The Number

Costa did not want to hear about the eleven calls. Nadia had expected that, and she had still driven across the city to tell him in person, because some things needed a face attached so they could not be filed under a misheard phone call later. "You were asked to verify a restaurant." Costa did not raise his voice. Solicitors who billed at his rate never raised their voices; they simply became very precise, as if precision were a kind of door closing. "You verified the restaurant. The restaurant is excellent for our client. The CCTV is excellent for our client. You have, in the course of being thorough, gone and pulled a record relating to the deceased — which was not your instruction, Ms. Reyes — and you have found a detail which, if it means anything, can only complicate a defence that is currently in very good order." "It means Helen Crane was being called eleven times on the night she died by a number nobody can trace, and that number isn't in the police disclosure." Nadia kept her own voice even. "Either the police don't have it, which is a failure, or they have it and didn't disclose it, which is worse. Both of those are things a defence is supposed to want." "A defence wants its client acquitted." Costa folded his hands. "Our client has a clean, complete, independently verified alibi for the entire window. He could not have made those calls; he was on camera, on his own, not on the phone. So the eleven calls, whatever they are, are someone else's problem. They are, if anything, more evidence that Daniel Vesper is innocent. And I would very strongly prefer, Ms. Reyes, that you write the report you were engaged to write, confirm the alibi, and let the eleven calls remain a curiosity that nobody you work for has any interest in pursuing." Nadia drove home and did not write the report. It was not nobility. She wanted to be honest with herself about that, sitting again at her kitchen table with the clean notebook open. It was not some clean burning commitment to truth. It was that Daniel Vesper had flinched away from his phone forty times in three hours, and Helen Crane's phone had rung eleven times in those same three hours, and Nadia did not believe — could not make herself believe — that two phones behaving so strangely on the same evening were unconnected. Costa said Vesper could not have made the calls. Nadia accepted that completely. The CCTV was good. The man at the Lantern had not dialled anyone. But there was a great deal of space between *did not make the calls* and *had nothing to do with them.* A man could sit alone in a restaurant, building himself an alibi one linen tablecloth at a time, and flinch at his silent phone the entire evening because he was waiting — dreading — to learn whether something he had set in motion somewhere else had been done. Nadia went back to the CCTV a third time, and this time she did not watch Daniel Vesper. She watched the door. At twenty past nine, a woman came into the Lantern, spoke briefly to the host, and was directed toward the back. She passed within a few feet of Vesper's table. She did not look at him and he did not look at her, and that — Nadia knew, with the certainty that nineteen years grinds into a person — was itself a kind of looking. Two strangers genuinely indifferent to each other glance, reflexively, the way you glance at a passing car. Two people performing strangerhood hold very still. The woman held very still. Vesper held very still. And then she was gone toward the back of the restaurant and the moment closed over like water. Nadia froze the frame on the woman's face. Mid-thirties. Dark coat, good but not memorable. She did not recognise her, which meant nothing; she recognised almost nobody. But she could find out. The Lantern kept its bookings, and a woman who arrived at twenty past nine and went to the back had either booked a table or met someone who had, and either way her name, or a name, would be in a system Nadia had already been given access to. It took two phone calls and one small, careful untruth to the restaurant manager. The booking at the back table that night, party of two, nine-fifteen, was in the name of M. Holloway. Nadia wrote it in the notebook under the untraceable number. Then she sat back and looked at the two facts together — the number that had called a dead woman eleven times, and the woman who had walked past Daniel Vesper's alibi without looking at it — and she felt the particular cold that came when a simple job stopped being simple and revealed, underneath, the shape of something that had been arranged. Her own phone buzzed against the table. An unknown number. Nadia looked at it ring, once, twice, and thought about eleven missed calls in an empty flat, and on the third ring she answered it and said nothing at all. There was a silence on the line that was not an empty silence. It was the silence of someone listening to find out whether she would speak first. "Ms. Reyes," a man's voice said eventually, pleasant, unhurried. "You've had a long day. The restaurant, the records, Mr. Costa's office, and now you're sitting up late with a notebook. You should write the report. It's a good report. The alibi is sound." A pause. "The alibi is genuinely sound, Ms. Reyes. That's the part I'd like you to hear properly. Daniel Vesper truly was at the Lantern all evening. Everything you've verified is true." "Then you've nothing to worry about," Nadia said. "No," the voice agreed, and there was something almost like warmth in it, which was the worst thing she had heard all day. "But you've started pulling at a number that doesn't lead anywhere, and a name that does, and the trouble with you, Ms. Reyes — I've read about you — is that you don't stop at the answer you were paid for. You stop at the true one. And the true one here is a great deal larger than a restaurant, and a great many people have already agreed it should stay the size of a restaurant." The line went dead. Nadia sat very still at her kitchen table. Then, slowly, she turned to a fresh page in the notebook and wrote down the time of the call, and the words *the alibi is sound*, and underlined them twice — because a man had just gone out of his way, at considerable risk, to make sure she believed Daniel Vesper's alibi was real. And in nineteen years she had learned that nobody ever worked that hard to protect a true thing unless the true thing was hiding a far more useful lie.