The Skim

The mouth opens, and the thing that comes out of it is not a confession and is not the cello, and for one terrible second I do not know whose it is.

"Get him off his radio."

It is to the receptionist, and it is low, and it is mine, I think it is mine, because Cosima would never give a stranger the gift of being protected from a scene, Cosima would let the security man earn his wage and let Joss be carried out screaming for the cameras, that is a clean ending and a useful story and the appetite was halfway to wanting it. But the words came out plain, the chest-voice and the founder-voice for once saying the same thing, and the man with his hand on the radio looks at me and hears a founder telling him to stand down, and he does, because the world waits, and I hate that the body's authority is the only thing in this room that can keep my sister safe.

"Joss," I say. "Come up to my office. Not for me. For you. There are forty people in this atrium with phones and I am not going to have your sister's name read off a screen by lunchtime because we did this where it's bright."

It is the cruellest sentence I have ever built, because all of it is true and all of it is a lie, your sister, as if I am not standing in the only body that knows where your sister has gone, and Joss hears the truth in it and not the lie, the way you always heard the part of me that meant it, and her chin comes down a quarter inch.

"Fine," she says. "Your lovely chair. Lead on."

I lead. I count the lift up because the dread needs somewhere to live and because if I count I cannot say the name in the only register that means it. One: she is in the box with me, four feet away, breathing the air the body breathes, and she does not know me. Two: she has connected the gutted studio to the dark phone and drawn the line to the founder, and the line is correct, it just has the wrong woman at the end of it. Three: I will not find the third thing, and the body does not offer it this time, the body is very still, listening, the way it goes still when the sleeper wants to hear what the sister says next.

The doors open on eleven and I take her into the office and I shut the door behind us and check it, the ritual, my one half-second with my back to the wall, and Joss watches me do it and her eyes narrow because a woman who is hiding nothing does not check a door in her own office.

"You do that like you're scared of something," she says.

"I am," I say, before the cello can dress it, and it is so true it frightens me, and I turn it into the only shape that survives. "Of you. You're terrifying. You've been terrifying since you were six." Her face does something, a crack, gone before it lands, because I have just described her exactly and a stranger could not, and I take my mouth back hard, because that is the wall, that is the one wall, and I almost spent it to comfort her.

"Sit down," I say. "Tell me what happened. From the beginning. The real one, not the one you rehearsed in the lift on the way here to throw at me."

She does not sit. But she talks. And while she talks I do the thing I have learned to do in this body that is the only weapon Talia ever had, which is listen the way a designer listens, for the part of the system everyone is looking past.

Three weeks of silence. Before that, months of a sister who sounded flat and far and wrong, who stopped finishing sentences, who once, on the phone, did not know the name of the cafe she and Joss had gone to every Sunday for nine years. Joss says it like the worst thing, the cafe, and it is the worst thing, it is the on-rails thing, it is the mind already gone from the body and only the route still running, and I have to hold my own face still while my sister tells me, without knowing it, the exact symptom of the impossible truth I am living inside.

"And the money," Joss says.

I go still. "What money."

"Her account." Joss is pacing now, the worn boots on the founder's clean carpet. "I'm her next of kin, I had the bank send me the statements when she went dark, I thought, I don't know, I thought maybe I'd see where she'd gone, a train, a hotel, something. And there's nothing. No train, no hotel. But for the last four months there's money going IN. Three lots of it. From a company account. From here." She turns and looks at me. "From Halcyon. Paid to my sister, who got nothing from you people for two years, who you ground into the floor, suddenly getting paid, right before she goes quiet. So you tell me, Cosima. What were you paying my sister for."

And the floor goes out from under the conversation, because I know what she is describing and it is not what she thinks it is, and the body knows it faster than I do, the body has already read it, the way the body read Damien for two years, and under my breastbone there is no want at all, only that cold clean recognition again, the way you recognise your own handwriting, and the sleeper says, almost amused, almost approving, oh, Damien, you greedy thing, you've been using her.

I sit down behind the desk because my legs have stopped agreeing to hold a founder up. I open the laptop. I walked out of that atrium wanting two things, Joss out of the glass and whatever she knows, and I have both, and now a third want has arrived without my permission, the way they do, which is to find out before Joss does what those three payments are. Because the question in this room is no longer whether I can keep the wall up. It is whether the answer behind that money is going to be the thing that finally tears it down.

"What were the amounts," I say.

"Why."

"Because I didn't authorise any payment to Talia Frost," I say, and it is the first wholly true sentence I have given her, "and I sign everything over twenty thousand pounds, and if my company is moving money to your sister without my signature then you and I want the same thing, Joss, we just got here by different doors."

She tells me the amounts. I type, and the body types faster than my mind, the founder's credentials, the controls portal, the COO's quarterly disbursement ledger, the muscle navigating a building I never worked in to a screen I have never opened, and there it is, and it is so exactly Damien that I almost laugh, the laugh that means nothing is funny.

Three payments. Vendor account, set up four months ago, a consultancy shell, the kind of name you give a thing you do not want read, paid out of a discretionary line Damien controls and I, the founder, have apparently never queried because the founder before me did not query Damien, the founder before me and Damien were two halves of the same theft. The money does not go to my sister. It goes through her. A name on a flow-through account, paid in, paid straight back out the same day to the shell, three times, four months running. Damien is skimming the discretionary line and laundering it through a junior who left, a junior nobody would look at, a junior who is, on paper, conveniently about to stop being reachable.

He is using the dead woman's name to wash money. And he picked her, of all the names in the company, because Cosima told him, somewhere in a room I was not in, that Talia Frost would not be a problem for very long.

The sleeper says it before I can stop the thought from being a sentence. He doesn't know yet. He thinks he's just being clever. He picked the name I gave him.

I take the count back. I press my palms flat to the cold edge of the desk, the way Joss has hers fisted at her sides, two sisters in a glass room holding themselves still over the same dead-and-not-dead name, and I count, because the dread is past any wall. One: Damien has been moving money through Talia's identity for four months, which means he has been impersonating her, signing as her, keeping her account alive, and a paper trail that says Talia Frost was active and transacting right up until three weeks ago is a paper trail that says she chose to disappear, that she is a fraudster who ran, not a woman who went quiet on rails toward a basement. Two: that paper trail is going to be the exact thing the police believe, when there is something for the police to believe, and Damien built it without knowing he was building an alibi for a murder he does not know is scheduled. Three. There is no three. There is only Joss, watching my face do the arithmetic, watching the founder she came to fight go grey and silent over a laptop, and getting, on her own clever furious face, the first flicker of a worse idea than the one she walked in with.

"You didn't know," Joss says slowly. It is not a question. She has read my face the way she has read my face since she was six. "You actually didn't know."

"No," I say. The cello is gone. There is only the chest-voice, the unspent one, and I cannot afford to spend it and I cannot stop it. "I didn't."

"Then who did."

And I look at my sister across the desk of the woman who is going to kill her, and I open my mouth to give her the one name I can safely give, Damien, the true thing aimed at the guilty man, the move I have made twice now and could make again, when the office door opens without a knock, and Damien Wilde is standing in it with his coat still on and his phone in his hand, looking at the two of us, looking at the open ledger glowing on my screen that he can read upside down as well as I can, and his pleasant face does the thing it did with the prototype, the smile that stops, and he says, light, friendly, to me, not to her, "Cosima. Who's your guest?"