Tanner's Wharf Alley ran along the east flank of Ostrander Tower like a seam, and at half past midnight it held one parked bicycle, three bins and a cat with an opinion. The tower rose above it on the left, sixty-two floors of lit glass shrinking into drizzle, and the alley's wall was the rough bottom course of the old building that the glass had been built on top of: brick, soot-black, patched with grey cement.

"There," whispered Pippa, and pointed with a torch the size of a rolling pin.

"I can't see a door."

"It's not a door, darling. It's a hatch. Mind the cat."

She had insisted on coming. Imani had argued for twenty minutes in the kitchen, using phrases like *seventy-one* and *hip* and *Security cameras*, and Pippa had put on a black raincoat and a woollen hat and said, "Who do you think carried the orchids?" and gone to wait by the front door. They had come in a taxi with the driver's rating system watching them from a phone cradle. They had told him they were visiting a sick friend on Quay Street. Now Imani crouched in the dark by a rectangle of steel set at ankle height in the brick, painted the same soot as the wall, with a lock plate the size of a coin, and thought that she could not remember when she had last been so afraid of a cat.

"The coal hatch," Pippa said, close at her ear. "From when the tower was a hotel. Your father had it welded shut from outside, and put in a proper inner door, and kept this one for himself. The cameras in this alley were put up in 2019. They point at the bins."

"You know where the cameras point."

"I'm a woman who has opinions about bins."

Imani put her father's key into the plate.

It would not turn. She adjusted the angle and breathed, and tried again, and something in the lock yielded with a dry little sob, and the hatch swung inward on a hinge that someone had oiled. She stopped with the steel in her hand.

"It's been oiled," she said.

"Has it?" Pippa lowered the torch.

"Recently. You can smell it." She rubbed the hinge and her fingertip came away black and slick. Then she bent her head and went in, feet first, down a short brick chute into the dark.

* * *

The soil lift stood in a stone shaft behind what had been the gardener's store and was now a place for broken chairs. She found the light switch by feel; an old brass toggle, which clicked, and gave her three grudging bulbs in cages. The car was a wooden box, six feet by four, with a slatted door on a concertina gate and a lever on the wall in place of a button. There was one floor indicator, a brass dial with a trembling needle, and at the bottom of the dial, in her father's lettering again: *B. TO ROOF. NO STOPS.*

Pippa came down the chute with a thump and a small noise. She straightened her hat. "Well," she said. "Hello, old girl."

The car had been cleaned.

That was the first thing. It was a wooden car forty years old, and it should have been grey with dust and flecked with compost, but it had been scrubbed, quite recently, with a wet cloth and some cheap citrus cleaner, so that the planks were pale and streaked. The floor was damp in the corners. Imani stepped in. The wood gave a soft complaining sound, and she knelt and put her face close to the boards.

Lemon. Cleaning fluid, hospital strength, the same lemon she had smelled in Service Lift Three. But under it, so faint that she thought at first she was imagining it, something else: green and bitter and expensive. Citrus peel, then a dry woody note beneath.

"Pippa."

"Mm."

"Come and smell this."

The old woman got down on one knee with the help of the gate and a sound like a hinge, and sniffed. Her eyes shut. The whole broad face went still, the way it had in the kitchen. When she opened her eyes, they were bright and dangerous.

"Bergamot," she said. "That's his, that's *his*, he put it on with a trowel."

"It's on the floor. It's in the wood."

"It's in the *car.* It's been in the car, darling, he was in the car." Her breath came quickly. "Teodor was in this lift. Or somebody wearing him was."

*Somebody wearing him.* It was an odd phrase, and a good one, and Imani felt her mind catch on it as on a splinter. She stared at the floor. She looked at the corners, where the wet had pooled, and ran her finger along the join between the planks and the wall. Something small and dark came away on her skin. She held it under the bulb.

A hair. Two. A few short bristles, coarse, almost black, with a grey thread running through them like a seam. Beard hair, trimmed or cut, a quarter of an inch. She went on looking, on her knees, her cheek almost on the wood, and found more, collected in the crack along the back wall in a small drift as fine as pepper. Dozens of cut hairs. Someone had shaved a man in this lift.

"Piet," she said. "*Beard like a hedge.*"

"What are you doing?"

"He had a beard. The man in the lift didn't." She turned her head to look at Pippa, still kneeling, and the old woman's face in the cage-light was all hollows. "I said it to Ruth. *Piet's forty and has a beard.* And she said, *rather changed, hasn't he?* And I thought it was what you say to someone in shock. But she was right. Someone changed him."

"So he was shaved —"

"Here. After he was dead. Then dressed in a good suit and sprayed with Teodor Marchetti's aftershave and sat in a lift, and the lift that was meant to log him logged nothing, because he was brought in a way that doesn't log." She felt her pulse knocking in her wrists. "They made him into Marchetti. And then they let me find him."

"Let *you*?"

"The lift I opened is the lift I'm assigned to on Wednesdays. Ferdie Nwosu's bay fees. It's on my schedule, Pippa. It's on the app Bea uses. Anyone who looked could tell I'd be in that bay at seven twenty." She sat back on her heels. "Ruth knew I'd been photographing his portrait for fourteen months. I'm the one person in the building who would say *that's Teodor Marchetti* in front of witnesses, and be believed by nobody."

Pippa took her hat off. She held it in both hands.

"Then somebody wanted you to say it," she said softly. "And somebody else will say you were wrong."

Imani did not answer. She had taken a clear freezer bag from her coat, one of the ones she used for serving documents, and was picking the cut hairs from the boards with a pair of eyebrow tweezers, one by one, with the bored precision of a woman who has done worse for less. She sealed it, wrote the date on the seal with her father's old tailor's pencil, and put it into her inside pocket. A single clean fact. It was one thing she'd be able to put in front of Idris Nakagawa, who could not lie and had said gaps were somebody's choice.

"I want to go up," she said.

"To the roof?"

"To see where it comes out."

"Imani, it's gone one o'clock —"

Over their heads, in the stone shaft, something clicked.

It was not loud. It was the sound of a heavy latch drawn back a long way off, and it came down the shaft as an echo. Then came a hum. The brass needle on the dial twitched, and began to swing, quite slowly, from *ROOF* toward *B*.

Pippa said a word in Samoan that Imani had never heard in nine years of lodging.

"Someone's called it," Imani said. "Someone's calling the car down."

"Out. Out, now."

"It's not coming down, it's already moving, it was on the roof —" She took the gate in both hands. The cage lights flickered. Far above, in the dark of the shaft, a counterweight shifted with a groan. "Pippa. Go back to the hatch."

"I'm not leaving you in a box."

"Pippa."

"Fine." The old woman got to her feet with surprising speed, took the torch from her pocket, and turned off the three caged bulbs by their brass toggle, one-two-three, so that the store dropped into an ordinary dark. "But I'm waiting in the chute, and if someone puts a hand on you I'm going to hit him with this torch."

Imani went to the shaft door and stood very still. The hum deepened. Above her, a pinprick of light grew in the stone, wobbling, like a head lamp. A bulb. A phone's torch, lit and held up in a hand. The car came down on its cables, creaking, wood and rope and iron, bringing the smell with it: lemon, bergamot, wet soil. It stopped with a small bounce at the bottom of the shaft, level with the store floor, and the concertina gate slid open.

A man stepped out of the car in a black Security jacket with a half-eaten sandwich in the left pocket.

Kobi stood in the torch beam with his hand on the gate. He did not look surprised. He looked, in the thin light, the way he had looked on the dock when he was fifteen and she was twelve and their father had come home to find the cellar window broken, with his face already wearing the apology.

"Imi," he said. "What are you doing in here?"