Toast dealt with, they opened the case again.
Lila swept the crumbs into her palm and put the laptop where breakfast had been. Her glasses came out of a drawer Edwin hadn’t seen her open before — small wire frames, serious enough to make her look more dangerous rather than less. Edwin claimed the other stool and pulled the Notebook to him. It still carried Pike’s index under the leather, bright and temporary: two hundred and forty names spending the last of their borrowed morning.
"Tarrant first," she said. "Pike was begging a dead man. I want to know which dead man."
"Brightside and Charrington. Senior partner until 2008. Birmingham hotel. Apparent heart attack."
"You've had that paragraph in your pocket since Tuesday. Show me what you've got."
Edwin had three lines on his phone in his own handwriting. Lila had a search bar, a grudge, and better instincts.
The Telegraph piece came up inside twenty seconds.
Henry Tarrant, partner at Brightside & Charrington, died in his sleep at the Hyatt Regency Birmingham in March 2008, aged 53. The family had said cardiac arrest. The practice was described as quiet. There were two surviving daughters and a wife who was not named.
Lila went through it once, then again on her feet.
"This has been stripped," she said.
"That's the Telegraph for you."
"No, Marsh. Listen. Senior partner at a top-tier London firm dies in a Birmingham hotel in his fifties, and the obituary gives him sixty-eight words. No school. No university. No family names. Not even a club, and those bastards list clubs for men who did nothing except own ties."
"He kept his head down."
"Senior partners don’t get to be that invisible. Not in the Telegraph. Someone took a scalpel to him."
She opened another tab.
Same surname, same paper, two days later — three lines in a property column noting his Highgate flat had gone to auction at speed. Three more days, and an Inner Temple bulletin observed his absence from a committee with the precise lack of feeling those bulletins specialised in. After that, the results turned into unrelated Tarrants, dead links, and archive pages that wanted £9.99 to disappoint them properly.
"Edited," she said again, testing it like she was making sure it would still bear weight. "Marsh, did Pike's diary actually have a real Tarrant slot in it, or were we imagining things?"
"He had sixteen months of fortnightly PR work that wasn’t PR work, and a Tarrant slot at the Garrick three weeks ago marked cancelled. He was writing to Tarrant after Tarrant was already in the ground."
"After being told no by a corpse."
"By whatever was still answering for him. Somebody was keeping the diary alive."
Her hand stopped on the counter. Sunday light thinned across the kitchen, catching on his shirt at her shoulder, and Edwin made the professional decision not to catalogue the effect.
"I don't like this one," she said.
"No."
"That obituary doesn’t read like a heart attack."
"Probably not."
"It reads like the same pressure. Pike, Tarrant, the edited paper trail — different rooms, same kind of boot on the throat." She angled the laptop so they could both read the obituary. "If Pike had sixteen months of fake PR work, and near the end of it he was trying to reach Tarrant, and Pike was on Marcus Thorne's authorised list, then Tarrant either worked with them and stopped—"
"Or he was standing somewhere they needed empty."
"Either version ends in the Hyatt. He went in breathing and came out as sixty-eight words."
The Reckoning stayed quiet through all of this, and Edwin resented the silence like a man resenting a help desk that had definitely seen the ticket.
He had been hoping the Reckoning would answer: one clean line across his vision, one clerkly correction, one useful cruelty. It gave him nothing. He took that for an answer, though not one he trusted. Either Tarrant sat outside Edwin’s reach, or somebody had buried him under enough paperwork that even the Reckoning declined the excavation.
He wrote in the Notebook, brief: Tarrant — obituary stripped; estate moved fast; Pike contacting posthumous diary. Treat as Forger-network pressure until disproved.
"Why did Pike think a dead man could help him?" Lila asked over his shoulder.
He hadn't got that one yet. He didn't pretend to.
"I'll write it down," he said, "and we'll come back to it."
She made him put a question mark on the end.
At eleven fifty-eight, Pike’s borrowed index began to fail.
It did not vanish dramatically. The Reckoning had better manners than that, or worse ones. The names under the Notebook’s leather dulled by degrees, one column after another going from fluorescent to tea-stained to ordinary paper. Edwin copied what he could. Lila cross-checked his notes against the photographs already on her phone. By midday, the borrowed structure was gone.
The Notebook remained. Pike’s order did not.
After that, they were working from photographs, notes, and whatever their own memories had managed not to ruin.
By four, Tarrant’s two daughters had married surnames and almost nothing else. At five, after Lila told him for the second time that he needed clean clothes, Edwin stopped pretending this was not true.
"I'll come with you," she said.
"You won't."
"Marsh."
"You will not. We've had two minutes of being people in a flat together, and I'm not spending the next hour by walking you through my front door for whoever might be standing behind it."
"You think someone is."
"I think it's possible. I think it's stupid not to act like it is. You stay here, lock everything, keep the book and the photograph off the worktop. I'm in and out. Shirt, post, charger. I'll text you from the street."
"You will text me at the door, in the hallway, after you’ve checked the rooms, and when you’re leaving."
"Yes."
"And if you don’t, I’m calling Ada, and she will arrive with police powers and a serious expression."
"Also yes. I am extremely motivated by Ada’s serious expression."
He put the Notebook back inside his coat before they went to the door.
She kissed him there, once, briefly — not anything for the corridor. He went down to the Fiesta with his collar up.
Rain had started by the time he came out. The Bakers Arms had its lights on, Greggs was shutting up, and the Fiesta started on the second try, which counted as enthusiasm.
He drove to Leyton with the wipers complaining and the mirrors doing more work than the windscreen. No black BMW, no estate car; only Sunday traffic thinning under wet streetlight. He parked three doors down from his block, on the wrong side of the street, under the one lamp that still believed in public service.
Emperor Kebab was still open. Yusuf was behind the counter with his sleeves up, refusing to look at the windows. Message received. He pushed through the inner door, took the stairs two at a time, and stopped on his own landing with his key already in his hand.
The frame was unmarked. The little hair he had taped across the join at hip-height — a habit acquired with humiliating speed once surveillance became a feature of his week — sat four millimetres lower than he had left it, glued by water.
He texted Lila: Door tampered. Going in.
She answered before he was finished writing: Carefully, Marsh.
He turned the key.
The flat smelled wrong: no cooking, no stale kebab warmth through the floorboards, only windows opened and closed by hands that were not his.
Nothing had been taken.
Everything had been searched.
The drawers in the chest by the wall had been put back closed, but each one a finger-width less closed than he kept them. His sock drawer had been emptied and refolded in a grid: trainer socks, work socks, the two pairs of cycling socks he never wore. He didn't fold them in a grid. Whoever this was did. The fridge had been opened and closed; a magnet had been put back upside-down. The kettle lid sat backwards, and someone had filled it to the line.
On the pillow, in the middle of the bed, lay a card.
From the doorway, the card gave him its message. He did not touch it.
White card, the size of a place-card at a wedding. Fountain-pen handwriting in a hand he didn't know, entirely unremarkable.
We know who you are, Mr Marsh. Choose carefully.
No signature, no date, and no threat crude enough to argue with.
The Notebook sat quiet against his ribs. Pike’s borrowed traces had been gone since lunch.
Edwin texted Lila: They've been in. Note on the pillow. Nothing taken. Going down for the bat.
He did not wait for her reply.
He locked the flat behind him, tested the handle once, then went back down the stairs at a pace he was not proud of. Outside, in the rain, he opened the Fiesta's boot and lifted the aluminium bat out of the emergency blanket and the half-bottle of motor oil and the inexplicable copy of Now That's What I Call Music 67.
At his front door he stopped and set the bat against the wall, business end up. The first placement was wrong: too decorative, too optimistic. He moved it a foot left, where his hand would find it before thought had time to be polite.
That, he thought, was where it lived now.
He locked the deadbolt behind him. He did not turn on the lights.
He photographed the note without picking it up, then the pillow beneath it, the kettle, the sock drawer, and the upside-down magnet on the fridge.
Then he stopped in the middle of his own kitchen and spent the question he had been saving since the door opened.
He spent a breath of Diligence — barely affordable, and probably stupid — and called Discrepancy on his own flat.
Behind his sternum, the cost registered before the text arrived. He was not at comfortable yet. He had borrowed against tomorrow to do this, and felt the loan in his back teeth.
A line opened across his vision, neat as a summons.
Discrepancy. Most material inconsistency in this room: two unauthorised electrical signatures present within domestic outlets. Locations: behind bed; behind kettle.
At the edge of his awareness, Discrepancy went dull for the day.
He swore.
He swore in a Hertfordshire register Lila would have found legally insufficient, and went to the bedside outlet first. The faceplate was on straight. The screws were on straight. The bottom-right screw carried a fresh scrape in the slot. Edwin had never touched it. He took the butter knife from the kitchen drawer and worked the screw loose.
Behind the faceplate sat a black plastic disc the size of a ten-pence piece, glued to the back of the back-box with a strip of double-sided tape. It had a pinhole down one face and a dead green light along its edge.
He prised it out, held it under his phone torch, photographed it, and laid it on the bedside table before walking to the kitchen.
The kettle outlet had its twin. Same size, same shape, same dead eye. Whoever had put them in had done it neatly enough that a man not looking would have lived with them for years.
He prised that one out too. He photographed it. He put the pair of them on the kitchen counter, on a square of kitchen roll, and watched them not respond.
They were not responding to him. They were not responding because they were dead. They had been a wire to somebody, and the wire had just been cut by a man with a butter knife and a bad afternoon. He pictured two little squares going black somewhere he could not see. Someone would mark the time, note what it implied about Mr Marsh, and pass the problem upward.
The thought arrived without grammar: they’ll know, they’ll tell whoever pays them, they’ll come back. Worse next time, because he had refused to play.
He texted Lila: Two bugs found. Removed. Note still on pillow.
She wrote back: Bring the note. Bring everything. Come back.
He looked at the screen.
Then he wrote, with the flat-bottomed honesty he hated: Staying here tonight. Don't want to walk this through your door. Back in the morning.
Three dots arrived. They didn't become words for some time.
Then: If you don't text me at seven I'm calling Ada and breaking your door.
Seven. Promise.
Marsh.
Yes.
Lock everything.
Yes.
He sealed the note in a clean freezer bag from under the sink and put the two devices in another. Both went into his bag by the door. A clean shirt followed, folded badly on top, because going to bed first felt like a question he wasn't ready to answer.
He went back to the front door.
The bat was where he had set it.
He picked it up.
He didn't go into the bedroom. He didn't turn on the bathroom light. He stood in the hallway, in the dark, with the bat at the angle a man holds an umbrella he isn't quite sure of, and watched his own front door from the inside.
The door looked back like a door.
He thought, with the flat-bottomed honesty that arrived after being frightened for too long: I'm going to sleep with that, tonight, against the side of the bed, for as long as it takes.
Then he thought, because he was twenty-seven and from Hertfordshire and trying not to embarrass himself in his own hallway: And I'm going to be properly bad at it the first night. And then less bad.
Outside, rain ticked against the kitchen window with the patience of something waiting to be let in. Pike’s borrowed traces were gone. The bag by the door held the unsigned card, the two dead bugs, and the clean shirt he had not yet put on.
He did not move from the hallway for a long time.
When he moved, the bat came with him.
