St. Brendan's Hospital smelled of floor wax and burnt toast, and at ten past six on Thursday morning the only people awake on the orthopaedic ward were a night nurse, a man mopping, and Pascual, who was sitting up in bed with his right arm in a cast to the elbow, doing a crossword in biro with his left hand.

"Seven across," he said, without looking up. "Six letters. 'Keeps watch, mostly in vain.'"

"Sentry," said Dilly.

"That's what I put. It doesn't fit." He turned the paper to her. His handwriting with the wrong hand was a child's, enormous and wandering, and he had written SENTRY across five squares and then stopped, defeated, in the margin. "Nine years I've kept that car clean. Never a scratch. And a man in a cap takes my wrist like a stick of celery."

"It's not your fault."

"I know whose fault it is. I'm saying I'd like it to be somebody's I can shout at." He folded the paper in half, then in half again, with one hand and his teeth. "How is he?"

"Under ninety by one. Asleep by two. Bettina made him eat an egg." She sat down on the plastic chair, which was designed by someone who hated visitors. "He wants to come and see you. I told him if he did I would personally hand him to Margit."

"Good. Margit frightens him more than the bank does." The ghost of a smile, then gone. "The lad Teodoro, he's all right?"

"He's fine. He was told the lift was down. So was everybody."

"Aye." Pascual looked at the window, where the day was coming up the colour of weak tea. "Ms. Karimova. I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear me out before you decide what it's worth."

She put her phone face down on her knee.

"I've driven for that house twenty years," he said. "Nine of them for Mr. Sel. Before that I rode second to the old lady's own driver, Mr. Haskell, God rest him, until he retired and put me on. And I never repeat what goes on in the back seat. That's not a rule of the bank. It's a rule of me."

"I know."

"So understand that I'm about to break it, and I'm only doing it because they broke my wrist to stop a man signing his name." He took a breath. "Once a month, the first Sunday, the old lady had me drive her out to Kiln Road. Past the gravel works. There's a long low building there with no sign and a chain-link gate, and a man in a blue coat who'd let her through without asking her name. She'd be in there ninety minutes, and she'd come out looking, I don't know. Cross. Cross the way she was when she'd been proved right about something and didn't enjoy it."

"What's in the building?"

"I never asked. Sixty years in Corliss Ferry, you learn what not to ask." He rubbed the cast with his good hand. "But I carried her bag in once, in February, when her hip was bad. There was a corridor. White, clean, a lot of doors with little windows. And a smell, like a dentist's. And on the wall by the lift there was a sign with a heart on it. Not a Valentine. A proper one, a drawing, the kind they put in biology books."

Dilly said nothing. She was thinking of a blue-nailed hand on a laundromat counter, and a man who had said, in a voice like paper, that no one in his family had lived past forty-five.

"She told me," Pascual said, "the last time, three weeks before she died, that if anything happened to her I was to drive Mr. Sel to that gate and nowhere else, and not ask him first. I thought she was being dramatic. She often was." He looked at Dilly. "I didn't tell him. I thought, he's got enough. And now I'm thinking, perhaps that was my own cowardice and not kindness."

"It might be both."

"That's very fair of you."

"It's the only kind of fair I've got." She stood up. The chair scraped like a complaint. "Thank you, Pascual. Do you have the address?"

"Kiln Road. Past the gravel works, on the left. The gate has a number on it. Forty-one." He lay back against the pillows, suddenly very tired. "Don't go alone."

"I never do," said Dilly, which was a lie she was learning to tell better.

* * *

She found Hester Nwosu-Kallio in the car park.

It was the staff car park under the Fairhold Building, a low concrete cave lit green by tube lights, and Hester was standing beside a small silver hatchback with her back to the pillar, holding a cardboard box. There was a plant in the box, and a framed photograph, and a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST COO, and a pencil, a single pencil, lying across the top like a flag.

"They've taken my badge," Hester said, before Dilly had got within ten feet. Her voice was quite level. Her glasses were on the chain and her cardigan was the plum one, buttoned wrong. "Greta rang me at five. Suspended, pending an inquiry into the Merchant Street incident. She was very gracious about it. She said she was thinking of my health."

"The sign-off wasn't yours."

"I know it wasn't mine."

"Then say so."

"To whom?" The corner of Hester's mouth moved. "The board has eleven members, Dilnoza, and I have been the Chief Operating Officer for fourteen years and I don't think one of them could tell you where I park. I do not have a mobile device any more. I do not have a laptop." She shifted the box on her hip. "I have a pencil."

Dilly took the box from her. It was lighter than it looked. "Walk with me."

"Where?"

"To my car. It has a heater, and nobody listens to it."

They sat in the front of the grey hatchback that Junie called the Taxi of Shame, with the engine running and the box on Hester's lap. Dilly had a thermos of her mother's tea, and she gave Hester the lid, and the older woman held it in both hands and did not drink.

"The work orders were raised from the facilities portal," Hester said, at last. "The portal needs two things. A badge number, and a token that refreshes every thirty days on whichever device you last signed in with. My token refreshed on the twenty-ninth of last month. On the tablet. FDRT-TAB-07." She looked at the heater vents. "I was so ashamed of that tablet, and I never once thought to ask what it could do. It was a gift. A tablet that does everything I do, only in someone else's hands."

"Tobin Aldous-Fairweather."

"Mr. Aldous-Fairweather has been on annual leave since Tuesday. He has gone to a wedding in Lisbon. Greta was good enough to tell me that herself." Hester drank the tea, finally, in a series of small, bitter sips. "I should have kept my own counsel on Wednesday, and I did not. I told you, and I told your husband-to-be, and the next day my name is on a work order that kills the elevator and strands him on the stairs. It's a very efficient way to cost me my job, isn't it? It means I can't say anything, because I'm the person who did it."

"It also means they know you talked to us."

"Yes." Hester looked at her. "I've been wondering how."

Dilly had been wondering the same thing since the stairwell. She did not say that the only people who had known about the garage log were Hester, Dilly, Sel, Margit, Junie, and now Eun-ji. She did not say that Junie's phone was in a box at the door on Pellow Hill, with the others, and that the box had been locked, and that Dilly herself had checked it. She said, "Who gave you the ninth key?"

"Odessa. In 1999. I told you."

"I know. I'm asking you why. Why you, not Bettina, not Eun-ji. Why would a woman who locked everything give a key to her COO?"

Hester put the lid on her knee. For a moment her face went quite blank, and then something came up under the blankness, old and private and unguarded, and Dilly looked away so as not to see it.

"Because in 1999 the sideboard drawer held the draft of a letter," Hester said. "Odessa asked me to write it, and I wrote it, and I put my initials on the bottom, and she put it away. She said it was the sort of letter you wrote when you could not yet stand to send it. She told me one day she would ask for it back." She shook her head. "She never asked. I think the letter is still in that drawer."

"What kind of letter?"

"I would sooner not say. It is not mine to say. It is, I think, Mr. Sel's." A breath. "But I will tell you what I put in it, because you've been kind about the cake. I wrote that a clause that kills the people it chooses is not a clause, it is a curse, and that the only honest thing to do with a curse is break it. I wrote that in 1999. I was thirty-one."

"Thirty-one," said Dilly.

"Yes, well. I did the arithmetic. I was always good with numbers." Hester almost laughed. "I was frightened for the whole family even then, and I didn't have the courage to say it aloud. I wrote it down instead, and gave it to a woman who kept it in a drawer for twenty-seven years."

Dilly turned off the engine. The car ticked in the green quiet. Somewhere above them a tyre squealed on the ramp and a door thudded, and it was just a car park again, and the town was waking up above it, forty thousand people opening Tally to see whether they were still rich.

"Hester. Have you got somewhere to be?"

"I have a sister in Dunmore. I could go there."

"Don't." Dilly took out the work phone, the clean one, and wrote an address on the back of a receipt with the tactical pen from her sleeve. "That's a flat over a laundromat. It has a spare room with a futon, a mother who doesn't ask questions in English, and a streamer in the room next door who is very good at pretending he's asleep. You can bring the plant."

Hester looked at the receipt as if it were a snake. Then at the plant, which was an African violet, rather the worse for travel.

"It would be a debt," she said.

"Everything costs," said Dilly. "Only the price changes. My mother says."

Hester Nwosu-Kallio put the violet on the dashboard, and wept, very briefly, without any sound, like a person doing arithmetic.

At twenty to nine the work phone buzzed on the seat. It was Junie, in capitals, which she never used.

THE BOARD JUST VOTED. EMERGENCY SESSION. 9 TO 2. THEY'VE GOT A SUBPOENA-ISH THING TO GET INTO THE VAULT BOOKS FOR AN AUDIT. TODAY. MAURICE SAYS ITS FOR HESTER'S PROTECTION.

And, a second later:

DILLY HE'S COMING TO THE WEDDING.

She read it twice. Then she put the phone in her pocket, started the engine, and drove Hester Nwosu-Kallio and an African violet through the middle of Corliss Ferry in the first full light of the morning, past the shuttered banks and the bakery vent breathing out on Merchant Street, where a white maintenance van that had not been there at dawn was now, once again, parked with its hazards on, perfectly legally, exactly where it had been.