The man in the cap took it off as he came, which was the first honest thing he had done in three days.

Dilly knew him by the walk before the face. Six foot two, unhurried, shoulders loose, the roll of a man who had spent years being the calmest thing in any room. He had a broken nose that had set a little to the left, and a warm wide face, and the face was tired. Dari Fenwick-Mbeki stopped ten feet from the gate with his hands out from his sides, palms forward, and she found that her own right hand had already gone to her sleeve.

"Don't," he said. "Please. I'm not wearing anything. Check me if you like."

"I will."

"I'd expect nothing less." He turned slowly in the road, arms out, a man at an airport. Windbreaker, jeans, boots, no bulge at the small of the back. A phone in a back pocket, which he took out and, with great ceremony, laid on the gravel at his feet and stepped away from. "That's off. The battery's out. I've never taken a battery out of anything in my life, but I watched a video."

"Why are you here?"

"Because Cyrus told me to follow you and tell him if you went through that gate." He looked at the sedan on the verge, the cracked tail-light, the roof rack. "It's a rental. Ardent's logistics people do them in bulk. It's a rubbish car."

Behind her, Dilly heard the gravel crunch as Sel came round the bonnet of the Fairhold car. She said, without turning, "Stay there."

"I am staying."

"Stay further."

"Ah." A short pause. "I am staying further."

Dari had not looked at Sel. He kept his eyes on Dilly. They were brown and steady and had a tremor at the corners, the kind a man gets when he has not slept properly for a long time. "I'd like to talk to you for five minutes," he said. "Out here, where everyone can see. Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke can stand where he likes. I know what it looks like. I know what I look like. Two weeks ago I would have said I couldn't believe I was doing it, but the truth is I've been doing it in my head for a fortnight."

"Go on."

"The call." He breathed in. "The one you said I made. The, the voice in the earpiece."

"It wasn't you."

"I know it wasn't me. I've heard it now. Priya Ventura sent it to me." He gave her a rueful look. "On Tuesday. No note, just the file. I was sitting in a coffee shop when I pressed play. It sounds like me. It sounds exactly like me, if I'd been hired to sound like me." His voice cracked on the last word and he waited for it. "I went home and I played it twenty times. And the thing is, Dilly, I remember saying some of those words."

She did not move.

"Not in the earpiece. Somewhere else. Not those words in that order, but the vowels, the, the way I say your name." He swallowed. "I couldn't think where. I was awake until four. And then I remembered the call."

"What call?"

"February the ninth. Two days before the launch. A Tuesday, I think. I was at the flat, doing laundry, and a woman rang from, she said it was Calloway & Pryce's wellness team. Insurance. She said every officer on the Ventura detail had to complete a voice-stress assessment as part of the policy. It took twenty minutes. She had me read a script. Numbers, names, a paragraph about a lighthouse. She said it was for a, a baseline. For fatigue." His mouth twisted. "I thought nothing of it. I did what I was told. I always do what I'm told. It's practically on my CV."

"The number?"

"Withheld. But I remember her voice. Young. Very bright. She said, 'You've been so helpful, Dario,' and she called me Dario. Nobody calls me Dario."

"Calloway & Pryce," said Dilly slowly, "never had a wellness team."

"I know." His eyes were red now. "I rang them on Wednesday. I said, I'm checking my insurance file. They said, we don't do voice assessments. They said, who told you that? And then the line went quiet in the way lines do when somebody has covered the handset. And the man who came back said it must have been a mix-up." Dari spread his hands. "A mix-up. For twenty minutes of my voice."

"Who rang you? From C and P? Name?"

"She said Marguerite." He laughed shortly, without humour. "Of course she did. I've never met a Marguerite who was telling the truth."

The wind came across the grass. The enamel number on the gatepost clicked once, a loose rivet. Dilly became aware of Sel behind her, standing quite still, and of Teague on the far side of the chain-link, not breathing. She was also aware of a tight hard feeling in her sternum that she had not felt since the stage in February, and she identified it, with a kind of dull astonishment, as the thing that lies next to forgiveness and looks like pity.

"Why tell me?" she said. "You work for him."

"I work for Ardent. I started in March." He said it carefully, like a man reading a charge. "Cyrus is a very kind employer. He gave me a car. He gave me a title. When I said I'd have to take time off because of the Ventura thing, because it was eating me, he said, 'Dari, the best revenge is a promotion.' He's the first person who said anything about it. Everyone else crossed the corridor." His jaw worked. "I was grateful. God help me, I was so grateful, I never asked why he'd needed me in particular."

"He needed you because of your voice."

"Maybe he needed me because I was easy to hold." He looked at his phone on the gravel. "I don't know, Dilly. I'm not telling you Cyrus did it. I don't have anything. I have a recording I've listened to twenty times and a woman called Marguerite. I'm telling you because I was the man on your left, and I didn't hear you, and I've spent two years thinking I let you down. And now I think somebody used me to do it." His voice dropped. "It's not an apology. It's a thing I owe you, and I'm paying it."

"That's what an apology is."

"Is it?"

"It's the only kind that costs anything."

She took a step toward the gate, and stopped. She was deciding something, and from the stillness of the three men around her, she knew they all knew it. Once, she would have refused. She'd have turned and walked, because kindness is a debt and she did not carry debts. She wanted, even now, to say thank you and go, to put the wall back up where it had stood for two years.

"Here's what you do," she said. "You go back to Cyrus. You say we drove to the gate, rang the bell, got no answer, and went home. You say you waited an hour. You say there's a gatekeeper with a clipboard who is old and rude and told us to come back with an appointment."

"You want me to lie to him."

"I want you to be what you were hired to be. A man who gives the answer he's been told to give." She held his gaze. "Except this time it's mine."

Dari looked at her for what felt like a long time. Then, slowly, he nodded, once, and bent to pick up his phone.

"There's one more thing," he said. "Marguerite. She told me to expect a package, a month after, a thank-you gift. Calloway & Pryce hospitality. It came to the Ardent building in March, after I started. An envelope of gift cards." He turned it over in his hand. "It had a return label. It was printed. I remember because it was stuck on slightly crooked. FAIRHOLD MUTUAL, it said. Pellow Hill."

The words went into her like a thin cold blade. She did not turn round. She did not need to. She could hear Sel, behind her, not saying anything.

"Pellow Hill is the house," she said.

"Yes."

"The label could be forged."

"Of course." Dari straightened his cap and put it on. "I'm only telling you what the label said."

From the far side of the gate there was a strangled sound, and Teague, white to the lips, was pointing with his clipboard down the length of Kiln Road. Dilly looked. A long way off, past the shuttered diner and the sign for hot pie, a car was coming fast and low and green, with a dark shape beside the driver and a flash of camel wool in the glass.

"That's her," said Teague. "That's Miss Greta. She said twenty minutes. It's been eighteen."

Dilly looked at the gate, and the building behind it, and the little brass key in her pocket with the number scratched on its bow. She had a clean choice, and it was a bad one. She could stand here and force the thing, with a man who had broken a wrist behind that green car's wheel, or she could leave and let the door stay shut one more night.

"Ilan," she said, not loudly. "Engine."

"Ma'am?"

"Turn it over. We're going."

"But the door," said Sel, from somewhere behind her, in a voice with no shape left in it. "Dilly, the door."

"Tomorrow at ten." She took his arm. "Teague, I'm sorry. I think you're going to have a bad afternoon."

"I've had worse," the old man said, with great dignity, and his eyes shone. "I'm a gatekeeper. I'm good at being stood at."

They were in the car before the green one had reached the diner. Dilly looked out of the rear window as they pulled away and saw Dari Fenwick-Mbeki walking back down the verge toward his rented car, hands in his pockets, not looking behind him. And behind him, further, on the dust-pale road, the green car stopped dead beside the gate, and the passenger door opened, and a small woman in camel wool got out and stood looking after them.

She was not smiling. She had Odessa's cheekbones. She was holding up one hand, the palm flat, very slowly, as if to say: wait.

"Faster," said Dilly.