“Gavin,” Nina said again.
“Don't use the nice voice. I got a call about a source account I haven't worked on in months. Your husband's signature's on it. Somehow they want me.”
“Who called?”
“The company contact. Asking what I can substantiate. As if I kept all this because I like filing.”
“You put it in a question. Now everybody wants an answer.”
Gavin's voice had lost the party's soft refusal. In the background she could hear metal moving, wheels dragged over a hard floor.
“I've seen your face in the work,” she said. “I saw you with Adam. I asked what you knew.”
“You asked like I was a mark on a page.”
She leaned against her car. People were leaving Northreach, turning toward buses or cars with the abrupt speed of people late for whatever had been waiting while they worked.
“What do you want?”
“You to stop making me the part you can throw away.”
“I haven't offered anyone an account that leaves me out.”
“Lucky you. People listen when you give an account.”
He let that sit between them. Nina heard him put something down.
“I've sent you a page. Look before you tell me what you think I did.”
She took the phone away from her ear. A photograph had arrived from the same number. A work-order page, stained at one corner, held flat by a hand with a bitten thumbnail.
Six Ansel Court. An old date. First names, Nina and Adam. A scheduled arrival, a cancellation instruction against her invitation and a tenant-contact cell number.
Her number. The number she'd given people when she was thirty and looking for somewhere to live, the number she still used now.
“You see it?” Gavin asked.
“Yes.”
“Still works.”
Her hand tightened around the phone. “Was that how Martin found me?”
“You want to ask me things, come and ask. Somewhere I don't have to shout over work.”
“You can send what you have to the officer.”
“I know how email works.”
She closed her eyes. “I meant I don't need you to take a risk because I've asked for a page.”
“I'm taking a risk because you asked a company question with my job number in it. That bit's done.”
They agreed on a public place a short drive away. Nina told the officer where and whom she was meeting, forwarded the received image and said Gavin claimed it was part of material he retained from his own work. She didn't promise what he would say.
Gavin was already at the outdoor table when Nina arrived. A closed umbrella rattled in its stand beside him. He had a bottle of water he hadn't opened and a paper carrier bag at his feet.
“No Adam?” he asked.
“You called me.”
“Of course I did.”
He moved his foot to let her sit. Up close he looked younger than the beard made him seem, and badly slept. There was a little cut above his thumbnail, the one she'd seen holding the page.
“You recognized me,” he said. “At the party.”
“From the visit photograph.”
“Did you like that? A picture of somebody standing by a door. Must mean he was there.”
“You were there.”
“At a door. Yes.”
She let the answer remain as small as he'd made it. He looked past her at a delivery cyclist locking a bike to a rail.
“I did visits. I did dispatch when they needed someone who could find the paperwork afterward. Invoices when nobody else wanted to sit with them. If a man didn't pay, it became my problem because I knew which job was his.”
“And you kept this because of payment?”
“I kept my work. They'd say something hadn't happened, I could show it had. They'd say I'd agreed a price, I could show who'd changed it.”
He took out a thin folder. Not much material. The old Ansel page, a few messages and attachments associated with a later sales account. He put them on the table but kept one hand on the top corner.
“Owen's work order. I helped with the dispatch and then had to chase the fee. The couple, the cancellation, the key. I wasn't choosing who got seduced.”
“You knew what the arrangement was.”
He looked at her. “I knew enough.”
The umbrella rattled again. He put his water bottle against the stand to quiet it.
“Owen showed that page to Martin,” he said. “Years later. Selling him what he called family reconnection. Big talk about making a life look like it had always been there. Martin didn't believe enough of it to pay what he wanted. So Owen showed him something real.”
“My life.”
“His work. That's what it was to him.”
Gavin opened a short billing exchange on his phone and pushed it across. Owen asking for the old page to go with an invoice. A reference to having shown it to Reed, who had photographed it and wanted his own copy. Gavin's irritated reply about being paid for work done rather than promised a part in future business.
Nina read the words once, then again. Martin hadn't somehow learned the exact question Adam would fail. He'd learned there was a lie at the beginning of the story she loved best. He had called the woman named on the page because the same woman appeared on the receipt that had once helped him find Beth.
“He had a receipt from the property company,” she said.
“He sent it back at us. See, she'd done it before. If she worked there and her husband did this, she could do it again.”
He showed the part of Martin's reply he had kept in the dispute thread. Nina's current professional name, the complaint reference, a demand that they stop supplying front names and give him actual whereabouts. Beth and Theo. A person asking for a family in language that treated them as a delivery.
Nina looked away from the screen. Across the sidewalk the cyclist was struggling to get one cuff out of the bike chain. Gavin watched until the man had freed it.
“What did you see?” she asked.
Gavin withdrew the phone. “What do you mean?”
“You said everybody wants an answer. About Martin?”
His eyes moved past her again. This time he wasn't watching anything.
“There was an argument.”
“Were you there?”
“Near the desk. We used the same workshop office. Martin came in talking about money and finding his son. Owen wanted the page back. As if that would do anything after he'd let him take a picture.”
“Then?”
Gavin turned the unopened bottle between his hands. “Owen hit him.”
“You saw that.”
“Yes.”
“Where were you?”
“By the desk. Not in another room. Not told by somebody. I saw him hit him in the middle, and Martin went against the bench. Owen hit him again when he tried to get up.”
His thumbnail worked under the bottle label. It tore into a white strip.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing useful.”
Nina waited.
“I said that's enough. From over there. Like a man asking them to turn the radio down. Then I left through the side.”
“Did you call?”
He shook his head.
The answer had cost him more than the first one. Nina could see him waiting for her to supply the accusation. She had no shortage of words. She chose the question he could still answer.
“Will you tell the officer that?”
“And then what happens to me?”
“I can't promise you that.”
“Adam gets to be sorry with his wife beside him. I get to be the man in the photograph.”
“I'm not beside him in the way you mean.”
“You came when I called because of him.”
She looked down at the work order. The first names. The little schedule made six years ago by people who assumed she'd arrive when they wanted and feel what they'd planned for her.
“I came because you have things that happened to other people too.”
He looked at her for a while. Then he opened the bottle and drank half of it, his hand shaking enough that water ran onto his wrist.
“I can forward the thread,” he said. “The bits I own. The attachments. They don't need me to carry them in a secret envelope.”
“Do that.”
Gavin's phone sounded on the table. He looked at it and turned it facedown.
“Owen?” Nina asked.
He nodded.
“What does he want?”
“He wants to know what I've sent. The company question went back down the chain, and now he wants to know why his work is in it.”
“Did you answer?”
“I told him to answer for his own work.” He picked the phone up again, read the message and held it out. It asked which records Gavin had supplied and whether Adam had put him up to it. Not a threat Nina could quote out of context and have everyone understand. She could feel Gavin waiting for her to tell him it didn't say anything terrible.
“Keep it,” she said. “Tell the officer about the call too.”
“I keep everything. Haven't you noticed?”
He pocketed the phone. His bottle had left a wet ring on the edge of the work-order copy. He blotted it with his sleeve, swore and laid the page flat again.
“I'm the one they ring because I know where things are. Your husband knows it too. He'd tell me, Gavin'll have it. Like a drawer.”
Nina thought of Adam producing the envelope. The act she'd wanted from him, followed by this man being called at work. She put her hands below the table so she wouldn't reach to organize his papers for him.
“Adam should tell them what he asked you to do.”
“He can tell me.”
“He's already spoken to the police.”
“Good for him. Was he looking at you when he said it?”
“No.”
“Did he get to look afterward?”
She didn't answer.
“I want him to come and say what he gave me to do. To me. Not you explaining his choices.”
“Then ask him.”
“He won't like it.”
“He hasn't liked much this week.”
Gavin gave a short laugh, then looked almost ashamed of it. He put the pages back into his folder without taking them away from the table.
Nina asked him if he would speak to the officer now. He took time deciding. She didn't fill it with promises. When he nodded, she called, said Gavin was beside her and handed over the phone.
He began with his name. Then he said he had been present when Owen struck Martin. Nina moved a few feet away while he supplied the details, leaving him to say the parts she couldn't know.
When the call ended, Gavin gave her back the phone.
“They're asking for the correspondence,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I'll send the copies today. Originals I have to get out of the place. They've told us to clear the work there. Funny timing.”
Nina looked at him. “Tell them exactly where and when. Don't go there if you know Owen's around.”
“I'm frightened. I'm not stupid.”
She gave him the officer's contact again. He checked it against the message he'd just received and saved it.
He stood, leaving his empty bottle on the table, then came back for it. At the trash can he struggled with the lid and swore under his breath. Nina watched him leave with his thin folder and the bag of ordinary things he'd brought from work.
On her phone was the first page he'd sent. Her number beneath a plan for an encounter she had spent six years calling chance.
She saved the message and the actual circumstances of its arrival. Then she called Adam and said Gavin wanted to speak to him himself.