Tallow & Dray Recovery occupied the first floor of a narrow building on Cutler Street, above a pharmacy whose green cross buzzed and flickered whenever it rained, which in Karrow was most days. You reached the firm by a stair that smelled of cough sweets and carpet glue. At the top there was a frosted door with the firm's name in peeling gold, and behind it a room with six desks, a printer that jammed on principle, and a woman of fifty-four named Beatrix Calloway, who was standing at the window with her reading glasses pushed into her grey-blonde hair and her phone against her ear.

"No," Bea said into it. "No, I understand. Yes. She's here now. I'll tell her."

She hung up. She did not turn around.

"That was Ruth Abelard-Singh's assistant," she said, "and I would like you to know I have never in my life been so politely told that my contract is on a ledge."

"Hello, Bea."

"Hello, my girl." Bea turned. She wore her usual armour: a bottle-green blazer, big silver earrings, a face that could have sold a flood to a fish. "Sit. Have a biscuit. I'm told that you found a corpse and told Security it was the wrong corpse. I'm told you refused the Director her tea."

"I drank the tea."

"Refused the *phone*, then." Bea sat on the edge of her desk. "Imani. The tower is eleven per cent of my turnover. It's the only reason the printer is leased and not repossessed. When Ruth Abelard-Singh rings me up in the voice of a vicar to say that Miss Quaye is an exemplary professional and would I mind awfully keeping her out of Ostrander Tower until the matter of this unfortunate misunderstanding is resolved, I hear a vicar telling me I've got until Friday to find another vocation."

"I'm suspended."

"You're *redeployed*. To the harbour district, where nobody's been shot at for a week." Bea held up a hand. "Don't. Hear me. I've got a ferry company that owes us for three years of trailers, a bridal shop in Quillon Row that thinks I'm a fiction, and a man in Dunmore who sends the invoices back with pictures of his dog. I'd rather like it if you did all of that, and went home, and did not do whatever it is you're about to do."

"What am I about to do?"

"The thing with your jaw."

Imani realised that it had gone tight. She loosened it. "Bea, he was dead in the lift and he had Teodor Marchetti's face."

"Did he."

"I haven't seen it in five years and I would know it in a coal cellar."

"I believe you." Bea took the glasses out of her hair, looked at them as though they had disappointed her, and put them on. "That's the trouble. I believe you and I also believe I'd like to keep my office. So let's put it like this. You will take the bridal shop. You will take the dog man. You will do nothing else, and in particular you will not do the clever thing you're good at, which is find people. I won't ask what you did before you came up the stairs. I don't want to know."

"You never do."

"That's why I'm still in business." She smiled at last, a quick bright tired smile, and for an instant Imani saw the woman who had hired her at twenty-four, from a pile of forty applications, on the strength of a single sentence: *I'm good at being patient with people who are bad at paying.* "Go home. Eat something. I've told the cleaners to leave you a pastry."

* * *

She did not go home.

She went to her desk, which was by the window with the broken blind, and sat down and woke her laptop and opened the program that the firm paid nine hundred a month for and did not like to discuss. It was called Tracer. It was not illegal, quite. It drew together everything a person left behind them in the world, the loans and phone contracts and supermarket loyalty cards, the delivery addresses, the forgotten accounts, and it handed them to a collector in a neat grid, like a lover who had kept every letter. Debtors changed their names, their cities, their numbers. They never changed their habits. They went on ordering the same brand of tea.

Teodor Marchetti had a Portuguese mobile, a Portuguese bank account and a Portuguese address in a village she could not pronounce. All of those were quiet. For five years the grid had shown the small, regular heartbeat of a rich man's retirement: a pharmacy in Lagos, a membership of a golf club, an olive-oil subscription that billed the first of each month. Nothing since Monday. Nothing at all since the morning of the day Piet Lindqvist, or whoever he was, walked out of the lobby through the revolving door at eleven minutes past six.

Which was, if one were being literal, precisely what a dead man's accounts looked like.

She sat back. She looked at the printer, which had jammed. Then she looked at the grid again, and at the last column, where the program tucked what it called *secondary traces*: devices that had once shaken hands with a number, and might again. A hotel's guest Wi-Fi. A café. A museum with free internet and an app that asked you to like it. Most of them were noise. She scrolled.

*Ostrander-Guest. Connected 02:14. Device: Marchetti T. (phone). Duration: 11 mins.*

Last night.

Her mouth was dry. She read it twice, then a third time, as though the sentence might become a different sentence if she were unkind to it. It was the tower's guest network, the one that showed up on every phone in the arcade and asked you to accept the terms and conditions. Teodor Marchetti's Portuguese phone had joined it at fourteen minutes past two in the morning, for eleven minutes, on a night when the Director of Security said that Teodor Marchetti was in Portugal and the man in the lift was a guard who had walked out of the building on Monday and never come back.

That was the problem with a body that had been identified twice. Whatever you believed, you had to bury one of them. If the body was Piet, then who had been carrying Marchetti's phone into the tower at two a.m.? And if the body was Marchetti, then the man in the lift had been dead since Monday evening, so who was holding his phone on Tuesday night?

She opened the note on her own phone. It was called Shopping List, and it had nine lines, and she did not need to open it to read them. The first said *T.M.*, and beside it, in a smaller font, a date she had typed on the night of her father's funeral: *Sept 14.*

She did not cross out the line. She sat there, in the sound of the pharmacy's cross buzzing through the wall, and made herself do the part she was best at, which was nothing. Patience was a tool. She had not said the dead man was alive. She had said the dead man was Marchetti, and the Director had said he was somebody else, and now a phone said Marchetti had been in the building after midnight, and a body said it had been carried there, and there was only one question in all of it that mattered. *Which of them is lying to me?*

Her own phone buzzed on the desk.

A message from a number she did not have saved.

*Miss Quaye. This is Idris Nakagawa from the ME's office. I have your number from the incident sheet. I hope that is not intrusive. I have two things. First, I took prints from Mr. Lindqvist's body at the mortuary an hour ago. The Security floor's enrolment system, which they told me holds the fingerprints of every employee, has no record under that name. Staff ID exists. Photograph exists. Prints: absent. The Director says it's an administrative gap. I think gaps are usually somebody's choice.*

Imani stared at it. A second bubble followed, after a long moment, as though he had been composing it with care.

*Second. I would be grateful if you did not search for anyone. I say this not as an instruction but as a practical request. When a witness starts to look for people, the people sometimes look back. I am unable to protect you from a person I haven't identified. Please eat something. Yours sincerely, I.N.*

She read it again. Then she laughed, once, soft, in the empty office. Yours sincerely.

She typed: *Prints absent, or removed?*

The typing dots appeared at once, as though he had been waiting with his thumbs over the screen. *I don't know. It would be easier if the answer were one of those. It might be both.*

*Mr. Nakagawa. Did you really ask me to eat something?*

*Yes.*

*Is that part of your job?*

The dots went. Came back. Went again. *No,* he wrote. *It's a separate observation. You went rather grey in the Director's office. I mention it because nobody else did.*

She put down the phone. There was no reason for that to have hit her where it did, and it was quite a long moment before she could look at the screen again and type something that was neither warm nor rude: *Noted. Thank you.*

Then she locked the screen, and looked at the Tracer grid, and did what she had been told not to do.

She searched for a second device.

It took eleven minutes. Marchetti's Portuguese phone had joined the tower guest network from a point of access that the program had mapped, roughly, by the strength of the signal and the other devices nearby, and what it came back with, in the little grey circle at the centre of the floor-plan, was a number that made her stop breathing.

*Probable location: 62-A. Roof level, east.*

She knew that floor. The whole city did. Sixty-two was the garden terrace above the Ostrander family suites, glass and olive trees and a heated pool that appeared in magazines. The lifts did not go there. You needed a different key, and a family name, and, if you were being polite about it, a very good reason.

The pharmacy's cross buzzed. Rain began to tick against the window. Somewhere below, a delivery rider shouted a name and a number to a customer who did not come.

Marchetti's phone had been on the roof of the tower at two in the morning. The man in the lift had been dead since Monday. And on the sticky note on Imani's monitor, in her own handwriting, in a list she had made on a bad night years ago, were the words she had underlined twice: *Everything leaves a bill.*

She picked up her coat.