Tobin Aldous-Fairweather stood exactly where Dilly had told him to stand, which was the thing she disliked most about him.

He stood against the curved stone wall of the vault, between box 14 and box 15, with his hands clasped in front of him and his tablet held flat to his chest like a hymn book. He had been there since eleven fifteen. He had said good evening to Margit, who had not replied, and to Sel, who had replied at some length, and he had asked, politely, whether he might use the tablet to take notes, and Dilly had said that he might take notes on paper, and he had said that of course he understood, and had produced from his blazer a small leather notebook and a mechanical pencil, and written something down.

It was now eleven fifty-one. The lamp on the desk was lit. The ledger lay open at the day's page, returned to them at nine that evening by the same auditors, who had given the book back with a slightly ill-tempered courtesy and a form for Margit to sign. The old volume was still in its evidence sleeve somewhere on Pellow Road. The stamp pad sat in its drawer. The pen lay on the blotter, and nobody, since the afternoon, had been out of the room for longer than it takes to cross it.

"Would the observer," said Margit, "like to say what it is he is observing?"

"Only that the Close takes place, ma'am." Tobin's voice was light and clear, a choirboy's. "That it takes place on time, by the Keeper's hand, in the Clerk's presence. And that it is, ah, undisturbed."

"Undisturbed."

"Yes."

"By whom?"

He smiled at her. It was a courteous smile and a pointless one, and it did not change the shape of his mouth, which was pale and thin and quite ordinary. "By anyone, ma'am."

Dilly watched his hands. They were clean, with short nails and a pink callus on the inside of the right forefinger where the pencil sat. A man who wrote a lot. They were the hands of a person who did what he was told, carefully, and then slept. They were not the hands that had swung a length of something at Pascual's arm, but that proved nothing; the man in the yellow jacket had worn gloves.

At eleven fifty-five Margit read the summary. Deposits, loans, accounts. Dilly listened to her own pulse and counted the room: the desk, the lamp, the door, the stairs, the man by the wall, the man at the desk, the woman in grey with her watch turned to the light. Sel's hand went out for the pen.

"Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke," said Tobin.

Sel stopped with his fingers an inch from the holder.

"I'm so sorry. It's only that I've been asked to note the instrument." Tobin stepped forward half a pace, no more. "The Foundation's counsel is concerned about, about the provenance of the nib. In light of Wednesday. It would just be a moment, if I might look."

"It is eleven fifty-seven," said Margit.

"A moment, ma'am."

"It is eleven fifty-seven and fifteen seconds. There is a page that wants signing."

"I should be remiss."

"You are remiss," said Margit, "in everything but your manners. Step back."

Tobin looked at Dilly. He looked at her as a man looks at the one person in a room who can end an argument, and she let him look for exactly three seconds, her hand loose at her side, her thumb tapping once, twice, against the cuff where the tactical pen lived.

"Mr. Fairweather," she said. "Aldous. Fairweather. Whichever you prefer. The next person to put a hand near that desk before eleven fifty-nine will be removed from this building by me, personally, in front of the camera, and the footage will go to the board's insurers as a breach of the Close. Do you want to be in the footage?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then you've observed enough."

He stepped back to the wall. Sel dipped the pen, wrote his name, and Margit stamped it at eleven fifty-eight and four seconds, which was the fastest Close of the month and the most hostile. Sel did not put his head on the desk. He sat quite still with the pen in his hand, and the breath went out of him so slowly that she took a step before she'd decided to.

"I am entirely well," he said. "I simply wish the observer to take a good look."

"I've taken it," said Tobin faintly, and wrote something in the notebook, and Dilly, who was watching his pencil, saw that it was the time.

* * *

They did not speak in the car. Ilan drove, at a speed that suggested he was being paid by the corner, and Sel sat with his head against the window and her father's ring on the hand in his lap, turning it with his thumb.

The house on Pellow Hill was lit in every window, as it always was. Bettina had left a tray in the kitchen, and a note in a hand like a ruled line: SOUP. EAT IT. B. They stood on either side of the island and ate it, in silence, standing up, two people in the middle of a long day who did not know what the evening was for.

"I have had the east guest room made up for you," Sel said at last, "as per the contract. You may of course, I mean, there is no, you will want your own door. Bettina has put a lock on it that opens from the inside only. I thought that would."

"It's fine."

"And a second phone charger. And the chair you liked in the library has been moved."

"Sel."

"Yes."

"It's fine."

He nodded, and put down his spoon, and said good night with a bow that would have been absurd in anyone else, and went away up the stairs. She heard his tread on the landing, and a door, and then nothing.

She washed the bowls. She dried them. She went round the ground floor and checked the windows, one by one, because it was a thing to do with her hands; she found the scratched latch in the study, which she'd had a locksmith replace on Monday, and stood for a minute with her thumb against the new brass. Then she went up and lay on the east guest bed in her wedding dress for forty minutes, looking at the ceiling, counting exits, until she realised that she was crying, in a mild reasonable way, as one might sneeze.

It was a quarter to one. She got up. She took off the wedding dress and put on the grey tracksuit trousers and the T-shirt that said KARIMOV WASH & FOLD, and went down the corridor to check on her husband.

The study door was ajar. A light burned inside, the green-shaded lamp, and under it, with his back to her and his sleeves rolled, Sel was standing at the open safe in the wall, the small black steel one behind Odessa's portrait. He had a small brass key in his hand. He was looking at it.

She stood in the doorway for as long as it took him to notice her. It took a long time. He was not the sort of man who stopped being aware of a room, and the length of the pause told her more than she wanted to know.

"I would have told you tomorrow," Sel said, without turning round.

"Told me what?"

"That I lied to you. In the kitchen, the first week, when we opened the envelope. When you asked me whether the second key to the stamp drawer was gone, and I said it was." His voice was careful. The sentences were getting short. "It was not gone. It was in my pocket. It has been in my pocket since the night she died."

She did not speak. She had learned, in her earlier life, that the best way to hear a thing was to let it finish.

"She gave it to me herself." He turned, then. His face was very pale in the green light. "On the Tuesday, at about three in the afternoon. She had been asleep for most of the day. She woke and asked Bettina to go and fetch tea, and she said, Anselm, the small brass one on my ring. Take it. Tell no one. Not Margit, not Eun-ji, not the girl you will bring home. She said, if you tell her too soon, she will use it before she understands it, and if you tell her too late you will have robbed her of a choice." He took a breath. "I opened the envelope in the safe that night to make it look as if the key had been stolen. Because she told me that someone would try. I thought, if the envelope is cut and the key apparently gone, then whoever is looking will stop looking in my pocket."

"You let me think it was stolen."

"Yes."

"You let me stand in your kitchen and tell you someone from inside this house had cut a wax seal, and you said nothing."

"I said it was dreadful."

"You said it was dreadful." She heard her own voice, flat and quiet and very reasonable. "It was in your pocket."

"I had promised her."

"You had promised a dead woman who has been manipulating you from beyond the grave since the week she died." Dilly walked into the room. Her bare feet made no sound. "Term four, Sel. The truth about your body. I wrote it in under protest."

"This is not my body."

"No. It's worse. It's my life. I've been fighting a man I can't see for two weeks, and every time I've tried to work out why he knows what we do before we do it, you've been standing there with a brass key in your trousers."

He did not argue. He held it out on the flat of his hand, like a boy surrendering a stolen penknife. A small brass key, worn smooth. She took it. It was warm.

"The envelope," she said. "Did she say what the second key opens?"

"The stamp drawer, I believed. She said, it opens the thing I am sorry for." He swallowed. "I did not go to the vault to try it. I wished to wait until you could be there. I wished, God forgive me, to have a day of being married before I was a liar."

"Too late."

"Yes."

"You've been a liar since the first day." She turned the little key over under the lamp. "It's all right. I knew. I was waiting to find out how long it would take you to tell me."

His mouth moved. It might have been a laugh, or the opposite. "And now?"

"Now it's one in the morning and I'm angry, and I'm going to go to bed, and in the morning I'm going to be less angry." She closed her hand. "I'm keeping this."

"Of course. You have the right. You are the head of security."

"I'm your wife," said Dilly, "for a year," and heard how the words sat in the room, and did not take them back.

She went to the door. At the threshold she looked at the key in her palm, because she'd been taught to check any object twice, and she saw something she'd missed in the glow of the green lamp. On the flat of the bow, scratched so fine that it could only be seen at an angle, was a tiny number.

41.

She stood very still. She thought of a long low building past the gravel works, a chain-link gate, a man in a blue coat, and a corridor with a drawing of a heart.

"Sel," she said. "Does the vault drawer have a number?"

"I believe it is the thirty-third drawer."

"Then," said Dilly, "this isn't a stamp-pad key at all."