There were forty-three missed calls on Nora's phone, and her brother had left a message telling her not to open the door.
She listened to that one first.
“Nor. Ring me. Don't let anyone in till you've spoken to me.”
His breath scraped the microphone. Then there was a noise which might have been a van door and the message ended.
The room was too bright. She had slept with the curtains half open, unable last night to bear another small task involving her left arm. It lay across her stomach now, heavy beneath the dressing. When she shifted, pain pulled from the elbow toward her wrist, waking parts of her that the phone had failed to reach.
Cal's message was eight minutes old.
She pressed his name. It rang and rang. Downstairs, somebody leaned on the outer doorbell, let it go, then tried again with a shorter, more reasonable sound.
Nora sat up.
There were calls from Mina, calls from Cal, two numbers she didn't know and one identified only as withheld. A message from Mina said, Please just tell me you're all right. The next said, I'm coming round.
Nora typed Alive. What is happening? and sent it before looking at the time. She should already have been at the showroom. The morning's tasks waited in a neat list beside yesterday's medication reminder: finish the display wall; move Mina's cabinet; choose the photographs. After months of calculations, compromises and rooms belonging to other people, it was nearly ready.
The doorbell sounded again.
She put the phone between her knees and pulled on the loose shirt from the chair. Her arm caught in the sleeve. She swore, stopped and tried again, feeding the injured hand through with her right. The shirt hung open over the vest she'd slept in. She did up two buttons, enough to make being thirty-six and barefoot in her own apartment look like a condition she had chosen.
At the entry phone a man said, “Police. Is that Nora Vale?”
She didn't answer immediately.
“Ms Vale?”
“What do you want?”
“We need to make sure you're all right. Can you let us in?”
“I'm all right.”
“We'd like to see you.”
She looked back toward the bedroom. Her phone lit on the bed where she'd left it. Mina calling again. Cal still hadn't answered.
“Are you alone?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
“Could you come down, then? Bring some identification if you have it.”
Her passport was in the kitchen drawer beneath an envelope of spare furniture keys. She took it out and left the keys, closed the drawer too hard, then stood looking at her hand on the handle.
Nine days. They had got through nine days.
She should call Cal once more. She should get someone to tell her what had happened before she gave these people a face to attach it to. Instead she picked up the phone, put it in her shirt pocket and went downstairs.
There were two officers beyond the glass. One wore uniform. The other, a man in a dark jacket, held something flat against the door for her to see. She could read his surname, Bell, before the sunlight on the glass obscured it.
She opened the door.
“Nora Vale?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He introduced himself as a detective constable. The uniformed woman asked whether she was hurt.
Nora looked down. The cuff of her shirt had ridden up over the edge of the bandage.
“An accident,” she said. “Last week.”
“Are you getting treatment?”
“I've had treatment.”
The woman nodded. Bell asked to see the passport, opened it at the photograph and looked from the page to her face. Nora was suddenly offended by the picture: the old fringe, the obedient expression, the version of herself who had no idea how much she would want later.
“What's happened?” she asked.
He gave it back.
“Can we talk somewhere private?”
Nora glanced toward the street. A man from the ground-floor flat was putting his bike through the railings. He saw the officers, saw her and looked quickly at the lock in his hand.
“Upstairs,” she said.
She led them in, feeling the passport's stiff edge against her palm. On the stairs her phone vibrated. She didn't take it out. Bell stayed behind her; the uniformed officer came last. She could hear their shoes on the steps she usually climbed without noticing the sound.
The apartment looked too much like itself to contain whatever they'd brought. A blue mug by the sink. The small table with the uneven leg, repaired once by Cal and twice by her because they disagreed about how long a wedge should remain temporary. A chair near the window with the scarf Iris had left folded over its back.
Nora went ahead and took the scarf. She put it on the pile of clothes beside the bathroom door, a perfectly ordinary tidying movement, then turned.
“Would you like to sit?”
“Thank you,” Bell said.
The uniformed officer remained near the kitchen. Bell took the chair opposite the sofa. Nora sat, laying her injured arm on a cushion without intending to advertise it.
“There's been a report concerning you,” he said.
“What sort of report?”
“A woman went into a police station in Essex overnight. She said she'd killed you.”
Nora looked at him.
The words seemed to have entered the room without choosing where to settle. She could hear a kettle clicking in another apartment. The phone vibrated against her breastbone and stopped.
“She said she killed me.”
“Yes.”
“Well.” Nora lifted her right hand. “She hasn't.”
Bell's face didn't change enough for her to know whether he'd heard a joke.
“We're pleased to establish that,” he said. “At first we thought she might be confused about who she meant. Do you know a woman called Iris Keene?”
The name hurt more than the claim.
Iris had sat in that chair with one knee drawn beneath her, drinking coffee from the blue mug. Iris had stood in the bedroom wearing Nora's shirt and said the repaired patch beside the bed looked like an entrance somebody had decided not to finish. Iris had kissed her with a hand on the back of her neck, three weeks of useful, wanted company suddenly becoming something Nora didn't know how to mention to her brother.
The last time Nora had seen her, there was a bag between them. Iris had tried to pull it away. Nora remembered the hard little jerk of the handles, the look which crossed Iris's face, then glass making a noise far louder than she would have thought a single door could make.
She put her right hand flat on the cushion beside her left.
“No,” she said.
Bell waited.
“You don't recognize the name?”
“I've never met her.”
The uniformed woman looked at Nora. Not sharply. Just looked. Nora found that harder to bear than a visible change of expression.
Bell took out a notebook.
“She gave us your full name, this address and the address of your business.”
“They're not secrets.”
“She also described the apartment.”
Nora looked toward the bedroom door. It was partly open. She could see the end of the bed and a narrow strip of the wall above it.
“What did she say?”
“The layout. Furniture. A repair on the bedroom wall.”
“I've had people in to work.”
“Recently?”
“It's an old building.”
She sounded like a woman trying to sell him the flat. She heard it and couldn't stop.
“She remembered a joke about the repair,” Bell continued. “Called it your extension.”
Nora's mouth had gone dry. The patch was no more than the width of a hand, pale beneath paint she hadn't quite matched. An old bedside fitting had torn loose when she moved the bed. Cal offered to fix it, didn't turn up that afternoon, and Iris had filled it with Nora watching. An extension for people without the money to buy another room. They'd laughed about it for days.
Letting Iris stay hadn't been a crime. Denying it had already made the truth difficult to offer. Nora looked at the chair Bell occupied and kept her mouth shut.
Nora had wanted Iris to be gone until everything opened, until Cal's account became the only one anybody needed. Now Iris had put the bedroom wall in a police notebook.
“That's an odd thing to say,” Nora replied.
Bell wrote something.
“Have you been to a property called Wren House? Near a village in Essex.”
She knew the name. Dominic used it as if the whole county should already know where his furniture lived. Nora had selected pieces for his London rooms, answered his late messages and corrected an invoice he'd considered beneath his attention. She'd never visited the country house until the night they went for his money.
“I know the owner through work,” she said.
“Dominic Rusk?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been there?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. She made herself breathe before adding, “I've done some work for him in London.”
Bell nodded, holding the pen just above the page.
“The woman described an incident in a room behind the house. She said there was an argument. That she pushed you through a glazed door.”
Nora felt the floor come toward her, not literally, just the old sensation returning before she could put a name to it. The tiled edge against her shoulder. A cold place spreading beneath the warm pain. Iris standing over her with a face Nora couldn't interpret through the brightness at the sides of her vision.
“She said she left you there,” Bell continued. “In the garden room.”
Cal had found her there. Cal had got her into the van and to emergency care, his hands slippery, his voice telling her to keep talking. When she came properly awake in a hospital room he was there, holding a cup she couldn't use without help.
Whatever Iris had believed, she had left a living woman on the floor.
“As you can see,” Nora said, “she's wrong.”
Bell closed the notebook halfway and then opened it again.
“About your death, yes. We're checking the rest.”
The uniformed woman asked whether Nora wanted water. Nora said no, then changed her mind. The woman went to the sink, found a glass where Nora pointed and filled it.
Nora took it in her right hand. Her left fingers had begun to curl without her asking them to. She straightened them against the cushion, slowly.
“Why would someone do this?” she asked.
Bell watched her for a moment.
“That's one of the things we need to establish.”
“Does she know I'm alive?”
“The officers dealing with her will be told.”
She drank. Water hit the dry place in her mouth and made her realize how much she wanted it.
He had said they were checking the rest. That meant the house. The door. The place Cal said he had dealt with, while she lay on her sofa unable to bear the pressure of a sleeve. She'd let him handle it. She'd wanted him to handle it.
From her pocket came another vibration.
“You can answer,” Bell said.
Nora took out the phone. Cal. His name filled the screen above the photograph she'd used for years, him standing in a room he'd just painted, a white mark across one cheek.
She let it ring once more.
“My brother,” she said.
“The person we contacted?”
“You called him?”
“We were trying to find you.”
She pressed the side of the phone. The call went quiet. She put it face down on her knee.
“He'll be worried,” she said.
Bell nodded. He didn't tell her to ring back. He asked about her arm again, the accident, where she'd been treated. The next questions had already begun, and her brother remained on the other side of the phone, waiting for her to repeat the version which had got her home.