The story Cal had given the hospital was short enough to remember while Nora was in pain. Broken glass. Helping at a job. A panel which slipped.
Repeating it in her apartment took more effort.
“What sort of panel?” Bell asked.
“An old door. Glazed.”
“Where was this?”
“Essex. My brother was clearing things from a property.”
“Which property?”
Nora looked at the glass in her hand. There was a small chip beneath the rim, old enough that she'd forgotten to throw it away.
“I don't have the address.”
“You were there.”
“He drove.”
Bell nodded, accepting the answer as something to write down rather than something to believe. Nora gave him the name of the hospital. She knew that. She remembered it on a wall opposite the place she had sat waiting to be taken home, dressed in a shirt Cal bought because her own clothes were too much of a question.
The uniformed woman asked how she'd been getting on since then.
“It's healing,” Nora said.
“Have you got someone helping you?”
“My brother.”
“Anybody else?”
Mina, who had brought soup, taken rubbish out and stood at the sink complaining that Nora's washing-up liquid resembled a decorative object rather than something useful. Iris, who would have known where the spare towels were, what Nora wanted when she claimed she wasn't hungry, the difference between a headache and a mood she couldn't afford to show at work.
“A friend,” she said. “She's coming round.”
Bell asked for Cal's number, though they already had it. Nora gave it to him. He read it back. Hearing her brother reduced to eleven digits made her want to say something about him which the notebook couldn't accommodate.
“He took me to hospital,” she said. “He stayed with me.”
She had seen him there. She remembered his T-shirt, the small dark patch on the shoulder, the way he held the cup level while she drank. Later he told her he'd hardly left the place. She'd been frightened enough to accept the account without trying to measure the hours she'd spent under other people's care.
“We'll speak to him,” Bell said.
“He's working.”
“We can arrange that.”
Nora wanted to ask what they could do to Iris. For turning up now. For leaving her on that floor. For making her arm something two strangers were entitled to discuss in a room where Iris had once eaten toast in a towel.
Instead she asked whether she was supposed to stay home.
“You've somewhere you need to be?”
“Work. My business is opening.”
“Today?”
“Soon. There are things to finish.”
Bell looked at her arm, then at her face. “Keep your phone on. If you remember anything else about Ms Keene, call us.”
He gave her a card. The uniformed woman told her to get help if she felt unwell. It was kind, practical advice, and Nora thanked her with more warmth than she'd managed for anything else.
When they stood, Nora stood too. She opened the apartment door and followed them halfway to the stairs. Bell turned.
“One last thing. Has anyone else been staying here recently?”
The question made the scarf beside the bathroom door as conspicuous as if she'd left it on his chair.
“Not recently,” she said.
“All right.”
He went down. Nora stayed at the door until the outer entrance closed. Then she shut her own, turned the lock and stood with the card pressed between her fingers.
She had chosen the larger lie. At first it had been a word, no, aimed at a name. Now it included a hospital, a house, an absent woman and her brother's morning. Each answer needed the others to remain where she put them.
Her phone rang again.
“They've gone,” she told Cal.
“What did you say?”
Not are you all right. She heard it, then heard the noise behind him, a drill stopping, somebody calling across a room. He was at the showroom. Of course he wanted to know what she'd said.
“That I was alive.”
“Nor.”
“What else should I have said?”
“You know what I mean.”
She sat on the sofa before answering. Her arm had begun to throb again, tired from being held still in the wrong position.
“I said I didn't know her.”
Cal breathed out. She could hear him moving away from the other noise, then a door closing.
“Good.”
“Why did she do it?”
“I don't know.”
“You talked to the police.”
“They rang looking for you. I told them to keep trying. Then I rang you.”
“And told me not to open the door.”
“Because I wanted to know what was happening first.”
He sounded irritated now, less frightened. It made him easier to hear. She could picture him with his phone tucked against his jaw, one hand opening something because he never allowed a conversation to remain his only job for long.
“She told them about the house,” Nora said. “The door. Where she left me.”
“She can say anything.”
“She can say something that happened.”
“And she can explain why she did it.”
Nora rubbed the edge of the card with her thumb. Bell's surname had begun to bend.
“Did you speak to her?”
“When?”
“After.”
“I told you. She went. She'd taken off with the bag, and you were on the floor.”
He wasn't answering quite the question she'd asked. Nine days ago she would not have noticed. Nine days ago he'd come to the hospital with a toothbrush, clean clothes, the cup, and a face so angry she hadn't known whether to apologize or ask him to hold her hand.
“They'll go there,” she said.
“To the house?”
“They said they were checking.”
There was a pause. Nora looked toward the bedroom wall, the thin pale edge she could see beyond the door.
“You said you'd dealt with it.”
“I did what I could.”
“Cal.”
“You were bleeding. I couldn't do everything in the right order.”
Her anger stopped in the place his voice always found. She remembered his hand pressing cloth against her arm, the pain so sharp that she tried to pull away. He told her not to. He'd sounded furious because he was frightened. She had seen that face before, when Cal was sixteen and she was twenty-one, promising she'd get home before their mother's evening became something she couldn't manage.
He had come for her this time.
“I know,” she said.
“Do you?”
She closed her eyes. “Yes.”
“Then let me find out what's going on.”
“They want to speak to you.”
“Fine. I'll speak to them.”
He waited a moment, then his voice softened.
“Did you have breakfast?”
She looked at the mug by the sink.
“No.”
“Eat something.”
“I'm coming in.”
“Mina's cabinet's here. You're not lifting it.”
“I wasn't going to lift it.”
“You were going to tell us where to put it and then decide it'd be easier to do it yourself.”
She smiled despite wanting to remain angry. “That does sound familiar.”
“Eat first.”
He ended the call. Nora sat with the phone still in her hand.
The showroom was nearly complete because Cal had brought back enough of Dominic's money to finish it. Iris had gone with the bag, he said; he'd recovered a portion from what was left. Nora had not asked him to make the source prettier. She knew where they'd gone, what they'd intended to take and what she would have been willing to carry out if the door had not broken behind her.
Before the theft, her money had reached almost far enough. She had found the premises, paid for the lease, ordered work and then discovered how many ordinary things could stop a room from opening. Electrics. Insurance. A fitting whose photograph had failed to show its price. Mina's work, which Nora wanted because it would make customers understand what sort of business she'd built before she had to explain it.
She could have waited. She could have chosen cheaper pieces. She could have gone on making rooms for men like Dominic Rusk, who asked for her opinion and then treated the fee as something negotiable because she'd enjoyed giving it.
Instead she listened when Iris told her about the cash.
It had not sounded like a crime at first, which was the lie Nora had told herself more successfully than any she offered Bell. It sounded like an amount. Enough. Dominic kept enough in a place Iris knew, spent casually on things he would allow no one else to touch and expected her to continue folding his shirts for wages which arrived when he remembered them.
Cal made the rest seem manageable. A trip. A house without its owner. Three people who already knew one another. Nora remembered agreeing while looking at the showroom drawings on her table. Not cornered, not drugged, not frightened. Pleased by the opening of a possibility she hadn't earned.
She put the card down and went to make toast.
The butter was too hard. She couldn't steady the bread and spread it with the same hand, and her injured fingers refused the small pressure she tried to give them. After two failed attempts she set the knife down and stood watching the toast cool.
When Mina rang the entry bell, Nora let her in without asking Cal.
Her friend arrived breathing hard from the stairs, carrying a paper bag and wearing a coat she had pulled over clothes meant for her workshop. She looked at Nora's face, then at the bandage, then put the bag down.
“You could have answered.”
“I was asleep.”
“For all of it?”
“The phone was silent.”
Mina came across and hugged her carefully. Nora let her, feeling the ridiculous fresh shock of being warm and upright in somebody's arms after a morning in which her existence had required confirmation.
“Cal rang,” Mina said against her shoulder. “Said someone had told police you were dead. I thought he'd got something wrong.”
“I wish he had.”
Mina drew back. “What happened?”
Nora looked toward the sofa, the place Bell had sat, the card she'd left face up.
“A woman made a confession. They came to check.”
“Who?”
“Iris Keene.”
Mina frowned. “The woman you let stay?”
For a moment Nora couldn't speak. Of course Mina knew. She'd been here, had coffee with Iris, complained about the biscuits Iris had bought and then eaten four. Their ordinary lives contained people who would not become strangers because Nora needed them to.
“Yes,” she said.
“Why would she say that?”
“I don't know.”
Mina looked at her more carefully. Nora kept her face still, ashamed of how much effort it took to do that with someone who had come upstairs carrying breakfast.
“Did you tell them she stayed here?” Mina asked.
“I didn't tell them everything.”
“Nora.”
“I was half asleep. They turned up and started asking things.”
Mina stayed quiet. Then she turned toward the toast, picked up the knife and cut a thin slice of butter which Nora could use without asking her to spread it.
“Eat that,” she said. “Then tell me what half asleep means.”
Nora took the knife in her good hand. The butter began to soften on the warm part of the toast. She looked at Mina's paper bag and the chair where Iris had sat, and understood that the first person who could ruin her account had brought her something to eat.