The Reply

In the morning, Imogen did what she had wanted to do since the first text: she answered.

Who are you? she wrote, to the unknown number, and watched the message sit there, grey, undelivered to a phone that had already forgotten its own SIM.

"The number is dead," Sebastian said, reading over her shoulder with his coffee going cold. "They all are. Every text comes from a different one. Buy a SIM, send once, destroy it." He said it the way you describe weather in a country you've lived in. "That's tradecraft. That's a man who spent thirty years being the message nobody could trace."

"Sorrell."

"Or his keeper. Or Walter's man." He put the coffee down. "Or Sorrell himself, Imogen. That's the thing I can't make sit still. The roses were mine. Walter wrote that he had them delivered by a man he shouldn't have trusted. If Sorrell is telling you the roses were his - not Walter's, his - then he's telling you the wreath at your mother's funeral was personal."

"A confession in installments," she said. "Four words at a time."

"A man like that doesn't confess." Sebastian looked out at the city. "A man like that settles accounts."

The board had been called for the next day.

Vivienne had used the extraordinary-session rule, the one Walter himself had written into the company's bones forty years ago, for a vote of confidence in the CEO. Day ninety. Eleven days before the shares vested, if the marriage held. Sebastian explained it the way he explained everything now, evenly, as if it were happening to a company he had read about.

"She can't touch the trust," he said. "The trust holds the shares until day one hundred, whatever happens. But if the board votes no confidence tomorrow, I'm out of the chair before the shares ever reach me, and she'll spend eleven days making sure what reaches me is a company already carved. It's legal. It's clean. It's exactly what I would do."

"Then don't lose."

"Imogen." He almost smiled. "The board is eleven people. Six of them have known Vivienne since she was sixteen. Two owe her their seats. One is her godfather." He counted on his fingers the way other men count money. "I need to be in that room with something she didn't buy."

"You need a wife," Imogen said.

He looked at her then, properly, the way he had looked at her across the counter the night before, with his hand around hers.

"I need you to sit in that room," he said, "where my father used to sit, and remind me the door is mine to open. I don't need you to speak. I need you to be the one thing in the building she didn't see coming thirty years ago."

"She'll say I was bought. Five hundred thousand dollars, day one."

"She will."

"Then I'll wear the necklace your grandfather left in the wardrobe," Imogen said, "and when she says it, I won't blink." She picked up his cold coffee and took it to the sink, because somebody in that house had to keep the small things alive. "What time do I need to be ready?"

"Nine. The board sits at ten." He paused. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. It's in the contract." She said it lightly, and they both heard how untrue it had become, and let it stand.

She called Danny at lunch, on her break, from the bench outside St. Augustine's where the smokers used to congregate before the hospital banned them to the far gate.

He sounded twenty-four again. He had been at Moss's garage since seven, he had rebuilt a carburettor older than himself, and Moss had said he could keep the late shift if he wanted it, and the late shift paid time and a half.

"He doesn't do favors, Moss," Danny said. "He just does work. You know how long it's been since anybody looked at me and saw work?"

"I know," Imogen said, and meant it, and was halfway through telling him about the vote when his voice changed.

"Immy." Quieter. "There was a man in here this morning. Black car, grey coat, polite as a vicar. Ordered a coffee at the counter across the road and watched the garage for an hour, and then he came in and asked Moss if we did estimates."

Her whole body went to a single point of listening.

"It was him. The man from the photograph. Sorrell." Danny's voice had gone very steady, the way it went when he was being brave and wanted credit for it later. "He didn't look at me. Not once. He asked Moss about a service for the car, and Moss quoted him, and he paid for the coffee he'd already drunk, cash, and he left a tip and a napkin."

"Danny."

"I've got the napkin, Immy. He left it on the counter, folded in half, under the tip. Moss didn't see. Nobody saw." Paper crackled down the line. "It's got a phone number at the top, and under it, one line. It says - "

She heard him breathe in, the way he used to before jumping off the garage roof into piles of leaves.

"It says: Tell your sister the vote tomorrow is already bought. She'll know what to do with that."

The bench was cold under her. Across the road, an ambulance turned into the bay with its lights on and its siren off, which was always worse.

"Read it to me again," she said.

He read it again.

"Keep the napkin," she said. "Don't call the number. Don't tell Moss. Go back to work and be ordinary, Danny, be the most ordinary man in London."

"Immy. Is it true? Can she buy the vote?"

Imogen thought of eleven people in a boardroom, six of them bought when they were young. She thought of Walter's small, arrogant handwriting: the trap is a story you agreed to believe.

"Yes," she said. "It's true."

"Then what are you going to do?"

She watched the ambulance doors open. She thought: you don't save a patient by wishing the blood back. You find out where it's going and you get there first.

"I'm going to find out what she bought them with," Imogen said. "And then I'm going to buy them back."