Lila had spent the early morning on her phone in the back of the office, head bent over coffee, doing the quiet work she’d been good at for two years and which the firm had never quite paid her enough for. By half past nine she’d established that Henry Tarrant had been a partner at Brightside & Charrington until 2008, when he died of an apparent heart attack at fifty-three, in a hotel room in Birmingham, with no obvious explanation for either the heart attack or the hotel room.

She also established, by the simple expedient of texting Sandra, that Sandra would be at her desk by ten, and would, if Lila and Edwin happened to want to look in on Mr Pike’s office, find herself unexpectedly indisposed for fifteen minutes in the staff toilets at ten past.

The two of them had agreed, the night before, to come in after hours. Sandra’s offer of cover, in daylight, amid the firm’s general collapse into professional hysteria, was a better plan, and they had taken it.

Henry Pike’s office was on the eighth floor, at the end of the partners’ corridor, opposite a print of a horse Edwin had walked past for two years without ever thinking about until this morning, when he saw that the horse was, in fact, glowing very faintly in the colour of inherited debt.

He made a note of the horse for later.

The office door was locked. It had a brass handle, a frosted glass panel, and a small enamelled plate that read H. J. PIKE, PARTNER, and around the handle, the text that Edwin was beginning to associate with avoidance, a single fresh Footnote was already written.

Locked from inside, three days ago, in distress.

Edwin had not put the Footnote there. Footnotes were not, as far as he understood, autonomous, and he stared at it for several seconds too many, still waiting for the universe to admit it was joking.

“The building’s writing on itself,” Lila said quietly, beside him.

“Can it do that?”

“Apparently.”

He walked the length of the corridor, looking. Two more Footnotes had appeared on partners’ doors during the morning. Diana Hollis’s read Behind on something. Asking for help she will not accept. Another, on the door of a partner who had resigned at half past six that morning, read simply Gone to Lisbon. Will not be back.

A third door — a junior partner Edwin had once shared a lift with for eight floors of total silence — bore a Footnote that said only Worse than he looks, which Edwin found, on reflection, useful information.

Lila, behind him, was smiling slightly at all this, with the private satisfaction of a woman watching terrible things happen to people she didn’t like.

“Edwin.”

“Mm.”

“This is going to keep happening, isn’t it. The whole building. Every day.”

“For a while.”

“Until someone settles them.”

He watched her. “Yeah.”

“Right.” She pushed her coat sleeves up like a woman rolling up her shirtsleeves for a long shift. “Well. We’ve got work to do.”

They went to find Sandra.

Sandra was back at her desk now, slightly more distant than yesterday, a tissue tucked into the cuff of her cardigan. She’d been Pike’s secretary for eleven years and had spent most of those years hating him in a quiet, professional, accurately-spelled way that Edwin had always admired.

“Sandra.”

“Edwin.”

“Was there anyone with Mr Pike before he stopped coming in? A visitor?”

Sandra glanced at him. Yesterday she would have given him the appropriate brush-off. Today she said, without a pause, “Yes.”

He waited.

“A man,” she said. “Tall, expensive coat, the breed of expensive coat where you can’t tell it’s expensive unless you know. Mid-fifties. Silver hair. Smelled of money. Came in twice a week for a month.”

“Name?”

“He didn’t give one. Pike never put him in the diary.”

“Anything you remember about him?”

She closed her eyes a second, which Edwin saw, with the new attention of a Reconciler, as a Tier I Witness opening her own Recall — a faint inward focus, the specific way Lila had looked yesterday on his sofa.

“He was a good listener,” Sandra said at last, eyes still closed. “He let Pike talk. Pike did most of the talking. The man asked one question per visit. The question was never written down anywhere. The last visit, three weeks ago, I heard the question through the door, by accident. The question was: and have you spoken to Edwin yet.”

Lila stopped breathing for a half-second.

The question put ice under his breastbone.

“He asked about me,” he said.

“Yes,” said Sandra.

“By name.”

“By name.”

“Sandra,” Edwin said, quietly. “Do you remember anything else about him? Anything at all. How he held himself. How he said hello to you. Anything.”

Sandra opened her eyes and properly regarded Edwin for the first time in their two and a half years of working in the same building. She had, he noticed, been making a number of decisions over the last twenty-four hours that she had not previously thought herself entitled to make.

“He never said hello to me,” she said. “Not once. He walked past me like I was furniture. He did not say goodbye, either. He took his coat off himself and put it on the hook himself, which Mr Pike did not, and in fact has not done in eleven years. He carried his own briefcase. He wore the same cologne every visit, which I have not, in three years of trying, been able to identify, and I have a good nose. The cologne is expensive. It is also old.”

“Old?”

“Discontinued. Late eighties, early nineties at the latest. Cologne a man buys two cases of and uses for the rest of his life.”

Lila and Edwin exchanged a look.

“Sandra,” Edwin said.

“Yes.”

“You’re a Witness, aren’t you.”

She permitted herself, for a half-second, a tiny dry smile.

“Tier one,” she said. “Since Tuesday.”

“Did you—”

“I did not tell Mr Pike,” she said calmly. “Mr Pike, in my opinion, has a great many things he does not need to know.”

He thanked her. They left her at her desk. Lila did not say anything until they were back in the corridor, at which point she said, in the lowest voice he’d ever heard her use, “Marsh, what the fuck.”

“I know.”

“They were aware of you.”

“I know.”

“Before. Before the system.”

“I know, Lila.”

They stood in the corridor a little longer. Edwin’s heart was doing the slightly disorganised thing it did when he was tired and cold and being asked to think too quickly.

“His diary,” he said at last. “We need his diary.”

Pike’s office was locked, but Sandra had a key, and Sandra had decided — by the look of her — that her loyalty to Henry Pike had ended somewhere around half past nine the previous evening, when she had heard about Hartwell & Crook in the news while standing in a Sainsbury’s on her way home. She gave them the key without comment.

The office, inside, was cold. Pike had not been in it for three days. The dent of him was still in the chair. His coat was still on the hook. His desk was tidier than usual, which was itself a not insignificant clue — Pike had left the office expecting to come back, and was, by Edwin’s calm reading, already not going to.

Lila pulled up his Outlook calendar.

The diary was full of meetings, most of them banal. Internal catch-ups, audit committees, a recurring fortnightly slot called PR work that, Edwin saw now with new eyes, had no associated location and no other attendees. They scrolled back. The recurring slot ran for sixteen months. It had started, he noted, almost exactly when Pike had been promoted to senior partner.

“That’s the one,” Lila said quietly.

“That’s the one.”

She kept scrolling. Three weeks before today, on a Tuesday at six in the evening: Tarrant — Garrick Club.

“Tarrant again,” Lila said, very quietly.

“Tarrant again.”

She wrote it down. She also, unobtrusively, photographed the diary in its entirety on her phone — the methodical thoroughness Edwin had noticed before in Lila, mostly in tax season, and had never quite credited as the survival instinct it was.

“Edwin.”

“Mm.”

“Look at the recurring.”

She held the phone up. Tuesday at six was Tarrant. Tuesday at six the week before Tarrant had also been a meeting — but Pike had typed cancelled into the subject and not deleted it. The notes field, behind the strikethrough, read won’t see me. tried again. still no.

Edwin read it twice.

“He was begging Tarrant to meet him,” he said.

“For weeks.”

“Tarrant’s the dead one.”

“Yes.”

“Pike was begging a dead man to meet him for weeks, and then they met three weeks ago, and now Pike is missing.”

“Yes,” Lila said.

She lowered the phone.

He took a long breath.

“Right,” he said.

Edwin walked the room, letting Ledger Sight settle over the office rather than forcing it.

The room answered in pieces.

The painting behind the desk — a print of a hunting scene, framed in dark wood, that had been there as long as Edwin had been at the firm — flagged by the same quiet administrative glow, with a Footnote: Misaligned. Three-eighths of an inch. Recently moved.

He examined it, then pulled it gently away from the wall. Behind it was a little wall safe — the cheap kind, mid-eighties, with a four-digit code, the kind of safe that meant Pike had assumed nobody on the floor was clever enough to find it.

“Lila,” Edwin said.

“Mm-hm.”

“Your brother.”

“On it.” She was already taking her coat off.

Edwin walked the rest of the room. The second drawer down on the left side of Pike’s desk answered next, on the left side of Pike’s desk — the drawer Pike had always kept locked, which Edwin had asked him about once, in his first year, and been told, with the quick smile of a man who had given the answer many times before, that’s the firm’s whisky, Edwin.

The drawer was not locked today.

Edwin slid it open.

There was no whisky.

There was a plastic bag of cash, several thousand pounds in fifty-pound notes; a black flip-style burner phone, off, charged; and a single white paper receipt, folded in half, from a business called J. Henshall & Co., Bookbinders and Bespoke Stationery, Bermondsey.

The receipt was for one volume, leather, 200 ledger ruled, monogrammed, dated four months earlier, made out to Mr H. Pike, Hartwell & Crook, paid in cash.

Edwin held the receipt up and read it properly.

“Lila.”

“Yes.”

“Who in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-five orders a custom leather ledger book from a bookbinder in Bermondsey.”

“Someone,” Lila said slowly, kneeling at the safe with a bobby pin between her teeth, “who isn’t planning to put it through the firm’s books.”

He pocketed the receipt.

She got the safe open.

Inside the safe was a single object: a leather-bound book, deep red. A book you could not buy in a WHSmith, with monogrammed initials on the spine in faded gold. H. J. P.

Edwin lifted it out, weighed it briefly in his hand, and felt — through his fingertips, with a granular clarity — that the object was very, very heavy.

The book was angry.

It was the only word he could think of for it. It was a book that had been used, over and over, for the work it had been built to do, and the work had not been good work. The entries had a shape beneath the cover, like a sleeping animal under a blanket.

“Don’t open it here,” Lila said, watching his face.

“No.”

“Take it home.”

“Yes.”

“Edwin.”

“What.”

“Don’t open it tonight either.”

He turned to her.

“I want my brother in the room when you open that,” she said quietly. “And not for the locks. For the if it does something.”

He thought about that for a moment, and nodded.

He put it in his bag, very carefully.

The painting went back on the wall, three-eighths of an inch correctly aligned this time. The drawer and the safe closed behind them. He used a corner of his handkerchief on the safe handle, more out of professional reflex than any real belief that fingerprints were going to matter on a day like this one.

Sandra, at her desk on their way out, did not look up at them. Clearly busy with her own work, she had already decided — maintaining the small dignity Edwin had come to recognise as the firm’s only real asset — that she did not see them, had not seen them, and would not, if asked, remember that they’d ever been there.

Edwin walked into the corridor with a custom-bound ledger in his bag and a bookbinder’s receipt in his pocket, carrying — distinctly — the weight of a question he was not going to be allowed to put down.

Lila walked beside him in companionable silence the rest of the way back to their desks, and only when they got there did she lean down and say, very quietly, into his ear:

“Marsh.”

“Yes.”

“That book felt wrong.”

“I know.”

“Tonight, then. Petros first.”

“Petros first.”

He sat down at his desk, set his bag down between his feet, and took out a pen to write a file note for nobody. As he reached for his coat pocket for his phone, his hand met something that hadn’t been there ten minutes earlier.

He pulled it out, slowly, under the desk.

It was a leather-bound notebook. Palm-sized. Deep red leather. Slightly battered, like something carried for years rather than bought. The sort of notebook a man might have inherited from a grandfather with strong views on stationery. It had not been in his pocket that morning. It had not, by any account he could give, ever been his.

He opened it. The pages were blank. At the top of the first page in writing that was very plainly not his own:

Reconciler’s Notebook. Footnotes recorded here will persist twenty-four hours instead of one, and remain legible only to you. Use carefully. Welcome.

Edwin studied it for several seconds too many, and then put it, very carefully, in his inside coat pocket.

He thought, thank you, very pointedly, into the air.

The system did not reply, which he took as the appropriate professional acknowledgement of a message both sides had agreed had been received.