I was eleven steps into lifting a water stain from a dead merchant's ledger when a stranger said my husband's name. Eleven. I'd been counting, the way I always count. Dampen. Blot. Wait. Lift. The ledger lay open on the suction table under the work lamp, its pages the colour of weak tea, and the stain, a long brown tide-line from some flood in 1893, was finally letting go of the paper. A little at a time, with a patience that wasn't entirely mine. That was the trick of it. You didn't fight a stain. You gave it somewhere better to be. Twelve. I tilted the blotter. "Mrs Mercer." I didn't look up. In the conservation lab at the Hale Archive Trust, nobody speaks to you at the bench unless the building is on fire, and nobody comes in after six-thirty at all. The senior staff had a rule about it, and I had a stricter one. People who touched my work without asking learned it once. "The lab's closed," I said. "I know." A man's voice. Low, unhurried, not apologising. I lifted the blotter, and the tide-line came away with it, a ghost of brown on grey, and the page underneath was clean enough to read. *Received of Mr. T. Marsh, forty-one pounds, on account.* Good. I laid the blotter down and only then did I turn my head. He was standing just inside the door, where the lab's yellow floor tape ended, and he hadn't crossed it. That was the first thing I noticed. Not that he was tall, though he was, or lean in the way of people who forget to eat, or that his hair was cropped close and going grey at the temples, though he couldn't have been much past thirty-five. It was the tape. Every visitor in three years had stepped over it as if it were a decoration. He stood with the toes of his shoes exactly at its edge and his hands where I could see them, and he looked at the room the way people look at a church they're not sure they're allowed in. "This is a restricted space," I said. "I'm sorry." He wasn't, quite. He was something more careful than sorry. "Your colleague at the front desk said you'd be here. I waited until the others had gone." "That's worse." "Yes," he said. "I thought it might be." Behind me, in the glass-walled office across the corridor, a chair creaked. Aldous Pryce had been working late too, which was nothing new; he usually left a lamp burning there until he was sure I'd gone home. Now the door opened and he came out with his coat over his arm and a cup in his hand, the way he'd come out every evening for eight years. "Nadia, my dear, I've left you tea." His voice was soft, as it always was. He had a habit of speaking as if the objects in the room were asleep. Half-moon glasses, silver hair, and on his right cuff the faint green smear of fountain-pen ink that no laundry in Port Alder had ever got out. He saw the stranger and stopped, and something in his face went very still and then very polite. "I didn't know you had a visitor." "I don't," I said. "Go home soon," Aldous said, to me and not to the man. "Whatever it is will keep. It's always kept, hasn't it?" He set the cup on the corner of the side bench, as far from my work as it could be, and touched my shoulder once, lightly, as he went by. I felt it through my cardigan. I always did. The stranger didn't turn his head to follow him. I noticed that, but only later, when I had reason to turn the whole evening over like a page and look at the back of it. At the time I noticed only that he waited until Aldous's footsteps had gone down the stairs, and then a little longer, and that when he spoke again his voice was lower. "My name is Cassian Rook." I waited. "Your husband called me on the evening he died." There's a particular quiet that comes into a room when someone says a thing you have been braced against for two years and had begun, God help me, to stop bracing for. The lamp hummed. Somewhere in the walls of that old customs house, the pipes ticked as the heating cooled. My left thumb found the edge of my wedding band and turned it, once, the way it did, a small hard circle against the bone. "Get out," I said. "Mrs Mercer-" "Emeric was found at the bottom of a stairwell at eight thirty-five on the fourteenth of November. The police have a file. The coroner has a report. I have a *grave.*" I'd stood up without noticing; my chair rolled back and bumped the bench behind me. "If you want something from me, you'll write to the Trust's solicitors like everyone else who has ever wanted something from the Trust's widow-" "Mrs Mercer," he said, gently. "I'm not asking for anything." "Then what are you doing?" He took one hand out from behind his back. In it was an envelope. Plain, cream, a little soft at the corners. He didn't offer it, exactly. He held it at his side, like a man showing you a dog he hasn't decided whether to let off the lead. "He asked me to hold this," Cassian Rook said. "He asked me to hold it for two years and then give it to you. It's been two years and eleven days. I'm late, and I apologise for that too." "I don't want it." "I know." "Then why-" "Because he did." He said it so flatly that I couldn't tell for a moment whether it was cruelty or the only kind of kindness he had. "Because your husband didn't leave you a fortune, Mrs Mercer. He left you a warning." I have been told I have a good face for bad news. A stillness, they call it. Emeric used to say I looked like a woman reading her own obituary and finding it competent. It was not stillness that day. It was the thing underneath, the thing I had spent two years sanding down, and for one second I felt it rise to the surface of me like a stain coming up through wet paper. "You have no right," I said. "No." "You *walk in here* - you stand in my lab and say his name as if-" My voice cracked, and I hated it, and I hated him for hearing it. "You don't know him. You don't know what he-" "He left one clue blank in every crossword he ever finished," Cassian Rook said quietly. "In pen. He said it was so there'd always be something left to look forward to." I stopped. It wasn't in any file. It wasn't in the obituary the Trust had printed, or in the eulogy I had barely managed to read, or in any of the condolence letters I kept in a drawer because I couldn't throw them away and couldn't bear to look at them. It was a small, stupid, private thing, and a stranger had just put it down in front of me like an object on a bench. "Leave," I said, and this time my voice was a whisper, and I didn't know who I was asking. He looked at me for a long moment. He had grey eyes, I noticed, very level, with the faint pinch of sleeplessness around them, and a thin white scar that cut through his left eyebrow. He wasn't looking at my face. He was looking, I realised, at my hands. At the bone folder in my hair, the scalpel scar on my thumb, the adhesive that had stained my fingertips the colour of old ivory. As if he were reading something there. Then he crossed the room. I should have called out. I should have reached for the telephone, for the alarm, for the heavy brass weight I used to hold down vellum. But he walked the way he'd stood, with a kind of deliberate smallness, and he didn't go near the ledger, or the suction table, or the lamp. He went to the far corner of the side bench, the one that held nothing but a bone-handled brush and a roll of blotting paper and Aldous's untouched tea, and he set the envelope down on the bare wood, six feet from my work, and stepped back. "I'll be at Tallow Lane," he said. "The old print shop. The door's open until nine most nights, and after nine I sleep upstairs and I don't mind being woken." "I won't come." "I know," he said. "Take it anyway." And then he went. No second look, no parting line. His footsteps crossed the corridor, and the stairwell door opened and sighed shut, and below the window I heard a car door close, and an engine that sounded like it belonged to a very ordinary man. I stood for what I think was a minute and a half. The lamp hummed. The ledger lay open, a clean page, a name, a sum of money long since spent. I made myself finish the step I'd been on. Blot. Wait. Lift. I counted it all the way through, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and my hands were steady, and I was proud of that, absurdly proud, for as long as it took to put the blotter down. Then I looked at the envelope. I told myself I would leave it there. I told myself that the Trust had a security officer, and that I could hand it to him in the morning; that it was almost certainly a cruelty, some stranger's strange game, a man who'd read my husband's obituary and decided to profit from it. I told myself a number of sensible things, in my own voice, in the voice I used with grieving donors. Then I crossed the lab, and picked it up. It was lighter than I'd expected. Cream wove paper, perhaps ninety gsm, soft at the corners from two years of someone's pocket. No name on the front, no address. Only, in the top left corner, a pencilled mark so faint I almost missed it: a small, slanted *N*. I knew that hand. I turned the envelope over to look at the flap, because that's what I do. I look at how a thing is made before I let myself feel what it is. The seal was neat and flat and slightly glossy at the edges, cooked-starch paste, a thin skin of it, dried to the colour of old bone. *Wheat starch.* Not gum, not glue, not the sticky-strip that every shop in the city sold. Wheat-starch paste, the kind we mix in the lab from flour and water on a hotplate, stirring until it clears. The kind I'd taught one person on earth to make. I'd taught him one evening in our kitchen in the first year we were married, laughing, flour on both our elbows, because he'd wanted to learn how I sealed things. *Love letters,* he'd said. *I want to seal my love letters the way you'd seal a fragile thing.* And then, the way he did everything, he'd practised until it was perfect. Thin. Even. Never a bubble. Never a smear. In four years of marriage, he had never again sealed an envelope any other way. No one else did that. No one else had ever known to. I stood under the humming lamp, in a building that smelled of old paper and cold radiators, with a dead man's seal under my thumb, and I understood, slowly, the way you understand that a floor has given way, that I was going to open it.

I did not open it at the lab. That was the rule I made on the stairs: not here, not under Aldous's lamp, not with the cleaners due at seven and the night porter's radio muttering in the foyer. A thing like this needed a table I owned. So I put the envelope in my satchel between a bone folder and a roll of Japanese tissue, and I walked home through Port Alder in the early dark, with the harbour wind coming up Customs Row and the cranes standing against a sky the colour of a bruise going yellow. I counted the steps to the bus stop. Two hundred and six. I counted the stops. Seven. I counted the stairs to my flat, forty-four, because the lift had been broken since the summer and I'd stopped complaining about it around the time I'd stopped complaining about most things. The flat was cold. It was always cold on Tuesdays; the boiler had opinions. I hung my coat on the second hook. The first hook held Emeric's, a charcoal wool overcoat with one button sewn on in the wrong thread, which I had never moved. People had suggested I might. Ruth had suggested it three times in two years, each time in a different voice, and each time I'd said *yes, soon,* and each time, in the morning, the coat had been there. I put the kettle on and didn't make tea. I put the envelope on the kitchen table, under the lamp, on a clean sheet of blotting paper, and I sat down and looked at it the way I'd look at any object that had come into my care. I made myself do that. Material first. Then maker. Then history. Feeling, if there's any left over, at the end. Paper: a cream machine-made wove, ninety gsm, a little foxed along the bottom edge. Not cheap, not precious. The sort of stock you'd buy at any stationer's by the quire. Chain lines faint to the light; no watermark. I held it to the lamp and found nothing, which was itself a kind of information. Handling: soft at the corners, slightly bowed from lying against a body. A pocket, a jacket lining. Someone had carried it for a long time and had been careful. There was a faint brown crescent at the top left where a thumb had rested. The pencilled *N.* I looked at under the glass. Left-handed, the stroke pulling down and away from the body, the long diagonal of it ending in a little flick. Emeric wrote every capital N as if he were halfway to saying something else. And the seal. I tilted the lamp until the light raked across it. Wheat-starch paste, applied with a fine brush; I could see the faint ridges where the bristles had dragged. The paste had dried to a hard, glassy film, slightly yellowed at the edges, with that particular fine crazing you only get when starch has aged and then been kept somewhere dry. It hadn't been sealed last week. It hadn't been sealed last year. If I'd been asked to put a date on that paste in a report I would have said: *between two and three years, probably closer to two.* Which was exactly right. I sat there for a long time without moving. The kettle clicked off. Somewhere below me, a neighbour's television laughed at something. I thought: *this is a trick.* I thought it in a clear, sensible voice. A man who'd known about the crosswords could know about the paste. A man who'd obtained Emeric's papers, his letters, his belongings, could have obtained a sheet of his stationery and an hour of his handwriting. I knew how easy it was to make a thing look old. It was half my profession's dark art, and the other half was catching it. I took the bone folder out of my hair and slid it, very gently, under the flap. You don't tear a seal like that. You ease it. The starch gave in a long soft sigh, and the flap lifted, and there was no tearing at all. Inside was a single sheet, folded in thirds, and when I opened it the handwriting was the same slanting, left-leaning, flicked hand as the *N.*, and I had to put my palm flat on the table. *Nadi,* *If Cassian Rook has found you, I'm gone, and I was right to be afraid.* *I'm sorry about the first line. I tried writing it six different ways and they were all worse. You always said I buried the lead. You were right. I'm trying not to.* *Look for Linden Ford. Volume Four. It isn't where it should be, and it isn't lost, and I think it's closer to you than you'd believe. Don't take it to the Trust. Not to anyone there. Not even to the ones you love. I know how that sounds. I've sat in this kitchen for six weeks trying to find a way to say it that wouldn't frighten you, and there isn't one. Please just believe me, this once, without the proof. I will explain everything as soon as I can.* *If I can't, Rook will tell you what he can. He's careful, and he's honest in the way people are when they've decided to be, which is the only kind worth trusting. Let him help. He won't enjoy it.* *I'm sorry I decided for you. I keep thinking if I'd just said it at breakfast, over the toast, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, we'd both have been so much braver than I was by myself.* *I love you more than I know how to put on paper, and you know I can't leave a thing alone until it's right, so you'll have to forgive me for this one being wrong.* *E.* *P.S. You never did finish the crossword. Fourteen-across was always going to be the last one.* I read it twice. Then I read it again, the way I read a document I already know by heart, searching not for meaning but for flaws. The ink: a blue-black gel, ordinary. The pressure: heavy at the downstrokes, as his always was. The hesitation before *Linden*, a pause you could see in a thickening of the stroke. A man stopping to think before he wrote a name. I thought: *it's his.* I thought: *it can't be his.* I thought: *he sat in this kitchen for six weeks.* I got up. I went to the sink and ran the tap and held my wrists under the cold water, because that is what my mother taught me to do when I was twelve and couldn't breathe, and then I stood there with the water running for far longer than any wrists needed. When I could trust my hands, I took my phone from the table. I should have called Cassian Rook. That's what a sensible woman does: asks the stranger who delivered the thing. But some animal part of me recoiled from it. If I called him, it would be real. If I called him, I'd be a woman with a stranger's number in her phone and a dead man's letter on her table, and the evening would fold itself around that fact and become permanent. So I called my mother. His thread sat just above hers in the list, as it always did, and I scrolled past it the way I always did. The last message in it was mine. *Home by 9? I've made too much.* Delivered, never answered. I have never deleted it. I don't know why I think a phone remembers things the way a person does. Ruth picked up on the fourth ring. "Nadia, love. Is something wrong?" "No. Yes. Mum, I need to ask you something, and I need you to just answer it." I was standing at the window now, looking at the lights of the harbour. "Does the name Linden Ford mean anything to you?" Nothing. I want to describe this exactly, because I went over it for years afterwards. It wasn't the nothing of a bad connection, or of someone thinking. I could hear her breathing. I could hear a clock in the room behind her, the old brass carriage clock that had been Walter's, and a dull small sound that might have been a cup being put down on a saucer very carefully. It was the kind of silence a person makes when they're holding a door shut with their whole body. "Mum?" "I have to go, love." Her voice was perfectly normal. Too normal. A recorded message of a voice. "The oven. I'll ring you back." She hung up. I stood there with the phone against my chest. The oven. My mother had eaten at six every evening of her life, and I knew, as clearly as I knew my own name, that it was ten past nine and that nothing in her kitchen was on. I made tea. I drank it standing up. I did not read the letter again, though I could feel it on the table behind me like a second heartbeat. I counted my breath, in for four, out for six, the way you count a slow lift. I got to the end of the second cup. And then my phone rang, and the screen said *Mum,* and I looked at the clock on the cooker. Nine minutes. I answered. "Hello?" "Nadia." Ruth's voice was light, easy, wearing a little smile you could hear. The voice of a woman who'd had nine minutes to find the right face. "Sorry, love, the line went funny earlier. I didn't quite catch what you said. Which name was it?" I hadn't repeated it. I looked at the dark window, at my own reflection standing in it, small and pale and holding a cup, and I understood something I did not want to understand: that the line had not gone funny, that she had caught every word, and that my mother, who had never lied to me about anything larger than a birthday present, had spent nine minutes deciding what to say. "Which name?" Ruth said again, gently, and I heard the thing that was under her voice, and it was fear.

I told my mother it was nothing. *A client's name, Mum. A deed I'm cataloguing. Never mind.* And I listened to her breathe out on the other end of the line, a long, shaky, grateful breath she tried to disguise as a laugh, and I said goodnight in a voice I'd learned from her. I didn't sleep. Around four, I gave up pretending, and made a list, in pencil, on the back of a conservation report, which is how I make every list that matters. *1. The letter is Emeric's.* I looked at that for a while. Then I crossed it out and wrote: *1. The letter is consistent with Emeric's.* That was truer. A conservator never says *is.* She says *consistent with,* and she keeps her hands in her pockets. *2. Rook knew about the crossword.* *3. Rook knew about the paste. (Did he? He didn't say. Ask.)* *4. Ruth is frightened.* *5. Ruth lied.* I wrote the fifth one very small. At seven-forty I put the letter, in a clean polyester sleeve, into my satchel. At eight, I was standing on Tallow Lane in the cold, looking at a shopfront that had been a printer's for ninety years and had never quite stopped smelling of it. The old gilt lettering still showed through the paint on the glass, *RAWLINGS & SON, PRINTERS,* and below it, on a card in the window, in a plain hand: *Rook. Records. Authentication.* The door was ajar. I'd made rules on the bus. I'd practised them, the way you practise a speech to someone who's wronged you. I pushed the door open. It was a single long room, high-ceilinged, the old press still bolted to the floor at the back like a sleeping animal. Metal shelves of archive boxes. A trestle table. A kettle. Two desks, one tidy, one not. The tidy desk had nobody at it, and the not-tidy desk had a man leaning on the frame of a back door with a mug in his hand, forty or so, broad, bald, with the amiable, unsurprised face of someone who'd seen a great many people walk into a great many rooms and had never once been astonished. "She's early," he said, to the air. "I said eight," said a voice from the stairs, and Cassian Rook came down them with his shirtsleeves turned back to the elbow and a folder under his arm. He stopped on the bottom step. In daylight, he looked less like a threat and more like something I had no word for: a man who'd been awake most of a night and was too well-mannered to mention it. "Mrs Mercer." "Rules," I said. He nodded once. "Go on." "One. You answer what I ask. Not what you think I ought to ask." I put my satchel on the trestle table and kept my hand on it. "Two. If you don't know, you say you don't know. If you won't say, you say you won't. You don't dress it up." "Fair." "Three. You don't tell me what I feel. You don't tell me what I can handle. You don't," and I heard my voice catch on it, so I went on over the top of it, "decide anything on my behalf. Not a single thing." For a moment nothing in his face moved at all. Then, very faintly, as if I'd struck a bone, something behind his eyes did. "I'll try," he said. "That's not an answer." "No," he agreed. "It's the true one. I don't make promises I might not be able to keep." He glanced at the bald man by the back door. "This is Joss Okafor. He works with me. He'll stay, if you don't mind. He's the closest thing I've got to a conscience, and he's usually better at it than I am." "Don't flatter me," said Joss. He raised his mug at me. "Mrs Mercer. Sorry about the intrusion last night. He told me not to follow you, so I didn't." "I didn't see you," I said. "That's how you know I didn't." I almost smiled, and hated that I almost had. I took the letter out of my satchel and set it on the table in its sleeve, and Cassian looked at it without touching it, with the same stillness he'd had at the lab door. "You've read it," he said. "You already knew what it says." "I knew what it was for. I haven't read it." A beat. "He told me roughly what he'd written. I never asked to see." That was the first lie, though I didn't know it yet. Or it was the first half-truth, the kind that is made entirely of true words laid in the wrong order. I only remember that he said it simply and that I believed him, and that in the part of me that kept lists, something went quiet and made a note. "I'm going to ask you some questions," I said. "Things only someone who knew him could answer. If you get one wrong, I walk out of here and take this to the police." "All right." I'd prepared a dozen. I discarded eleven of them as I stood there, because they were all things a good investigator could have found in a week. I picked the one that was left. "What did he hum?" He didn't hesitate, which frightened me more than hesitation would have. "The first four bars of 'Shenandoah.' Always the first four. Never the fifth." His eyes were on the middle distance, as if he were hearing it. "When he was reading a ledger and something didn't add up. He didn't know he did it. Joss used to tell him to stop and he'd say, *stop what?*" Behind him, Joss said quietly, "He did, you know. He did say *stop what.*" I put my hand flat on the table. The wood was cool, with old ink worked into the grain. *Four bars. Never the fifth.* I'd gone twenty-nine years without knowing that I could be undone by something as small as the fifth bar of a song. "Why did he call you?" My voice was almost steady. "That night. Why you?" "To ask me to hold a letter." He said it without softening. "And to promise to give it to you after two years." "Why two?" "He didn't say. He said it was the length of time he needed." He paused. "He said it twice." "And you agreed." "Yes." "Without asking what was in it." "I asked what it was for. He told me that." "That isn't the same thing." "No," said Cassian Rook. "It isn't." The silence went on a moment longer than was comfortable. I realised he was looking at my hand again, the one on the table, the left, with the wedding band on it and the little scar on the thumb. Not at the ring. At the way I was holding it: fingers pressed flat, thumb tucked in, as if I were keeping something down. I took it off the table and put it in my pocket. "Stop looking at my hands." "I'm sorry." He looked up at once. "I notice things. It isn't-" He stopped, started again. "It's a habit. I wasn't aware I was doing it." *That,* said the list-making part of me, *is another one.* But I let it go, for now. I had a larger question and I was running out of ways to come at it sideways. "You said the death was wrong," I said. "At the lab. You said a warning, and you didn't say it was an accident. I want to know why." He glanced at Joss. Joss, without being asked, put his mug down and went and stood with his back to the door, as if he were keeping something out. Cassian opened the folder. "This is a copy of the coroner's report," he said. "I'd like you to read it before I say anything about it. I'd like you to read it all the way through, and not look at me while you do." I took it. It was four pages, stapled, the type slightly blurred by whatever machine had copied it. *HM Coroner for Port Alder. Inquest touching the death of EMERIC JAMES MERCER, aged 33.* I had read the verdict once, in a bright wood-panelled room, with Ruth's hand on my arm. *Accidental death.* I had never been able to read the rest. I'd signed things, and been handed things, and put them in a drawer. I read it now the way I'd read an object. Slowly, from the outside in. *Deceased found at the foot of the north service stair, Hale Archive Trust, at approximately 20:35 by a member of the cleaning staff.* *Cause of death: multiple injuries consistent with a fall of approximately fourteen steps.* *Toxicology: blood alcohol concentration of 0.09 per cent.* I stopped. "Read it all," Cassian said gently, not looking at me. *Dr K. Banerjee, forensic pathologist, notes in her opinion that the deceased survived the fall for a period of approximately forty minutes before death.* Forty minutes. I read that line three times. I put the paper down. I picked it up again. "No," I said. "Mrs Mercer-" "No. Emeric hadn't had a drink since his father's funeral. That's four years. He told me the night of the funeral. He said he'd decided he didn't like who he was with a glass in his hand." I could hear myself getting louder. I couldn't stop it. "He didn't *keep* it in the house. He wouldn't even cook with wine. When people brought bottles to dinner he'd put them in the cupboard for the next person. *Nine* per cent-that's nearly twice the limit, that's four, five drinks-" "I know," said Cassian Rook. I looked up, at last, because that was the wrong thing for a stranger to say. Not *I'm so sorry.* Not *that must be hard.* *I know.* He said it with the quiet of a man confirming a figure, and there was nothing on his face I could use. No pity. No relief. Only a kind of grim, patient attention, as if I'd just done a sum he'd already done on his own, in the dark, several times. "Forty minutes," I said. "He lay there for forty minutes." "Yes." "And the police, the inquest, they-it says *a member of the cleaning staff found him at twenty thirty-five.* The fall was at seven-forty. Where was-" I couldn't make the sentence come out. "Why did no one find him sooner? Why was there no alarm? Was someone with him? Why is nobody asking *why?*" "I've been asking for two years," he said. "Quietly. I don't have the standing to ask loudly. Nobody listens to a man with no relationship to the deceased." "You said you knew him." "I knew him for a matter of months. That isn't a relationship. That's an acquaintance with a very bad ending." He closed the folder, and then, to my surprise, slid it across the table. "Keep it. It's yours. It was always going to be." I took it, because I couldn't do anything else. My hands were shaking in a way I hadn't allowed them to for two years. I pressed the pages flat to the table and ran the side of my hand down the first of them, smoothing it, the way I smooth everything, as if I could press the whole terrible thing back into order. And there, in the top right-hand corner, in the thin dark grey of a fax machine's header, small enough that you'd need to look for it, was a line of text. *TO: SOLICITOR'S COPY. FROM: HM CORONER'S OFFICE PORT ALDER. PAGE 1 OF 4. 19 MAR.* Nineteenth of March. Not this year. I knew, because I knew the date I'd collected my own copy of the coroner's findings, and the weather that day, and what I'd worn. Nineteenth of March, the March before last. Twenty months ago. He had said he'd been *asking for two years, quietly.* That was consistent. But I looked at the page and then at the man, and I said, in the careful voice I used to speak to difficult donors, "How long have you had this report?" He didn't move. Behind him, so slightly I'd have missed it if I hadn't spent a decade watching how objects changed under pressure, Joss's shoulders shifted. "Since last week," said Cassian Rook. I looked at the header again. *19 MAR.* I did not tell him that I'd seen it. I did not say that a man who'd had the report only since last week could not have had it faxed to a solicitor twenty months before. I didn't say anything at all. I folded the page along its original crease, and slid it into my satchel with the letter, and put my hand over the clasp. "Thank you," I said. "That will be all." "Mrs Mercer." "I'll be in touch," I said, and I was at the door, and Joss stepped out of the way without a word, and I walked out into the grey cold of Tallow Lane with my heart going like something trapped. I counted my steps to the corner. Forty. I counted them again. By the time I reached the bus stop I had stopped being afraid of the report, and of the forty minutes, and of the man in the print shop who knew how my husband hummed. I was afraid of the lie. Because a stranger who lies about *when* has something he doesn't want me to know about *why.*