Marisel Veyron Pov The pavement took the skin off my knees before I had gone ten feet. I could hear my own breathing. Not breathing, exactly a wet sound, like something being pulled through a straw. The sun stood straight up in a white sky and the street had emptied out. No one on the balconies. No one at the windows. Shutters shut, a dead dog at the kerb, the heat coming off the tarmac in a shimmer that made the road look like it was moving. I had walked this route a thousand times. Eleven minutes, Dacre liked to say. Door to door. If you ever need me, Marisel, eleven minutes. It had taken me an hour and I was still going. And the worst of it, the part I chewed on while I crawled, was that I had given him the idea myself. Six months back, when the broadcasters first started on about the cycle, I was the one who sat up in bed and said we should put water by. Cans, bottles, whatever we can get, even if nothing comes of it. He'd laughed and called me his water merchant's wife. But he'd let me fill the shed behind his shop, and I did it with my own hands. Forty-something cans, lids taped down, my back aching for a week. Then the taps coughed and the heat came, and my own flat had nothing in it. Not a cup. Because I had put all of it in his shed. Because he was my husband. Because it's eleven minutes. His building's front step was in the shade. I got up on my elbows and pushed the door and it swung in. Cold. The lobby was cold. He had the generator running and the air conditioner running off it, and the cold hit my face and I nearly cried. I went up the stairs on my hands and knees. I remember the tile. I remember thinking it was too bright, that he should have picked a darker tile. His door stood open a hand's width. I heard glass. I got my head around the door and there was Vesper on his kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet, hair stuck to her forehead, and Dacre on one knee in front of her, holding a bottle to her mouth with one hand and holding her hair back from it with the other. Her throat was moving. The water is going down. He was talking to her. Low, gentle, the way you talk to a child with a fever. Slow. There's more. Slow. I said his name. Or I tried. It came out of me as a creak. He looked over his shoulder. I'll give him this much, he didn't pretend not to see me. He looked straight at me, lying on his hallway floor with my arms out in front of me, and something crossed his face. Not horror. I've had time since to think about it. It was closer to irritation. Like I'd tracked mud into a clean house. Then he turned back to her. "Just a bit more," he said. "Come on." I don't know how long I lay there. The cold went out of the floor after a while, or I stopped feeling it. The last thing I remember clearly is the bottle. Empty, on its side, rolling a little on the tile, the light through the kitchen window catching the wet inside it. Then the hallway went out like a lamp. --- "How would heat kill somebody?" I sat up on Dacre's couch with my mouth open and my hands shaking, and he was in the armchair with one ankle crossed over his knee, holding the remote, laughing at the television. I looked down at my knees. No blood. No grit. Just my own cotton trousers and the faint blue line of a vein under the skin. "There she is," Tovin said, mouth full. "Slept through the whole thing, this one." "I wasn't asleep." "You were breathing like a man in a sack." He shook his bowl of peanuts at me. "Have one." The woman on the screen had a map behind her with a red shape spreading across it, and she was saying the words sea surface temperature and ten-year cycle and something about how the coming week would run hotter and longer than anything the stations had on record. "Seven days," she said. "Our modelling starts on Wednesday." Wednesday. I turned it over. Seven days. Tonight was Wednesday. Sable stood by the window with her arms folded, watching the street, which was her way of listening. Tovin was in the other chair with his shoes off. Vesper sat on the floor with her back against the couch, near enough to Dacre's chair that the arm of it grazed her shoulder whenever she moved, and she had a tall glass of water in her hand with ice in it, and she was holding it the way you hold something you know you can get more of. She was wearing my earrings. The small gold ones with the chip in the left one. I'd looked for those earrings for two months before I moved out of this flat and told myself I'd lost them at the market. "-so I said to him, don't buy more than you can move by Sunday," Vesper was saying. "My cousin's got the shop on the corner of Fenner and she's had the distillery rep twice this month. Twice, Dacre. That's not a man who thinks nothing's coming." "Your cousin sells spirits," Dacre said. "My cousin sells whatever's walking out the door." Vesper turned her glass slowly on the floor. "She's got a buyer from the coast asking about bulk water. Not bottles. Cans. He's got a hotel and he's frightened. He'd pay over the odds." "How far over?" She smiled. "You'd want to sit down." "Vesper." "I'm only telling you what she told me." Sable said, without turning round, "And what does she want for the introduction?" Vesper's smile didn't move. "She wants her cut, same as anyone." There it was. The whole argument about whether the sun was dangerous, and under it, this - the two of them had been talking about it already. Not the way I'd talked about it with him six months ago, worried and sensible with a pen and paper. The other way. The way where the danger was the point. Dacre turned the volume down. Sable reached over and turned it up. "I'm listening to this." "You've heard it before." "Ten years ago it wasn't this." "Ten years ago it was exactly this." He set the remote down. "I had sixty crates of bottled water in the shop. Remember? My brother-in-law talked me into it. Wholesale out of Kessel Road, cost me more than the roof repairs. What came? Two warm weeks. Then that wedding party in September bought the lot off me at a loss so I could clear the back room. Ten years of that joke. I hear it at every family thing." "So you don't stock anything now," Sable said. "The shop stocks what sells. I've got a hundred and forty empty jerrycans in that warehouse this minute. I sell them to builders." "Empty," I said. Everyone looked at me. I hadn't meant to say it out loud, but my voice came out steady, which surprised me. "Empty," I said again. "A hundred and forty of them, and not one with a lid taped." Dacre laughed. "What, you want a shed of your own now?" "Maybe." "You're the one who told me to fill that shed in the first place." He said it lightly. He had no idea what he was saying. "Now you want to do it twice?" "Maybe I was right the first time and just not early enough." His face changed, a small amount, the way it does when he decides a conversation isn't worth having. Vesper got there first, which was worse. "She's frightened, Dacre." She said it gently. "Look at her. Anyone would be, after a broadcast like that. Marisel, love, don't start buying cans in a panic, that's how people get robbed. Leave it to the ones who know the market." "And you know the market," I said. "I know my cousin's shop, that's all." She picked her glass back up. "I'm not the one who's going to be standing in a queue on Thursday." Thursday. She'd said it before the woman on the television had said it. Or maybe she hadn't and I'd misheard. I've turned it over a hundred times since. "Marisel's right about one thing," Sable said. "Empty cans in a warehouse is a strange kind of nothing." Dacre picked up the remote and switched the television off in the middle of the woman's sentence. I got my bag off the floor and put the strap on my shoulder. "Where are you going?" "Home." "It's half nine." "I know what time it is." I looked at Vesper, at the earrings, at the glass. "Tovin, don't get up. I don't need to walk." "Marisel-" "I said I don't need it." Sable picked her keys up off the windowsill and came with me. On the stairs she said, "How much water have you got in your flat?" "One bucket." "Full?" "About a quarter." She let out a breath through her nose. "You filled a shed for him." "I know what I did." We came out into the street. Nine o'clock at night and the air still holding the day's heat like an oven with the door shut. "Market tomorrow," she said. "I'll come." "Be at mine at three." --- Halim was pulling his shutter down when I got to Kessel Road. I put my hand flat on the metal so he couldn't slide it further. "Twenty-litre jerrycans." He looked at my hand, then my face. "How many?" "How many have you got?" "Sixty in the back. Eleven of the fifty-litre." "I'll take twenty of the small ones. Delivered tonight." He named a price higher than the one chalked on his board. I paid for it. He wrote my address on a scrap of newspaper and said he'd send his nephew round. Then I said, "Halim. The water board notice on the board by the gate. How long has it been?" "Since this morning." He squinted at me. "Kessel East, Harrow Row, Mbeki Close. Five days, they say. Five days in this." He laughed. "Somebody at the board's got a sense of humour." "Can I take it?" "It's paper. Take the board, take the pole." I took the notice down. I took it to the woman who runs the photocopier behind the fabric shop, and I paid her for forty copies, and then I walked back down Kessel Road and pinned one to the gate of my building and one to the gate of the tyre place and one to the shutter of the one-shoe woman's stall. The woman with the baby bath on her head was still at the yard tap, third in the line. I gave her a copy. "Thursday, six in the morning," I said. "This street goes dry till Tuesday. Tell whoever you like." She read it twice and then looked up at me. "How do you know?" "It's on the notice board by the gate. Go and look at the one I left." "Why are you telling me?" Because in another life nobody told you, I thought, and on the fifth day you were in a queue with a plastic basin and a dead look, and I never saw you again. "Because you've got a baby," I said. --- The cans came at seven. Sixteen of them. The boy wouldn't look at me while I counted twice. "Four short." "That's what was on the truck." "Your uncle wrote twenty." I counted out four cans' worth of money and folded it into his hand anyway. "For the walk. Tell your uncle I want the four on Sunday and I'll pay the Sunday price for them. And tell him the taps on Kessel East go off Thursday at six - five days - and he's got eleven fifty-litre cans in the back that he's going to sell to somebody at four in the morning for less than they're worth. He can do better selling them slow to people who'll remember him." The boy looked at the money, then at me. "He won't listen." "You tell him anyway." I dragged the cans inside one at a time and lined them under the window. Then I went back down with my phone torch and read the notice one more time, standing in the dark by the gate, my own copy in my hand. Kessel East. Harrow Row. Mbeki Close. Adjoining streets. My street. Sable's street. The one-shoe woman's. The yard behind the tyre place. Alder Vale wasn't on it. Dacre's street, eleven minutes away, with its generator and its cold lobby and its kitchen floor, was not on the list. I stood there for a moment with the torch shining on nothing. In the life I'd just crawled out of, I had died on his hallway floor while he held a bottle to another woman's mouth. And he would have water. That was the thing. He would have his shed and his generator and his cold tiles, and Vesper would bring him a buyer from the coast, and the two of them would make money out of other people's thirst, and when I was dying eleven minutes away he would look at me the way a man looks at a stain on a clean floor. So I would not crawl to him this time. But it wasn't enough to sit behind my own door with my sixteen cans and be right. If that was all I had, he'd still get his way, and Vesper would still be wearing my earrings, and the woman with the baby bath would still be in that queue on the fifth day. I went up the stairs and got the first can under the tap and turned it on. It came out the width of a pencil. Warm. Eight minutes past nine. Sixteen cans, nine hours, one tap. I sat down on the floor with my back to the cupboard and started counting again.

Marisel Veyron Pov The first can took eleven minutes. I timed it with the phone because I didn't trust my own sense of anything anymore. Eleven minutes for twenty litres, and there were sixteen cans, and that came to just under three hours, and I had until six in the morning. On paper I was going to be fine. On paper I'd fill all sixteen twice over and have time to wash. I stood with my hand on the tap and watched the water come out the width of a pencil. By the fourth can it was the width of a straw. I put my palm under it to check I wasn't imagining things and it was warm. Not cold. Warm, out of the cold tap, at ten o'clock at night, in a building with a tank on the roof. I set the fourth can against the wall with the others and stood looking at four full and twelve empty and did the sum again and didn't like it. The knock came at half eleven. I nearly dropped the can I was carrying. I put my eye to the gap in the door and it was Sable in a headscarf with two full jerrycans on the landing and a face like she'd already decided something. "You said three o'clock," I said. "You said three o'clock. I didn't agree to it." She came in past me and stopped in the middle of the room and looked at the line of cans. "Four." "Four." "And a tap that's running like a man with a bad chest." She put her two cans down by the door. "I've got four more at home. My landlord will notice six cans in a one-room flat by Friday, so I'd rather move them here." "I'll make room." She went to the sink and put her hand under the water and held it there. Then she turned it off and on again, and it gave that same dry knock and coughed and came back thin. "How long has it been like this?" "Since about ten." "It's Thursday in half an hour." "That's what I'm saying." We did the rest of it together. She held the cans and I watched the tap and we swapped when my arms went. She talked to keep us both awake, her cousin's shop, the price of cooking gas, a man she'd nearly married in her twenties who turned out to have a wife in another city. I listened and answered where answering was needed and kept my eyes on the water. At half one I took the full cans through one at a time and stacked them behind the fridge, and Sable moved the fridge with me, and it went over the tiles with a noise like something being killed. At two the tap was down to a drip with the occasional spurt. Eleven full cans. Five empty. Two of Sable's. At three she said, "Marisel. Sit down." "I'm fine." "Sit down or I'll sit you down." I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and she put a glass in my hand. Water out of a can, when the tap was still technically running, because she said my hands were shaking and she wasn't wrong. "Tell me the truth," she said, sitting down opposite me with her legs out. "This isn't about the broadcast." "It's exactly about the broadcast." "You didn't watch the broadcast. You sat on that couch and stared at the wall through the whole thing and then you were on your feet like the room was on fire." She waited. "What happened to you?" The tap dripped behind me. I counted four drips before I answered. "I had a dream." "You already told me that." "It was a bad one." "Was I in it?" I didn't answer. Sable leaned her head back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. "That's how I know it wasn't a dream. In a dream you'd have put me in it. You'd have put Dacre in it. You'd have put yourself in it. You wouldn't have left me out." She brought her eyes down. "You've been doing sums all night. You counted those cans at eight and again at ten and again when we moved the fridge. You know that notice off by heart, I watched you read it, and you don't read anything twice. So don't tell me it was a dream." The tap gave a spurt and stopped and started again. "I'm asking you to trust me," I said, "and not to ask me yet." "That's a coward's arrangement." "It's the only one I've got." She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "All right," and got up and started filling the next can. At twenty to five the tap died properly. Not a drip. Nothing. I turned it off and on for a while and it gave one small cough and a mouthful of brown and then it gave me nothing at all. Eleven full cans and two of Sable's. Six empty and one bucket at a quarter. Somewhere around three hundred and forty litres in a one-room flat, and eleven minutes of water left in a bucket, and no idea what the next five days were going to do to my arithmetic. The first light came up grey and mean outside the window. "It's not six yet," Sable said. "I know." "Somebody's pulled the supply early." I got my shoes on. "Where are you going?" "Halim's. He owes me four cans and he opens at six." "Marisel, the sun isn't even up." "Then I'll get there before it is." --- Kessel Road at half five was a different street. There were women at the yard tap behind the tyre place, more than there should have been. A queue of pots and buckets and one woman with a baby bath balanced on her head, and she was sixth in the line and she'd been third at midnight. Halim's shutter was already up. Halim never had his shutter up before six. He stood in the doorway with a clipboard and his boy was loading the last cans into the back of a truck. "Them's mine," I said. Halim held up one finger, finished writing, and lowered the clipboard. "Morning, madam." "That truck's got my four cans in it." "That truck's got sixty cans in it and I've sold all sixty." He said it flat, the way you say a thing you've already said twice this morning. "Fella came at four. Paid cash, paid above the price, took the lot. Fifty-litres too, eleven of them, gone before I'd finished counting." I stood there looking at the cans going up into the truck. "Who?" "Shop on Alder Vale." Halim shrugged. "Says he's got a warehouse. Been at it since four, him and a woman doing the counting. They've had every can off this road. And I'll tell you something for nothing, madam, I'd put money on which of us is going to be wrong about this weather." Behind me Sable said, very quietly, "Alder Vale." Two trucks down, backed up to the tyre place, a man in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up stood with his hands on his hips watching them load. I could see his shoes. I bought him those shoes for his birthday. Dacre had told us, not a week ago, that he wasn't going to fill a single can and sit on them like an old woman. And beside him, with a notebook open against her forearm, Vesper was counting. I watched her mouth move. I watched her write something down and look up at the truck and write again. She had a pen clipped to the notebook and she was dressed for a market, not for half five in the morning, and she wasn't tired. That was the thing I couldn't get past. Everyone on that road was tired. She looked like she'd slept eight hours. Sable said, "Marisel." "I see him." "What are we doing?" "Nothing yet. Watch the notebook." Vesper counted the last of the fifty-litre cans into the truck and wrote the number down. Then she closed the notebook and said something to Dacre and he laughed and put his hand on the small of her back. "There were sixty," Sable said. "She wrote eleven first and then something else. I couldn't see the first number." "She wrote eleven on the second line because that's fifty-litres." I said it slowly, working it out as I said it. "And she wrote a number on the first line that wasn't sixty." "How do you know?" "Because Halim said sixty and she counted and then she turned the page back and looked at it again before she wrote. You don't look twice at a number you're just writing down. You look twice when you're putting on a different one." Sable was quiet for a second. "That's a lot to get from a woman's shoulders." "It's the only thing I've got." And then Dacre turned round and saw me. --- He came across the road with his hands still on his hips and his shirt coming untucked, and I made myself stand still and not step back. "Marisel." "Dacre." "You're up early." "So are you." He looked past me at Sable, and then at the two of us standing there in yesterday's clothes with our hair a mess. "You've been out all night." "I've been home all night. I came out for cans." "From Halim." "From Halim." He smiled at that, the way he smiles when he's about to say something that sounds generous and isn't. "You should have said. I'd have sold you some out of the warehouse at cost." "You sold Halim's stock out from under him at four in the morning and you're going to sell it back to this road at three times the price." I said it without heat. "That's not cost." "That's business." "It's the same road you buy your nails on." Something went across his face and it was quick, but I saw it. He didn't like being seen standing in the street like this. Two women with a handcart had stopped to watch. The one-shoe woman had come out of her stall and folded her arms. "Go home, Marisel," he said, quieter. "I'll send a can round." "I don't want a can round." "Then what do you want?" "Nothing from you." I started walking. "That's the whole of it." "Marisel." I kept going. "Marisel." He caught my arm, not hard, and I stopped. "You're making a scene on my road." "Your road's got a notice on it," I said. "Six this morning, five days, Kessel East, Harrow Row, Mbeki Close. Does Alder Vale go dry on Thursday, Dacre? Or is it just us?" His hand stayed on my arm. He hadn't known. I watched it land, watched him turn it over, watched him do the arithmetic I'd done at nine o'clock the night before. Eleven minutes. His street was eleven minutes from mine and it was not on the paper. "That's not what that notice means," he said. "It means what it says." Behind him Vesper had come up with the notebook closed in her hand. She looked at me with her eyebrows up, that soft concerned face she does so well. "Marisel, love, it's half five in the morning. Come back to the flat, I'll make you something hot." "I've got a flat." "I know you do. I only meant-" "You've got my earrings on." Her hand went up to her ear and then came down again, and she laughed. Actually I laughed, a small one, almost admiring. "These old things? Dacre, didn't you say these were in the drawer?" "I don't know where they came from," Dacre said. "No," I said. "You wouldn't." I walked away with Sable, and neither of them followed, and the two women with the handcart watched us go and one of them spat in the road after Dacre's truck. --- At the gate of my building the woman with the baby bath was sitting on the step with the bath in her lap and a plastic chair pulled up opposite. She stood when she saw me. "You left the paper on the tyre place." "I am." "Thursday six, five days." "Thursday six, five days." She sat back down and made a small gesture with her chin at the chair. "My name's Odile. I'm going to sit here, if it's all the same to you, until somebody official tells me it isn't. Because I went round my sister's at three and her tap's already dead, and that's Harrow Row, and Harrow Row's on your paper." Sable looked at me. I said, "Have you got anything to put water in?" "Two pots and the bath." "Then bring them up. Both of you. Sable, go and get your four from yours, and anything Odile's sister's got, and anyone else on Harrow Row who'll listen." I got my keys out. "We've got a tap in this building that still works. It won't work much longer. Fill everything that holds water." "How long have we got?" Odile asked. I looked at the sky over the roofs at the end of the street. It was getting light properly now, and it was already warm, at half five in the morning, on a Thursday in a week that was supposed to end with the sun coming down on us like a hammer. "Tonight," I said. "Maybe not even that." They went, both of them, and I stood on the step with the keys in my hand and thought about a notebook with a number on it that wasn't the number on the truck, and a deposit in cash from a frightened man with a hotel on the coast, and a woman who had slept eight hours the night before the taps went dry. The first thing I needed wasn't water. I had water. The first thing I needed was to know what Vesper had written on the first line.

Marisel Veyron Pov By seven in the morning there were nineteen people in my stairwell. They came up from Harrow Row and Mbeki Close with pots and buckets and a wheelbarrow and one man with a fish crate under each arm. They came because Odile had gone round knocking on doors with my photocopied notice in her hand, and because by seven it was already too hot to stand in the sun on the street, and because the stairwell of my building was three floors of shade with a tap that still worked. The tap was on the half-landing between the first and second floor. It was a maintenance tap, put in for the cleaners, and it had never been metered, and it came out cold, which is the only reason any of them stayed. By half seven the queue went down to the front door and out onto the step. By eight the tap had slowed and there were two men at the front of the queue arguing about who had been there first. "Enough," I said. Nobody listened. The bigger one had his hand on the neck of the tap and the other one had a hold of his wrist. I got between them. Neither of them moved their hands. "Take your hands off each other," I said, "or I turn the whole thing off at the main and nobody in this building drinks today." They both looked at me. "I know where the main is," I said. "I've been up all night with this tap. I know what it does. Take your hands off each other." They let go. I got my notebook out of my bag - the same one I use for the shop accounts, half a page of last month's bread order still at the front - and I sat down on the step with it and started a list. "Name," I said to the big man. "House. How many in it. What you've brought to fill." He stared at me. "What for?" "Because in five minutes I'm going to time this tap and give everyone a turn, and if your name's not on this list you don't get a turn. Name." That was how it started. Not the water. The list. By nine there were thirty-one names on it. Forty-four people, counting children, and eleven of them from Harrow Row where the tap had been dead since three in the morning. I wrote down every container, every pot, the man's two fish crates, the wheelbarrow with a plastic liner in it, Odile's baby bath. When I'd done that I gave everyone a number and told them the tap ran from nine to twelve and then off until four, because a tap that runs all day is a tap that's dead by noon, and after that we'd see. A woman called Mira Tull, from the second floor, said, "And who put you in charge?" "Nobody. But I've got the notebook and the tap's on my landing." That got a laugh, which was better than an argument. Sable came down at ten with her four cans from her own flat and a plastic tub of drinking water under her arm and looked at the stairwell full of people and stopped dead on the stairs. "What did you do?" "I started a list." "You started a-" She looked down at the notebook and then at the queue. "Marisel. There's a man with a fish crate." "He's third in line for the afternoon. He's got a bad leg. I put him third." "He's got a bad leg because he was first in line and you gave him a number." "That too." --- Crawe came at eleven. Crawe is the caretaker. He's got a flat on the ground floor and a key to everything and a face like a man who has spent thirty years being blamed for things. He stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the whole queue of them. "Mrs. Veyron." "Crawe." "You've got half the street in my stairwell." "They're filling pots. Not breaking anything." "There's water coming out of that tap." "There is." "That tap's on the building's supply. That's the building's tank on the roof. That's not for the street." I came down the stairs to him. "How much is in the tank?" He looked at me. "Crawe. How much is in the tank?" "Full, near enough. It fills off the mains overnight. There's a float valve-" "So it filled last night, before six." "It would have, yes." "Then there's a tank full of water on this roof that'll last this building a fortnight if we're careful and four days if we're not." I kept my voice down. "And there are forty-four people on my list and I know thirty of them by name, and in five days when the taps come back on and Alder Vale has been drinking out of cans bought off this road at four in the morning, those thirty people are going to remember who let them fill a pot and who didn't." Crawe looked at the queue again. There was a woman at the front of it crying quietly into her sleeve while her pot filled. "Don't let them on the roof," he said. "Don't tell anyone there's a tank. And when it runs dry, Mrs. Veyron, it's your name they'll be saying, not mine." "I know." He went back into his flat and shut the door and I stood in the stairwell and wrote tank - rooftop - how much? in the back of the notebook, and underlined it twice. --- Dacre came at half twelve. He came alone, which surprised me. He stood on the step in the sun with his sunglasses pushed up on his head and looked at the queue going up the stairs behind me, and I watched him count it, and I watched him understand what he was looking at. "This is my water," he said. "This is the building's water." "I bought sixty cans off this road this morning-" "Off Halim. Who's got a stall on the corner and a nephew who can't count and a wife with a bad hip, and who you've known for eleven years." I stayed on the step. "You didn't buy this road, Dacre. You bought a man's stock at four in the morning and now you're standing on my step telling me it's yours." "You're going to be very sorry you did this." "I've been sorry before. I'm getting used to it." He took his sunglasses off. That was the tell with him - always was. When he wanted to be believed he took the sunglasses off, and it worked on me for six years and I watched it not work now and I felt nothing. "Marisel. Listen to me. I've got a buyer. Vesper's cousin knows a man with a hotel on the coast, three hundred rooms, and he's frightened and he's got money and he'll take everything I can put in front of him by Sunday. Everything. Do you understand what I'm telling you? I'm not sitting on cans this time, I'm not filling a shed for nothing, I'm selling. There's a market for once and I'm in front of it." "Then sell it." "I'm trying to." He put his hands out. "I need more than sixty cans. I've got the hundred and forty empty in the warehouse and a man on Kessel Road selling fifty-litres out of a lock-up. I need them filled by Sunday and I need a place with a good tap to fill them and there's the whole of it." He nodded at my stairwell. "You've got the tap. I've got the buyer. We do it together and split it." And there it was. Not the water. Not the heat. Not me on the floor of his hallway. He'd come to my step to rent my tap. "Who does the counting?" I said. "What?" "You said Vesper does the counting. Does she do the counting on this too?" He blinked. "She's good at it." "So she does the counting, and you do the buying, and I do the filling, and I wonder who does the splitting." I came down one step. "Dacre. She told you she counted sixty cans into that truck this morning." "She counted sixty." "Halim sold you sixty. She wrote something else first and then crossed it out." I watched his face. "I saw her do it. She wrote a number, turned the page back, looked at it again, and wrote a different one." "That's a lot of nothing from across the road." "It is. So ask her." He didn't say anything. Behind him, in the street, the one-shoe woman was sitting in the shade of her shutter with her shoes lined up in front of her and a bowl of water beside her, and she was watching us both. "You know what your problem is," he said at last. "You've got no head for business and you've decided it's a conspiracy." "My problem's your problem in about six days," I said, "and it's got nothing to do with business." He put his sunglasses back on and walked off down the road and didn't look back, and I stood on the step until he turned the corner onto Alder Vale. Then I went up to the second floor and knocked on Mira Tull's door. Mira Tull is a woman of about fifty with a good head and a bad temper and a brother who drives a delivery van for a wholesaler on Fenner Street. She'd been second in the queue that morning and she'd complained about it the whole time. "You want something," she said, standing in her doorway. "I want to know what's in the wholesaler's warehouse on Fenner Street." "Fenner's got four wholesalers." "Then I want to know all four." I held up the notebook. "I've got thirty-one names on this list and about a hundred litres of goodwill. I want to spend it before the sun comes down on us on Wednesday. Can your brother get me in?" Mira looked at the notebook, then at me. "He can get you in. He can't get you a discount." "I don't want a discount," I said. "I want to know who else has been in there since Tuesday."