Kobi saw the hearse first. She watched it hit him from forty yards: the tow chain, Odile Halloran dabbing her eyes, the small crowd of dockers and schoolgirls with their phones held up like candles at a vigil. He stopped on the wet pavement with the paper bag swinging from one hand. Then his head came round, slowly, the way a man's does who already knows what he will see, and he found her sitting on the customs-house steps with a phone against her ear.

"Imani?" said Idris, in her ear. "Are you still there?"

"I'll call you back," she said, and rang off.

Kobi arrived at the foot of the steps. He looked at the hearse. He looked at her. His mouth did something complicated.

"Did you," he said, "repossess a hearse."

"Technically it was a lease."

"With a *body* going in."

"No body went in. That was the point." She stood up. "What's in the bag?"

"A sausage roll." He held it up with a hopeless gesture. "Two. One's yours. I thought, she'll have had nothing since the ferry." A pause. "Auntie Pip rang me at seven to say you'd gone out in your good coat and she was very, very worried, and could I find you. I said you were probably at the Medical Examiner's, and she said *then take her a sausage roll.*"

"Did she also tell you to bring the envelope?"

His hand went to his jacket. It was a small movement, a flinch really, and he saw her see it.

"Show me," she said.

"Imi —"

"Kobi. Show me what Ruth sent you with."

He did. They sat on the steps, a little apart, in the grey noon, while the tow-truck groaned off down the quay with Odile Halloran's hearse swaying behind it like a patient on a trolley, and the dockers drifted away disappointed. He handed her a stiff cream envelope with the tower's crest embossed on the flap. Inside were two sheets, stapled: a covering letter on heavy paper with Ruth's signature in blue-black ink, and a form.

*NEXT OF KIN CONSENT TO RELEASE AND CREMATION*, said the form in bold across the top. *Deceased: Lindqvist, Piet Anders.* Below it, a printed paragraph, a list of checkboxes, and at the bottom a flowing, rather lovely signature that read *Greta Lindqvist (sister)*, a date in the same hand, *Tuesday*, and in the corner a stamped line from the Marl Hill Crematorium: *Booking ref MH-0914. Slot: Fri 09:00.*

"I was told to hand it to Mr. Nakagawa," Kobi said. "Personally. With my compliments. She said, *a familiar face makes people more comfortable,* and I said I don't know that I'm Mr. Nakagawa's familiar face, and she said..." He rubbed his jaw. "She said you'd look after me."

"Did she."

"I thought it was nice."

He said it so simply that she had to look away. This was the trouble with Kobi. He could carry a forged document across the city, past two cameras and a revolving door, and think he was running an errand for an aunt. Their father used to say that Kobi had been born with the wrong kind of lock: it opened for anyone who knocked kindly.

"It was extremely nice." Imani held the form to the light. Then, with the focus of someone who had read ten thousand forgeries, she began at the top and went down it one line at a time. A collector who could not tell a false signature from a real one starved. Names written in a fresh blue pen look different from names written in an old one. A date inserted later sits on the page in a different way, as though it has been invited. This form had been done by a single steady hand, in one sitting, at one speed. But it did not match itself.

"What?" said Kobi.

"The consent is dated Tuesday."

"Yes."

"The body was found on Wednesday morning."

"Well, yes, but they'd said — they said he was *missing,* so the family —"

"And the booking reference." She tapped it. "Marl Hill's slot reference was generated when the slot was booked. Odile Halloran has just told me that happened on Wednesday evening, at about half past six. The tower did it, through an assistant. So how does a form signed by his sister on Tuesday contain a booking reference that didn't exist until Wednesday?"

Kobi opened his mouth. Shut it.

"It doesn't," said Imani. "Somebody printed this on Wednesday night and put Tuesday on it, so that it looked as if Greta Lindqvist had agreed to cremate her brother before anyone knew he was dead."

The wind off the river, smelling of diesel and wet rope, picked up the paper bag and rattled it against the step. A gull on the railings put its head on one side.

"She wouldn't," said Kobi.

"Who wouldn't?"

"Ruth wouldn't." He said it with the flat insistence of a man putting a hand on a door. "She's — Imi. She was at Dad's funeral. She paid for the lilies. She sent Mum a card every Christmas till the day Mum died. She's never done anything that wasn't for the building, and the building isn't just the building, it's us, it's every single person who works in it. Ruth doesn't hurt people. She protects them."

"She's protecting someone."

"Yes."

"Is it Piet?"

He did not answer.

"Monday night," she said. "Quarter to eleven. A double portion of rice, four bottles of water and a tip of two hundred, left at the east service door. You opened it and said nothing to the rider, and paid her in cash from an envelope, and went upstairs with the bag." She kept her voice level, because she had learned long ago that if you said a terrible thing gently, the other person could still hear it. "Wren Okpara's got the order on her phone. She gave me the picture. I haven't shown it to anyone. I haven't shown it to Idris Nakagawa, who is upstairs at this moment looking at Piet's stomach and finding, among other things, rice."

Kobi had gone as grey as the sky.

"Who was the food for?"

"Imani, don't."

"I'm not shouting."

"That's worse."

"Who was it for?"

"Piet," he said.

It came out of him as if it had been dragged. He put his face in his hands and sat very still, a big man folded up on a stone step, and when he spoke again the words came muffled through his fingers. "Piet, on Monday. He came to me at four o'clock in the afternoon, white as a sheet. He said he'd seen something on the nights, something in the numbers, I don't know, he's not a numbers man, he's a doors man. He said, *Kobi, I need a place to sit.* He said somebody on the thirty-first floor didn't want him on the cameras. I took him up the hoist, I'm sorry, I took him up the *hoist,* Imi, I've known about it since I was eleven, Dad showed me, I used it for a wager in school once. I put him in the gardener's shed on sixty-two with a camp bed and a flask. Ruth knew. I told Ruth. She said, *Keep him up there until I've got my head round it.* She said it was best he looked like he'd gone home."

"So the lobby footage —"

"Is Piet leaving through the front door at eleven past six, and then walking round the back and coming in the east gate. The cameras there have been broken for two years." He lifted his head, and his eyes were wet. "I took him dinner on Monday night. I took him a flask. He was alive at half past eleven, I swear on Mum. He was reading a paperback. He said thank you. I went home. On Tuesday morning at six I went up with his tea and the shed was empty. His bed was made. I thought he'd — I thought Ruth had moved him. I thought it was fine. And then you rang from the lift."

"And you said it was Piet."

"Because it *was* Piet." His voice cracked. "Even with the beard off. I knew him by his hands. He had a little finger he'd broken, it set crooked. Imi, I looked at him and I knew, and I thought, the Director's going to say it's him, so I'll say it's him, and none of it will come back on you. You'd just be a woman who made a mistake."

"You wanted me to have made a mistake."

"I wanted you out of it."

She said nothing. A bicycle bell rang on the quay. After a time she asked, in a smaller voice, "Why did he order so much food, Kobi?"

"He was hungry."

"A double portion."

"Piet's big."

"Four bottles of water."

Kobi's mouth closed. It happened precisely, with a small click of the jaw, and the face behind it took on that smooth, polite emptiness she remembered from the dock when he was fifteen. "That's all I know."

"It isn't."

"It's all I'm going to say."

The door of the customs house opened behind them. Neither turned. Heavy, careful footsteps came down the steps, and a tall figure in a grey raincoat stopped beside the stone balustrade, holding a cold slice of pizza in a napkin he had clearly forgotten.

"Mr. Quaye," said Idris. "I'm Idris Nakagawa. I believe you have something for me."

Kobi looked up. For one moment Imani saw him weigh it: the steps, the quay, the hearse that had gone, the envelope in her lap with its crest. She watched him look for the joke.

"From the Director," he said. "With her compliments. It's the consent form for the, um." He cleared his throat. "She said a familiar face would make things easier."

Imani held the envelope out to Idris without a word. He took it. He read the covering letter. He read the form from top to bottom, as he apparently read everything, and she saw the exact second he reached the corner with the booking reference, because he stopped breathing for a moment and a small muscle moved in his cheek.

"This is dated Tuesday," he said.

"Yes," said Imani.

"Who gave it to you, Mr. Quaye?"

"The Director," said Kobi. And then, a heartbeat after, understanding, he closed his eyes. "Oh, God. I've just said that, haven't I."

"You've said it twice," said Idris gently. "I'm sorry. I'm obliged to write it down."