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“Leonard is going out to the brother’s house on Thursday evening.” She doesn’t look up from what she’s reading. “He’ll knock. He’ll be shown in. He’ll sit in the front room for about twenty minutes without touching him. Then he’ll leave. The brother will telephone your goaltender inside four minutes.”

The heating is at seventy-four. My coat is over my arm and my arm has gone cold anyway.

“The account is current,” I say. “There’s nothing outstanding.”

“There’s nothing outstanding, which is exactly the difficulty. Ten weeks of a man being perfectly cooperative, and now he’s stopped being frightened. A man who’s stopped being frightened begins to think the arrangement is a relationship.” She turns a page. “It’s forty-one, isn’t it? Forty-one Alder?”

She has the address in front of her.

She’s had it since late November. I typed it into a routine report and sent it to her at eleven minutes past midnight—the house number, the street, the fact that he lives there alone. Everything.

“Yes,” I say. “Forty-one.”

“You confirmed it yourself. I remember thinking it was odd you’d driven out.”

“It was on the way.”

“Nothing is on the way to Alder Street.” She takes the glasses off, folds them, and sets them down. I have nine years of knowing what that means.

I don’t have time to build anything. So I use the only material she’s ever accepted.

“Let me do it instead.”

Her eyes come up.

“Roth broke that man’s hand in four places in November,” I say. “Four. A surgeon put pins in two fingers. He still has another four weeks to go. I accept that Roth won’t touch him. The brother will still spend twenty minutes with the man who did it sitting on his couch. He’s not stable; he talks. He won’t phone the goaltender in four minutes. He’ll call a lawyer or the police. Or he’ll get in his truck at eleven at night, drive to that apartment, and say ‘syndicate’ out loud in a lobby with a camera.”

She’s entirely still, listening.

“You have a goaltender playing the best hockey of his life,” I say, “in the eleven weeks before a playoff position gets decided. Every line of my Monday report is worth money to you because he’s playing and because nobody outside that building knows anything about him that I haven’t told you. A frightened brother costs you the report. That’s the number. I can produce the same result on Thursday with none of the exposure, because he knows me and he believes I’m on his brother’s side.”

Vera picks the glasses up and puts them on.

She takes a long time about it. She doesn’t do that. In nine years, I’ve watched this woman price a shipping consignment, a man’s marriage, and a bad quarter in under fifteen seconds each.

“You’ve never argued with me about method before,” she says.

“I’ve never had an account that ran past ninety days.”

“No.” She turns the glasses over once in her hand. “Roth will handle this.”

She goes back to her screen. “You’ve just told me that your access is worth more than Leonard’s methods. You may find I remember that.”

I drive out to Alder Street that night. It’s Sunday.

Fintan Doyle opens the door in a fleece, his right hand still splinted, a dishtowel over his shoulder. Recognition hits first. Then fear.

“Mr. Brandt. Hey. Hey, come in, it’s freezing, come in, I’ve got the kettle. Is it Kieran? Is Kieran all right?”

“He’s fine. Sit down.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Sit down, Fin.”

He sits on the arm of a chair, which isn’t sitting.

The room is small and warm. There’s a television on with the sound off, a plate on the floor beside the chair with a fork on it. There are photographs on every flat surface of two boys and a woman with the same eyes as both of them, in an older frame, at the back of the shelf.