolment, which I'm told your system keeps."

"Of course," said Ruth. "We keep everything."

"Yes," said Idris. "That's what's interesting." He scratched his jaw. "I have a second matter. The deceased has been dead for between thirty-four and forty hours. That's consistent with Monday evening. But there's fixed lividity along his back and the backs of his thighs, which means after he died he lay flat on his back, in one place, for at least six hours, long enough for the blood to settle and stay. Then someone sat him up in the corner of that lift and arranged his legs." He lifted his hands, helplessly. "He didn't die where he was found. He was carried there. After death. And Director, your lift records say nobody entered the car, with or without a badge."

The silence was a fine one. Even the kettle seemed to be listening.

"There is a way into the tower that doesn't log," Idris said. "Isn't there?"

Ruth said, "No."

"I think there must be."

"I assure you there isn't."

"Then I'm wrong." He looked at Imani, with sudden, mild attention, as though she had spoken. "Miss Quaye. Who would know a building well enough to bring a body through it without being recorded?"

It was an honest question, put honestly, and she had no reason to answer it except that her mouth had already begun. "A maintenance chief," she said. "Someone who built the back stairs and the dumbwaiters and the old gantries. Someone who had keys to everything, forty years' worth."

"Good," said Idris. "Do you know anyone like that?"

"Yes," said Imani. She heard how her voice sounded. It sounded like her father's. "He died six years ago."

Kobi put down his biscuit.