A Simple Job

The job came in the way the simple ones always did, which should have been Nadia's first warning, because nineteen years as a defence investigator had taught her that the universe did not hand out simple jobs and the people who described a job as simple were either lying or had not yet read the file. "It's nothing," said the solicitor, whose name was Costa and who billed in increments Nadia could only dream of. "A verification. Our client says he was at a restaurant in Halewood between eight and eleven on the night in question. We need a body to confirm the restaurant exists, confirm the booking, gather the CCTV before it cycles out, talk to the staff. A day's work. Two at the outside." "Whose alibi am I confirming?" "A man called Daniel Vesper." Costa slid a folder across the desk with the particular delicacy of someone handing over a thing he would prefer not to touch. "He's charged in connection with the death of a woman named Helen Crane. We're saying he was nowhere near it. The restaurant proves that. You're just the person who makes the proof tidy." Nadia took the folder home and read it at her kitchen table with the window open and the city making its evening noise below, and the file was, on its face, exactly as described. Daniel Vesper, forty-one, a property surveyor with no record and a careful manner. Helen Crane, thirty-eight, found dead in her flat eleven days before, and the manner of her death was the sort of thing Nadia made herself read once, fully, and then set aside, because dwelling on the dead did not serve the living and the living were who paid her. The restaurant was real. She confirmed that in an afternoon. It was called the Lantern, a mid-priced place with linen tablecloths and a booking system that kept good records, and the records showed a table for one in the name of D. Vesper, eight o'clock, the night in question. The CCTV, when the manager finally found the right drive, showed a man who was unmistakably Daniel Vesper arriving at three minutes past eight and leaving at four minutes to eleven, and in between he ate a meal alone and looked at his phone a great deal, the way people eating alone do. A day's work. Costa had been right. Nadia could have written the report that evening and invoiced for two days and nobody, anywhere, would have known the difference. But she watched the CCTV again, because she always watched things again, and the second time she noticed the phone. Daniel Vesper looked at his phone forty or fifty times across those three hours. That was not unusual. What was unusual was the way he looked at it — the small flinch, each time, the way you check a thing you are dreading rather than a thing you are hoping for. A man waiting for good news leans toward his phone. Daniel Vesper leaned away from his, every time, and then made himself pick it up, and then set it down again with his jaw tight. It was nothing. It was a man having a bad evening. People had bad evenings. Nadia made a note of it anyway, because the note cost her nothing, and then she did the thing that turned a one-day job into the worst three weeks of her professional life. She requested, as a matter of routine thoroughness, the call records for the night in question — not Vesper's, those were already in the file, clean as a whistle, no calls in or out between eight and eleven. She requested Helen Crane's. There was no reason to. Helen Crane was the victim, not the alibi; her phone had nothing to do with whether Daniel Vesper had eaten alone at the Lantern. Nadia requested the records because nineteen years had taught her that a file with a hole in it was more dangerous than a file with a wound in it, and the hole in this file was that nobody had told her how Daniel Vesper and Helen Crane knew each other in the first place. The records came back four days later. Helen Crane's phone, the evening of her death. Between eight and eleven o'clock — across the exact three hours Daniel Vesper sat alone at the Lantern flinching away from his phone — Helen Crane's phone had received eleven calls. All eleven had gone unanswered, because by eight o'clock that night, Nadia already knew, Helen Crane was almost certainly dead. Eleven missed calls, ringing out into an empty flat, beside a body. And all eleven of them had come from the same number. A number that did not appear anywhere in the police file. A number that, when Nadia ran it, came back to nothing at all — no name, no contract, no provider record she could reach. A number that had called a dead woman eleven times and then, at three minutes to eleven, the same minute Daniel Vesper stood up from his table and put on his coat, had stopped calling forever. Nadia sat at her kitchen table with the window open and the city going on below, and she looked at the eleven missed calls for a long time. Costa had told her the job was simple. Costa had told her she was just the person who made the proof tidy. But proof, in Nadia's experience, was only ever tidy when somebody had spent a great deal of effort tidying it, and she was holding, in eleven lines of a phone record nobody had asked her to pull, the loose thread they had missed. She should call Costa. That was the correct thing. Report the anomaly, let the solicitor decide, stay in her lane. Instead Nadia made a fresh pot of coffee, because she could feel the night going long, and she opened a clean notebook, and at the top of the first page she wrote the untraceable number, and under it she wrote the only honest sentence she had: *Someone needed Helen Crane to answer her phone, very badly, eleven times, and then accepted that she never would.*