The van was parked across Merchant Street like a full stop.

Dilly saw it from the back seat at 11:22, a white box on four wheels with its hazards blinking and a pair of orange cones set out in a neat, convincing V. Fairhold green on the door. Under the green, in friendly letters: BUILDING SERVICES. Behind it, nothing. The street was empty in both directions, and the street was never empty, not at this hour, not with the late bakery vent breathing on the corner and the night-shift tellers going in for their trays.

"Pascual," she said.

"I see it." He had already slowed. Nine years of driving the same family will teach a man to brake before he's afraid. "There's the alley behind the bakery. I can go around by Dock Row."

"How long?"

"Eleven minutes, if the lights are kind."

The clock on the dash said 11:23. Beside her Sel sat very upright in his funeral-dark coat with the leather folder of Odessa's pens on his knee, and said nothing, which was how she knew he had done the sum too. Eleven minutes was eleven minutes. Then the lobby, then the lift, then the stairs down to the round room, where Margit would be standing with the stamp pad open and her watch face turned to the lamp.

"No," Dilly said. "Dock Row runs past the ferry landing. Anyone who wanted us on Dock Row would have a second van there."

"Dilly," said Sel, mildly. "You are doing the thing with your thumb."

She was. She was counting it against her knuckles, the exits, the way her father had taught her to count steps on a survey. She stopped. "Pascual, hold here. Doors locked. Nobody gets in this car but us."

"I'll move the van."

"You will not."

"Ms. Karimova." He turned his head, and for the first time in two weeks she saw the whole of his face: sixty, heavy-lidded, a moustache the colour of ash. "The cones say road works. The cab's empty. Somebody left the keys, or they didn't, and if they didn't I'll have it in neutral and rolling in a minute and a half. You can't carry a man down Merchant Street and also check my work."

He was out before she could answer. That was the trouble with good people. They had already decided.

She got out on the kerb side and took in the street in one long sweep. Left: the bakery vent, the dark awning of the shoe repair, a parking meter blinking its green eye. Right: the bank, three hundred feet up, lit on every floor like a ship. Somewhere above them a window slid and a woman's voice said something sharp and was cut off. Pascual walked up to the van. He put his hand on the driver's door. It opened.

It was the only thing that opened. As he leaned in, a figure stepped out of the doorway of the shoe repair, a yellow jacket, a cap, gloves, and brought something down across the older man's arm with the economy of somebody doing a job. The sound was small. A branch, a pencil. Pascual made no sound at all. He sat down against the van's wheel, with his right hand held in his left, looking at it with polite surprise.

Dilly was already running.

She had forty feet, and the man had twenty to the corner. He looked back once, and she saw nothing of his face but the bill of a cap and a pale, ordinary mouth. He did not run like a man afraid of her. He ran like a man with a schedule, and that was the thing that stopped her at the cones, with her hand on the cold white flank of the van and her breath coming in sharp bites. Because the schedule was not about him. It was about the clock on the dash of a car forty feet behind her.

11:25.

She went back. Pascual's face had gone the colour of dishwater. "Wrist," he said, through his teeth. "I'm all right. Go, go. Take him."

"Call it in."

"Go."

Sel had got out of the car. He stood in the road with the pen case under one arm and looked at the driver of his grandmother's car sitting on the tarmac, and for one moment she watched the shock land and go through him, the old courtesy trying to find a place to put it down.

"Pascual," he said.

"Sir, with respect." Pascual closed his eyes. "Get to the desk."

Dilly caught Sel's elbow. "We walk fast. We do not run until I say."

"I can run."

"You can walk fast." She had the work phone out, thumbing a single message to Junie, then a call to Eun-ji's night line, flat and quick: Pascual down, Merchant Street, ambulance, police, do not touch the van. She put the phone away and took the pen case from him, because his hands were shaking in the way that she had learned not to mention. "What is your pulse?"

"Elevated."

"Number."

He lifted his wrist and looked at the plain black band she had made him wear on Monday. It was the first time he had looked at it without making a joke. "A hundred and twenty-eight."

"And?"

"And I find it unkind of the thing to say it so loudly." The joke came out of him small and tired. "Dilly, if I am a few seconds late."

"Don't."

"Then the stake."

"I said don't. Walk."

They walked. Three hundred feet is nothing; it is a minute and a half at a good pace, and Sel's pace at a quarter to midnight with his grandmother three days buried was not a good one. By the shoe repair she had her arm under his. By the bakery she could feel his weight shift onto her, the slow tip of a man leaning and pretending to lean. The bank door was ahead of them, the revolving glass turning with nobody in it. Across the lobby the night guard, a young man called Teodoro with a pencil moustache and the beginnings of a smile, rose to greet them.

"Lift," Dilly said, before he could say good evening.

"Ma'am, the lift's down. Maintenance. It went at eleven-twenty."

Of course it had.

"The stairs," said Sel. "There is a stair behind the tellers' hall. Two floors down. They are very clean. Odessa had them scrubbed on Sundays." He let go of her arm. "I will go ahead."

"You will not go ahead."

"Dilnoza." The sentences were getting short. She had learned what that meant. "I know the way."

11:49.

She went down behind him, not touching him, close enough to catch. The stairwell was pale stone and cold light, the handrail worn dark by sixty years of palms. Eleven steps, a landing, eleven steps. She counted because it was something to do. At the first landing he stopped with his hand flat to the wall and his head bent, and she heard the breath go in, and in, and in again without coming out the way a breath ought to.

"Sit."

"If I sit I will not stand."

"Then lean." She put herself against his side and he leaned, a hundred and eighty pounds of well-bred stubbornness, and she took the weight. "Look at me. What's the last thing Gulnora said to you on Sunday?"

"That my fold was crooked."

"And?"

"That I did not give up." His eyes came up to hers. They were very dark and very frightened and, underneath that, absolutely clear. "I would like to not give up."

"Then don't. Eleven steps. Go."

He went.

Margit stood at the vault door in her grey wool, with one hand on the brass handle, and her watch in the other. She did not say anything as they came off the stair. She looked at Sel's face, then at Dilly's, and the only sign she gave of anything was that her thumb moved on the watch crystal, once, as though to wipe off a speck.

"Eleven fifty-seven," she said. "Forty seconds. The desk is lit. The pen is on the blotter."

"I brought the pens," said Dilly.

"The pen is on the blotter," Margit repeated, in exactly the same voice, and stepped aside.

The round room. The brass lamp, the green leather, the black cloth ledger lying open. Sel crossed the floor in a straight line with his shoulders square, and he sat in his father's chair and his grandmother's chair, and Dilly stood at the edge of the lamplight and watched his hand go out. The pen on the blotter was a plain steel nib in a black holder. She had a bad thought and spoke it before she could stop herself.

"Margit. Who put that pen out?"

"I did. At six."

"Has it been out of your sight?"

"No." A pause so small only a woman who counted exits would have caught it. "Not since I locked the door at eight. I have the key."

"Dip it."

"It is dry," said Margit, "until the Keeper dips it. That is the instruction."

Sel dipped. The nib touched the inkwell, and came up black and heavy, and he looked at the clock on the wall and Margit read the summary in her dry voice, the total of deposits, the total of loans, the number of accounts, all of it very clear and very far away, and then Sel wrote A. Thornquist-Adeleke with a hand that did not shake at all.

"Eleven fifty-eight and twenty-six seconds," said Margit, and countersigned, and brought down the stamp.

The blue-black print sat on the page like a held breath. Sel put his head on the desk. Dilly counted to ten out loud, because she had promised herself she would, and at seven his shoulders began to go, and she was at his side before the lamp had finished swaying.

He was awake. He was only grey, and very cold, and had both hands pressed flat to his sternum like a man holding a door shut. Margit was already kneeling with the white tablets in her palm, and a paper cup, and the sort of look an old soldier wears when she has seen this and has no more patience for it.

"Under the tongue," Margit said. "Do not argue."

"I would not dream."

"A hundred and ninety-one," Dilly said. She was holding his wrist, not looking at the band; she could feel it. "You told me you were fine this week."

"I was. Nearly all of it."

"That's not what I asked for."

"I know." He closed his eyes. "Pascual?"

"Broken wrist. Ambulance is with him. Eun-ji's already there." Her phone had buzzed twice against her ribs and she'd let it. "I'll go up in a minute. You stay on this floor until your number is under ninety."

"Dilly. The van."

"I know."

"It has a fleet number. They always do."

She had seen it. She'd seen it from the pavement at 11:25 in the white paint below the green, FHM-0417, and she had filed it with the cap and the gloves and the pale mouth. Now she took out the phone and called the night guard's desk, and Teodoro answered on the first ring, apologetic, young, eager to be helpful.

"Teodoro. The lift was out for maintenance. Who raised the work order?"

"Let me look, ma'am." Keys. A long breath. "Two orders. One for the lift, one for a street-side bay cleaning, both for tonight. Same requester, both approved at four this afternoon. Building Services, vehicle four-one-seven, and the approver is." He stopped.

"Teodoro."

"It says Nwosu-Kallio, ma'am. It's her sign-off. From the sixth floor."

On the floor, in the lamplight, Sel opened his eyes. Margit's hand did not move on his wrist, but Dilly saw her look up, once, and then away.

The stamp was still wet on the page. Dilly looked at it for a long moment, the clean blue-black print, and thought of a small woman in a plum cardigan and a lemon cake in a drawer, who had kissed no one and been kissed on the head.

"She was afraid," Dilly said quietly. "I'd have sworn it."

"Perhaps she was," said Sel. "Perhaps that is how it feels to be used."

He didn't say what he thought, and neither did she. But the elevator in the Fairhold Building did not go down by itself, and somebody on the sixth floor had told it to.