I called Bishop first.I stood at the window of my office with the phone to my ear and my back to Sophia. "Victor Grant is home, and he's shouting at his wife," I said. "I've never heard him do it. I want a man on that street tonight, close enough to see the house and the road. If anyone leaves in a hurry, or if anything looks wrong, I want to know within a minute."Bishop heard me out in silence. When I'd finished, he said only, "Twenty minutes," and hung up.I turned. Sophia hadn't moved. She sat on the edge of the chair with her phone in both hands and her eyes on the dark screen, and I knew without being told that she was counting the minutes until it lit.I came back and sat across from her. I didn't speak. There wasn't anything useful to say. A man was shouting in a room across the city, and a woman was standing in front of him with her hands folded, and the only thing either of us could do was wait.It rang at five past ten.Sophia held her phone out and pressed the speaker, th

Bishop arrived at eight on Thursday with two other men.I'd asked for him alone. But he walked into the room beside my office with a slim, grey-haired man in a rumpled jacket and a younger one carrying a flat case, and he introduced them in a single sentence and sat down before I could object. The grey-haired one was a forensic accountant. The younger one, Bishop said, was very good at finding where things had been put.I looked at the three of them across the long table. The strip of paper still ran along the far wall, covered in pins and dates and small neat handwriting. Nobody remarked on it. I'd noticed that, in the weeks since Bishop had started coming, nobody ever did."You had a long night," Bishop said."Sophia heard from the house at midnight." I told them the outline of it, briefly, leaving out most of what Margaret had said. They listened without moving. When I finished, the accountant took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve."A divorce he won't file," he said.

The younger man found it on Tuesday evening, and he found it by accident.That was how he put it afterward, in a flat, apologetic voice, as though he'd been caught trespassing. He had been working through the firm's mail since the previous Friday, in the room by the long table, with his machine open on its cable and a thermos beside him that he never seemed to drink from. Bishop had given him a narrow brief. Look for what had been moved or removed since the retention schedule changed. Look for anything that had been there once and wasn't now.I'd stopped checking on him by Monday. I'd learned not to hover.At ten to seven, he knocked on the frame of my office door and said, "Mr. Cole, I think you ought to come."---Bishop was already there. So was the accountant, standing at the back of the room with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, looking, for once, entirely without expression. The young man's screen glowed against the wall. He'd turned it so that I could read it from the doo

It was ten past eleven when the number lit again.I'd spent the morning the way a man spends a morning when he's waiting for something he can't hasten. I'd read the Hartwell summary Marcus had left on my desk. I'd taken a call from the property side and listened to a lawyer explain a clause. I'd stood at the window for some time, looking at nothing, with my hands in my pockets and the folded letter heavy against my side. Nakamura had come in at ten with a report on the week's positions, and I'd read it without taking in a figure.The phone buzzed on the blotter. I took it up and read.*He called back at a quarter to eleven. Before noon, as he'd said.**Where?**The east stair. The window on the half landing. He used the phone he keeps for Victor.*I thought of Nakamura, standing in the corridor, watching a man look out of a window he never looked out of. I thought of how little the building had to hide.*What did he say?*The dots came and went. It was a longer pause than usual, and w

I took it to the firm's lawyer on Friday morning.I had thought about that decision for most of the previous night, and in the end it came down to a simple fact. Everything I had against Marcus had been built in rooms I'd chosen. I'd built it with Bishop, and Sophia, and a stranger with a machine, and a voice on a telephone that wouldn't say its name. It had all been done quietly, and carefully, and it was real. But it was not yet the kind of real that could be put before anyone who didn't already believe me.A man like Marcus would have lawyers. He'd have the weight of twenty years behind him, and every door in the building would open to his hand. If I wanted to stand against that, I needed someone on my side who could read a document the way a court would.So I put the folder in a case, and Bishop carried the case, and we went down two floors to an office whose door I'd opened perhaps four times in my life.---The general counsel was a spare, careful woman in her sixties, with iron