"—and I said to her, Marguerite, darling, if it's a ground-floor man with a penthouse mouth you don't put him on the fourth-floor committee, you put him in the cellar with the sherry—"

The voice came through the letterbox before the door was open. It was a voice built for lifts: round, warm, tuned to carry exactly nine floors without being shouted. Imani let herself in with her key and found the hallway of 14 Marram Road full of the smell of onions, ginger and something sweet, and her landlady in the kitchen doorway with a wooden spoon in one hand and a phone in the other, playing a voice note out loud at a volume that could have been heard from the ferry.

"That's the Lift Ladies," said Pippa Tuilagi, not looking round. "Thirty-two of us. Retired operators, mostly, plus one woman who sold tickets at the funicular and thinks it counts. We have a chat. We are not, whatever Marguerite says, a gossip circle. We are a *watch.*"

"You have a watch."

"We have a watch with snacks. Come in, darling. Sit. Don't look at me like that, I've seen the clip."

Imani stopped in the doorway. Pippa was seventy-one, five foot one, built like a well-loved teapot, in a flowered housecoat and slippers shaped like ducks. She had operated passenger lifts at Ostrander Tower for forty years, from the days when the cars had human attendants in green uniforms with brass buttons, until a modernisation programme had replaced her, with great ceremony and a small pension, by a panel that said *Floor nine* in a woman's voice. She now owned the narrow end-terrace in which Imani rented the upstairs flat, and a fierce opinion about everything that happened inside the building she had once lifted people through.

"Sit," said Pippa again, and Imani sat. A bowl arrived. Rice, stewed greens, a boiled egg with its top sliced off, a spoonful of something orange. "Eat. You've gone the colour of an unwashed cup."

"Everybody's saying that."

"Because it's *true.*" Pippa lowered herself into the chair opposite and put the phone face down, which was how she announced a serious conversation. "Four thousand people watched you find that man. Marguerite's grandson sent it to her with a skull. I said, *that is my tenant,* and Marguerite said *which one,* and I said, *the one who frightens the bailiffs.*"

"Pippa, it's not —"

"Was it him?"

Imani put down her spoon. "Was it who?"

"Teodor Marchetti." Pippa said the name the way another woman might say the name of a rash. "Eleven years I took that man up and down in my car. Nine seconds from the lobby to the thirty-fourth floor, and he used every one of them to tell me about his wine. Always bergamot, that aftershave. You could smell him from the lobby and know he was coming. He never once said my name." She held up her spoon. "I knew from the first thing you did. You didn't say *dead man in the lift.* You went white and said *Teodor.* Don't tell me different. Marguerite's niece was in the bay, and she heard."

For a moment the kitchen was only the sound of the extractor fan and the small tick of the cooker cooling. Imani looked at her bowl.

"Ruth says it's a guard. Piet Lindqvist."

"Piet," said Pippa. "Beard like a hedge. Brings me soup in winter. He is thirty-nine, he is a *lamb,* and he is certainly not dead in any lift I ever heard of, unless somebody has been telling stories to Ruth." She sucked her teeth. "So there are two of them. What does the young man say, the one in the raincoat?"

"How do you know about the raincoat?"

"Marguerite's niece."

"Of course." Imani ate a spoonful of greens. They were extremely good. It was almost insulting. "He says the body was carried in after death. He says the lift records don't show anyone entering the car. He thinks there's a way into the tower that doesn't log." She watched Pippa's face. "And I told him that the only person who'd know a way like that would be a maintenance chief."

Pippa did not speak. It was so unusual that Imani looked up. The old woman's hands, which were never still, had gone still on the table. Her eyes had slid, just a little, towards the ceiling, and past it, as if through the plaster and the loft to the thing that waited above.

"Pippa."

"Hm."

"What is it?"

"Eat your egg, darling."

"What is it?"

"There was a thing your father did," said Pippa slowly, "when I was a girl in the lifts and he was a lad on the tools. He didn't tell the committee. They'd have had a fit. He was too fond of the building to let it be stupid." She smoothed the table with one palm. "The east side. The soil lift."

"The what?"

"The old hoist. It's not on any drawing the family has seen. It goes up the east core from the basement to the roof, behind the gardener's store, and they used to haul compost up it for the terrace before the modernisation, because the passenger cars were not *allowed* to carry soil, and Mr. Ostrander the elder would not have an orchid planted in anything a person had touched. They built it in 1987. When the new panels came in, nobody wired it into the system, because nobody remembered it. Your father did. He kept the key." Pippa shrugged. "He kept two. One on his own ring, and one he gave to me, because I wanted to take my orchids up to the roof at midsummer and I was not about to ask the family."

Imani put the spoon down very carefully. The tick of the cooker had stopped.

"You have a key."

"I have *a* key." Pippa rose, with a wheeze and a hand on the table, and went to the cupboard under the stairs, the one that stuck. She came back with a biscuit tin that had once held shortbread and now held, as far as Imani could see, a hundred pieces of the past: ribbons, buttons, a dead watch, a bundle of Christmas cards in elastic. Out of the middle she took a small brass key on a loop of green string. It had a paper tag tied to it. The tag said, in a hand Imani would have known in any language, *E. HOIST. SOIL ONLY. DO NOT LEND TO MR. OSTRANDER.*

She had last seen that handwriting on a card pinned above her bed when she was twelve, which said TURN THE LIGHT OFF, IMANI, THE TOWER IS NOT PAYING FOR IT.

"He had a sense of humour," said Pippa, quietly.

"May I?"

Pippa put the key in her palm. It was warm from the old woman's hands and smelled faintly of pennies. Imani turned it over. A good key, cut for a lock that was forty years old; on the shoulder, a tiny punch-mark she had seen on her father's workshop tools: three dots in a triangle. The mark that said *this belongs to the chief*.

"The other key's on his ring," Pippa said. "The big ring, the one with the brass tag. It went with him that night."

"It came back," said Imani. "In his effects. I signed the form. A pocket knife, a wallet, a watch, a — " She stopped. She had signed a form on the thirty-first floor, at twenty-seven, in a room with grey carpet, and she remembered every item on it because she had read it four times in the hope that reading it would make the list longer. A knife. A wallet. His watch with the cracked crystal. A tin of mints. A phone with a dead screen. A pair of reading glasses, folded. "No ring."

"No?"

"There was no ring of keys. I thought — I thought they'd kept it as the tower's property. It's the chief's ring. It's on the tower's inventory." She heard her own voice, fast and flat. "I thought it was in a drawer."

"Then it isn't in a drawer," said Pippa. "It's with somebody. Because I have the only other key, darling, and I have not left this house since Tuesday week." She gave a small, sharp laugh. "And I've been sitting on it for six years, thinking, one day I'll take the orchids up. I never thought I'd have to tell anybody who else might."

The extractor fan rattled itself quiet. In the hall, the old clock, which had belonged to Pippa's husband and which she refused to fix, struck one, then a quarter past, and stopped.

"If that's the way he came in," Imani said. "If someone carried a dead man up the east core and sat him in a lift, and the lift never logged it, then whoever did it knew about the hoist. And they didn't have a key from the tower. The tower doesn't have a key. Because nobody remembers it." She closed her fingers around the brass. "They had my father's ring."

"Which means," said Pippa, "that whoever has it has had it since the night he died."

The word she did not say was *fell.*

Imani looked at the key in her fist, and then at the old woman across the table. Pippa had put her hands in her lap. She looked her age. She looked, for a moment, like a person who had been carrying something in her pocket for six years and had just been told what it weighed.

"Eat your egg," said Pippa Tuilagi, very gently. "Then we'll go and see what the hoist does."