"If you are going to arrest a casserole," said Pippa, "you will have to arrest me with it."

She was standing in the middle of the houseboat's galley at eleven fifty-eight, in her duck slippers, with the lamb dish held against her stomach and a tea towel over the lid. The galley was not large. It held Pippa, Imani, Kobi on the settle looking grey and sorry for himself, and Idris, who had spent the last ninety minutes moving about the boat with his hands in blue gloves and the grave concentration of a man packing a parachute.

"Nobody is arresting a casserole," said Imani.

"I am only saying. It is a warm dish and I am an old woman and I have done nothing but feed people since Wednesday." Pippa lifted the corner of the towel with one finger. Under the lid, on top of the lamb and the beans, a clear evidence pouch lay in a bed of folded greaseproof paper. Piet's cracked phone was dark. A single butter bean had come to rest against the zip. "If anybody wants it, they will have to eat through the dinner."

"It's a very good hiding place," said Idris.

"I have been hiding things from men in uniform since before you were born."

"It's probably contaminating it."

"It is protecting it," said Pippa. "Ask anybody who has had my lamb."

Imani looked at Kobi. He had said nothing since Ruth's office. On the walk down to the quay he had held his bandaged arm against his chest as if it were a baby he'd been told to carry, and at some point she had realised he was not limping, only stepping carefully, the way you walk on a floor you have just mopped. Now he lifted his head, and she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed and perfectly clear.

"I'd like it noted I'd have been very good in prison," he said. "I've got the temperament. I make toast."

"You'd have been dreadful. You'd have organised the guards a birthday."

"That's what I'm saying. Morale." A faint wobble. "Imi, I'm sorry."

"Don't."

"I thought if I took it, she'd go quiet and you'd be left alone."

"I know what you thought." She sat down on the arm of the settle and, because there was nothing else to do with the feeling, took the burned arm gently by the wrist and checked the dressing. Idris had done it with tidy square corners. "You thought there was a bill, and you could pay it in a lump. You get that from me. I'd like it to stop."

"You're not the only one who keeps accounts."

"That," said Imani, "is the problem."

Idris said, from the counter, "They are here."

A car had pulled up on the quay. It was a long dark estate with a coroner's crest on the door, not a Security saloon, which was the first thing that made the back of Imani's neck prickle. A woman got out of the back, small and brisk in a tweed coat with a briefcase, and behind her came Mr. Hallam, carrying a plastic crate. He looked at the boat's name painted on the stern and then looked pointedly elsewhere, as if it had been rude to him.

The woman was Mrs. Quill, the coroner's officer. She was sixty or so, with a face like a closed door, and she stepped across the gangway without being invited and wiped her shoes on the mat with great deliberation. She and Idris shook hands. They had clearly done this before. Imani could hear nothing of what they said in the first minute but the shape of it: a paper produced, a paper read, a long pause, his careful voice, hers like a ruler.

"Investigator Nakagawa." Mrs. Quill's eyes moved round the galley. "I have an instruction under the Protocol of 1998 to take receipt of items originating from the Ostrander estate. I understand you have been co-operative."

"I have been honest."

"They're not always the same thing." She opened her briefcase on the counter and counted. "Dried material, in a sealed bag, one. Hair, in a sealed freezer bag, one. Notes."

"My notes are my notes. I will provide copies of the log entries. The originals are the office's."

"That seems fair."

"There was also," said Mr. Hallam, from the doorway, "a phone."

The casserole did not move. Pippa's face did not move. Imani could not have said how she knew that Pippa was now entirely, stonily, in a lift between the fourth and fifth floors with the doors shut.

"I have no instruction regarding a phone," said Mrs. Quill.

"It's in the paperwork. The Director was most specific."

"The Director has been specific about a number of things." Mrs. Quill took a long breath through her nose. "I do not take property from a private person at their private residence on the word of an assistant. If Miss Quaye has any item belonging to a deceased man, I shall be obliged to hear from the man's next of kin. Is there a next of kin?"

"Greta Lindqvist," said Imani. "His sister. She's a deckhand on the ferries."

"Then it would be the sister's decision." Mrs. Quill wrote this down. Mr. Hallam's mouth did something complicated. "I shall make a note that a phone was *mentioned*, and I shall note that I was shown no phone."

"You are not being shown a phone," Pippa said, with great dignity, "because I do not see a phone, Officer. I see a Tuesday dinner."

Mrs. Quill turned her head and looked at the old woman and the dish. She looked for what felt like a very long time. Then she said, in exactly the same voice, "What a lovely smell," and closed her briefcase.

It took twenty minutes. The scrapings went into the crate. The hair went into the crate. The photocopied log pages were signed by both parties, and the date and time written in blue-black ink with the gravity of a wedding register. Mr. Hallam carried the crate to the car in both arms, as if it might be asked to testify. When Mrs. Quill stepped back across the gangway she paused, one hand on the rail, and said without turning round, "Mr. Nakagawa. For what it is worth, I have been doing this for thirty-one years. I have never once been given a clean answer by one of those families. I should hate to see anyone who gave me one."

"Thank you," said Idris. "I think."

"It was meant kindly." She went.

For a minute nobody spoke. The car pulled out along the quay. A gull walked the length of the roof and surveyed the water. Pippa lowered the casserole to the counter and sat down on the nearest stool with her hand over her heart.

"Forty years," she said, "and I have never been so frightened of a woman in a tweed coat."

"It was the best performance I've seen at this table," said Idris.

"Do not tell me I was brave, I was hungry." Pippa waved her hand. "Is there anything left to lose? They took the boy's paint and the dead man's hair. What have they got now?"

"A third of it," said Idris.

Imani turned.

He was standing at the counter, peeling off the blue gloves one finger at a time, and he did not look pleased with himself. He looked, if anything, as though he'd been caught at something. "The Protocol allows them to take originals. It also requires me to retain a reference portion of any biological sample, for audit. That is a procedure. I have always done it. At ten to ten this morning I took a split from each bag, which I am required to do, and I sent it with the office courier to Dr. Fennimore at the Polytechnic, who is the independent laboratory the Medical Examiner uses when we want somebody to check our sums."

"And Ruth asked whether you had the items," said Imani slowly. "Not whether you'd sent a portion to a laboratory."

"She did not ask that." His mouth made a small, unhappy line. "I would have said yes. I think it matters that she did not ask. It's a very thin thing to hide behind, Imani. I'm not proud of it. I was very careful to have done it before we went up."

She stared at him. She thought of the cold stair biting under her foot, of the plain steel glasses and the cardigan and the tea. She thought, absurdly, of her father, who had never in his life concealed anything except where he'd put his keys.

"That's not a lie," she said.

"No."

"That's a stall."

"Yes." He glanced at her. "Procedure is a stall. It's all it's ever been. It's the only kind I can do."

Kobi had started to laugh, a helpless wheeze, both hands on his ribs. "Auntie Pip, did you hear that. He's a *procedure* man."

"I heard it, darling. I want him at my funeral."

Imani turned away to look at the water, because her face was doing something she did not wish to be watched doing. When she turned back, Idris had taken his notebook from the cardigan and was holding it closed against his chest with both hands.

"There is one more thing," he said. "The thumbprint. From the nose putty. I did not tell you in the corridor because I did not want to say it in that building."

She went very still.

"The national system returned a match at four this morning. It's a clear one. Twelve points." He opened the notebook, turned it round, and set it on the counter beside the dish of lamb. A name was written there in his neat, plain capitals. "It's an old record. A student arrest, nineteen years ago. A sit-in at the university, taken in by mistake and released without charge, but fingerprinted. The record was never expunged."

Imani read the name, and the galley seemed to lose a degree of warmth.

WINSTON OSTRANDER-BHATT.

"He did the nose," said Kobi, from the settle, in a voice so small it barely carried. "Not Marchetti. Not Ruth. Him. He put his thumb on the dead man."

Nobody said anything. Pippa reached over and, without ceremony, lifted the tea towel and began to serve the lamb.