She wrote her terms on the back of a laundry receipt, because it was what was on the counter.

It took her four minutes. Sel watched her do it with the polite expression of a man being audited. Rustam read over her shoulder until she shifted her elbow into his ribs. Her mother had gone back to the kettle and was running the same water over the same glass, which was how Gulnora Karimova listened to things she did not like.

"One," Dilly said, tapping the pen on the paper. "Security is mine. All of it. Your driver, your doors, your schedule, your phone if I say so. If I tell you to leave a room, you leave, and you can have opinions in the car."

"Agreed."

"That was fast."

"I have sat across from lawyers for eleven years. I can recognise a bargain."

"Two. The shop's loan is gone whether I stay or walk. In writing. Signed by someone who isn't you."

"By Mrs. Halvorsen-Duarte and my attorney, tonight."

"Three. If I want out, I get out. No penalty, no clause, no lawyer arriving at my mother's door. I give you a week to cover the Close before I go."

He hesitated at that. It was the shortest pause, but she was a person who lived in the pauses. "A week is not enough to find another woman I can trust with my name," he said.

"Then don't make me want out."

"That," said Sel, "is the most reasonable threat I have ever received. Agreed."

"Four." She had written it, scratched it out, written it again. "You don't lie to me about your body. Not 'I'm tired.' Not 'a dignified grey.' When it's bad, I find out from you, before I find out from the floor."

He did not say anything for a moment. The boiler ticked. A pipe somewhere gave up a small amount of water.

"I will try," he said.

"No."

"I should like to say yes. I would be lying to say yes tonight, and you've just forbidden it." He met her eyes. "I will tell you the truth when I know I can bear it being said aloud. That is as honest as I can manage. I think it might be the only honest answer you'll get from anyone in my family this year."

She looked at that for a long time. She had refused clients for less. Then she folded the receipt in half and in half again, and put it in her breast pocket, and said, "Fine. Under protest. I'll write it in."

"Dilnoza," said her mother, from the counter, in English. "You will do this?"

"For a year."

"For the shop?"

She could have said yes, and it would have been true. "Partly," she said.

Her mother set down the glass. She crossed the wet floor in her slippers without seeming to notice the water, took Dilly's face between two hands that smelled of detergent and cardamom, and kissed her once on the forehead, hard. "You were never the one who froze," she said, in Uzbek, so quietly that only Dilly could hear. "Someone froze you. Go and find out who."

Then she let go and went to put the kettle on again, as if nothing had been said.

The car was a long dark thing with a long dark driver named Pascual, who held the rear door for Sel and then, after a look from Dilly, closed it, opened the front passenger door, and stood back to let her decide. Good. She walked the perimeter first. Under the rear bumper her fingers found nothing. Wheel arches, nothing. Kerb side, the little shadow behind the plate: nothing. She looked at Pascual, who looked at the lamp post.

"How long have you driven him?"

"Nine years, ma'am."

"Anyone else ever drive this car?"

"Not since Mrs. Odessa." He paused. "Not since this afternoon."

She nodded, and got into the back beside Sel, because she was not about to ride up front on her first night and be seen sitting in the place the help sat. Not that. The back seat of the car was occupied by a woman of about fifty-eight with grey hair cut like a blade and a handbag held upright on her knees, who was looking straight ahead as if the windscreen had said something rude. In the front seat, turned round and halfway over the headrest, a girl of about twenty-four in an oversized sweatshirt with a laptop open on her knees and her feet up on the dashboard.

"Okay, so," said the girl. "Hi. I'm Junie. I do all of his, like, everything. Socials, calendar, emotional support, hostage negotiation. You're so much taller than in the clip. That's a compliment? I'm going to say it's a compliment. Don't tell me if it isn't."

"Junie," said Sel.

"I'm just saying. She's incredible. Look at the shoulders." Junie spun the laptop around. "So @ferrywatch is a burner. Nine hours old. Eleven followers before tonight, three hundred and forty thousand impressions now, which, honestly, kind of a masterpiece? The photo's good. It's artful. I want to hate it and I can't. I have a statement. Draft one: 'Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke is in excellent health and was doing laundry.' Draft two: 'The heir is not dying, he is simply thorough.' Draft three is just a picture of a sock."

"Do not send draft three," said the woman beside her. It was the first thing she had said. Her voice was flat and precise, each word set down like a plate. "Ms. Karimova. Margit Halvorsen-Duarte. I am the Vault Clerk. I have witnessed every Close since the nineteenth of March, nineteen ninety-six. I have not missed one, and I do not intend to begin with a bad photograph."

"Ma'am."

"You are going to ask me whether the Keeper can be forced to miss a night."

"I was going to ask whether anyone has tried."

Margit's eyes moved, for the first time, from the windscreen to her. They were pale and level and gave away nothing. "The elevator in the Merchant Street building was disabled twice this winter. A taxi taking Mrs. Thornquist to the vault was held at a false accident for forty minutes in January. A lock cylinder was changed without work order in March. In each case the Close was signed with ninety seconds to spare." She paused. "I have not told Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke. I am telling you. He is not good at being told things."

"I am sitting right here," said Sel.

"Yes," said Margit. "And you are going to take these now." From her handbag she produced a small brown bottle and a paper cup of water, and held both out with the dispassionate air of someone passing the salt. Sel took them. He swallowed two white tablets. Dilly watched his throat, and saw him notice her watching, and look away.

"Fine," Dilly said. "Here's what happens next. Nobody posts anything. No statement, no sock. Junie, you're going to tell me who has access to his location, his calendar, his home. All of it. Margit, I want the elevator logs, the cylinder change, the taxi. Pascual, we're not going to the house the usual way."

"Which way, ma'am?"

"Whichever way is the longest."

Pascual, God bless him, did not ask why.

The Thornquist house stood at the top of Pellow Hill behind a fence of black iron spears, a big square sandstone building with too many chimneys and a lawn like a snooker table. Every window was lit. That was her first problem. A dead woman's house, three in the morning, and every window lit like a party.

"Mrs. Odessa never let it go dark," Pascual said. "She said a bank should always look awake."

"That's lovely," said Dilly. "It's also a shooting gallery."

She walked the house alone, the way she always had, one hand open at her side. Kitchen, pantry, laundry. A drawing room with an enormous portrait of a straight-backed woman in a navy suit, who looked out of the frame with the expression of a person who had just been told the price of something and would be paying less. Library. Stairs. In the study, a window latch lay open by half an inch. She put her thumb against it. Fresh scratches in the brass. Someone had not forced it, exactly. Someone had worked at it, patiently, from outside, with a thin blade, in the last day or two, and had stopped when something interrupted them. Or when they got what they wanted.

She photographed it and closed the latch and went down the back stairs with her skin prickling, and found Margit waiting in the kitchen with a thick manila envelope held in both hands.

"This was left with me," Margit said. "Three weeks ago. Mrs. Odessa instructed that it be given to the person Anselm brought home, if and only if she said yes. She said that I would know." The Clerk's face did not change. "I did not believe her. She was not an easy woman to believe. She had a way of being right a week after she should have been wrong."

"Three weeks ago," Dilly said. "She knew about me three weeks ago?"

"She knew your name in the autumn." Margit held out the envelope. "I am going to go and sit in the car. I do not wish to watch you open it. I did not have the courage to open it myself, and I am a person who has had a good deal of courage lent to her."

She went. Dilly stood in the huge lit kitchen with the envelope, and opened it with her thumb.

There was a phone inside, an old one, with a sticky note on the back in firm blue ink: PRESS PLAY, DILNOZA KARIMOVA. DO NOT BE DRAMATIC.

She pressed play.

The screen filled with a woman of eighty-seven in a high-backed chair, in a navy cardigan, with an oxygen tube across her face and a gaze like a drawn blade. Behind her the library window was dark. She looked a little left of the lens, found it, and fixed it.

"Dilnoza Karimova," said Odessa Thornquist. "You are late."

Dilly's mouth went dry.

"I have been watching you for fourteen months. I do not do this out of sentiment. I do it because a bank is a machine that runs on people who do not do what is expected, and you did not do what was expected, and I wanted very badly to know why." A dry, wheezing laugh. "I know why. Or part of it. I have known since June. I am not going to tell you today."

The kitchen had gone still around her. The refrigerator hummed.

"You will want to shout at me. You will find that difficult, since I am dead, and I will have enjoyed the arrangement. Here is what you need to know. My grandson is going to tell you he is only slightly ill. He is going to lie. He is a sweet boy and a coward, in the way the loved ones of strong women are cowards, and you will need to be unkind to him a great many times. I recommend starting early."

"Mrs. Thornquist," Dilly said, out loud, to a phone.

"Someone is trying to stop the Close," the old woman went on, as if she had heard. "It is not Maurice, though he is happy to profit. Maurice is a man who cannot be trusted with anything but his own appetite. It is someone who has been inside the building a very long time. You will learn my reasons for thinking so. For now, listen carefully: do not trust anyone who tells you the clause was written to protect the bank." Her eyes, sunk in their pouched lids, softened, which was worse than anything. "It was written to protect me. And I am sorry. It has been killing my family for sixty-one years, and I could not make myself stop."

The screen jumped. A cut. The old woman again, tired now, hand lifted.

"Day ninety," she said. "Come back on the ninetieth day, if you are both still alive, and you will have earned the rest."

The video ended. On the dark screen of the little phone Dilly saw her own face, hollow-eyed, with the kitchen's yellow light behind her.

She turned the phone over. Under the sticky note, in the same firm hand, something else was written, so small she nearly missed it.

The man on your left was never in the earpiece.