She did not sign.

She wrote back instead, in forty words exactly, which was the length of a Schedule Four statement of cause and the only length at which she felt entirely safe. *Thank you for your consideration. I decline to countersign. Folasade Bakare's records are requested by her next of kin under the ordinary access procedure and will be available to any party entitled to them in the ordinary way. I am happy to meet. I do not drink coffee before noon.* It was ninety seconds' work. Her hand shook only on the last full stop.

Lucinda's answer arrived in four minutes, which was the Tenant's speed, and Ottilie did not like the resemblance. *Totally get it!! No stress at all. Here if you need anything x.* She looked at the x for some time. It had been made by someone who understood precisely how little a letter could weigh.

She left the Hall at six, in the sort of rain that did not so much fall as lean, and took the ferry not to the Lees but to Lees Quay, which was two stops short and meant she would have to walk the planking in the dark. She told herself she was going to return a casserole dish. She did not own a casserole dish. Ansel, who knew this, was kind enough to say nothing.

---

The Santa Inês sat low at her mooring, blue and white, with a string of paper lanterns hung along the rail from some previous birthday and gone soft in the damp. There was a light in the cabin and the smell of frying. Through the hatch she could hear a child's voice working at a problem in the tone of a magistrate.

"But if the ferry is three minutes late and the *other* ferry is two minutes early, then isn't it the same ferry?"

"That's a philosophy question, *querida*."

"It's *maths*."

"It's maths with a hat on." Quim's head came out of the hatch, eyebrow aloft. He saw her and for a quarter of a second his whole face did something unguarded and then rearranged itself into hospitality. "Ottilie! You have come at the exact moment when the rice is a disaster. Inês, we have a visitor. Put the shoes on the right feet."

"They *are* on the right feet."

"They are on the feet you have. Come, come, down, mind the third rung, it has opinions."

It was warm inside, and small, and tidier than she had pictured it, as if the boat had been tidied by someone taking an exam. Inês sat at the fold-down table in her school jumper, doing her homework on the back of a Dredge manifest, with the two shoes (Gerald, Gerald) on the bench beside her, drying. She had not worn the Tenant's gift to school, only to the door and back. She considered Ottilie with grave suspicion.

"Did you read the thing about the room?"

"Inês," said Quim.

"Papa said you read a thing and it was about a man who lives in a stairwell."

"It's nearly right," Ottilie said.

"Does he have a cat?"

"He has a brass door-stop shaped like a cat."

Inês absorbed this with enormous seriousness. "That is a cat that stays," she said, and went back to her sums.

They ate at the table, the three of them, an omelette and bad rice, and Quim told a long story about his grandmother and a bucket of eels that she was unable afterwards to follow in detail but could have recited the shape of, the way one recalls music: the rise, the pause, the eel. Inês corrected the dates. At eight he sent her to wash and brush and she went, trailing grievances, to the forward cabin, and the curtain fell, and in the little pause he reached across, took her cold casserole-less hands off the table, looked at them as if they might need a warrant, and let go.

"You're not here for a dish."

"No."

"What happened?"

She told him about Harbourlight, in order, in numbered paragraphs. She had not meant to. It came out the way a form fills in. The call panel; the drawer; *Confirmation of Licence by Personal Representative*; the girl with the earrings; Dapo; *they had the lanyards*. She did not, at any point, say *I was frightened*. At the end she took the folded paper from her inside pocket and put it on the table between the oil and the salt, and he did not pick it up. He looked at it for a long time with his eyebrow resting.

"Tilly," he said, carefully.

"Who told you that?"

"You said it in your sleep." It was a lie; he went red; he did not seem to know where the thing had come from. "Sorry. No. It was on the form. Your mother's name for you, in the witness's—" He stopped. "I'm sorry. Ottilie."

"I don't mind it," she said, to her surprise, "from you."

He sat back. The hurricane lamp shifted on its hook. "Your mother saw him first," he said. "Before I did. That's a thing I keep coming back to. I was down there with my lamps and my helmet cam like a man delivering a pizza, and your mother was *already* his neighbour."

"I think that's why he asked."

"I think that's why he asked her," Quim agreed, "and not you. Because you'd have fixed it." It was said without edge. "He wanted someone to tell him he could stay. He didn't want anybody to fix him."

There was a long, quiet noise. Overhead the rain walked up and down the deck.

"Quim. I have to ask you something."

"Yes."

"Has anyone from Tidemark contacted you?"

She watched him do it. She had always been unable to read faces, but she could read this, the small catch in the shoulders, the hand reaching to turn the salt a quarter-turn. It was almost endearing, the way he stalled, and it was the most frightening thing she had seen all week.

"Ah," he said. "Yes. I was going to tell you."

"When?"

"Tonight. Tomorrow. On a day with a better angle." He tried a smile; it failed; he put it down. "She called on Friday. Lucinda. Not Lucinda, Kemi, the one with the fleece, and then Lucinda herself on Saturday, very nice, called me *Quim*, asked about Inês. Asked about the boat. She knew my rating. She knew what the Santa Inês owes."

"What did she want?"

"A dive." The words came out flat, sincere, in the short sentences he reserved for when it counted. "Thursday. A survey team wants to see the room, and the gate, and the landing, and they need a certified tender who knows the stairwell. It's nine hours. It's twelve hundred credits." He met her eyes. "Twelve hundred, Ottilie. That's the March fees. That's the fees, and the arrears on the engine, and I have not had a number that size since the divorce."

"Did you say yes?"

"I said I would think. And then I thought. And then—" He spread his hands. "She said if I didn't, they would find someone who didn't know about the cat."

"That is a threat."

"It is a very nicely made one." He rubbed his face. "Listen. If I go, I'm in the room. I'm the one who says where the stool goes and who doesn't touch the nameplate. Somebody else goes down there with a camera and a crowbar and a *mandate*—"

"Quim."

"—and I thought, I can be a wall. I can be the person in the stairwell. That's all I wanted to be, in the whole business, someone who was there—"

"You said yes."

He stopped.

"Yes," he said, very low. "I said yes this afternoon. I was going to tell you tonight. I came up the ladder to tell you tonight and you were standing there with a dish you don't own."

She sat with her hands in her lap and tried to be fair. It was her great skill and for once it was no use at all. She could see the whole situation exactly: the arrears, the schooling, the man who over-promised and then hid, who had been so honest with her about the hiding, in the abstract, in the tea-kitchen of her own mind. She could see he had meant it. She could see the ledger of it, both columns. And under the columns she felt a plain and ugly little thing, smaller than anger, like a stone in a shoe, that said: *he was going to tell you tomorrow.*

"Does she know," said Ottilie, "about the confirmation? My mother?"

"No. I swear. Not from me."

"She'll have it by Thursday. If she doesn't already." Ottilie stood. The cabin was low and she had to stoop, which made her look as though she were considering leaving by the floor. "You'll be wearing a camera. They'll go through your footage. Whatever you say to the Tenant, in the room, they'll hear."

"I know."

"Do you? Because it will talk to you. It likes you. You've given it Inês's shoe size, and a dead man's name for the stool, and your grandmother and the tax inspector." She pushed the paper back into her pocket. "You'll be under oath, Quim. Not in a court. In a room. Everything you say near a gate is a term."

"Ottilie."

"I'm not angry." She wasn't. It was worse. "I'm trying to be accurate."

The curtain to the forward cabin stirred. Inês's face appeared at the gap, toothpaste at the corner of her mouth, scrupulously neutral.

"Papa," she said. "Is she leaving because of the dive?"

Neither of them answered. The child looked from one to the other, and then, in a voice of such grave practicality that it sounded like her mother's, she said: "You should say sorry in writing. That's what works with her."

Then the curtain fell, and from behind it, faint and distinct, came the sound of one small shoe being placed on the floor. Then the other.