Vivian Roost, Cold Harbour

The voice stopped, and the car was very quiet, and the cold sea went on being grey at the bottom of the street as if nothing in it had changed.

Nadia did not move for a long time. She held the lit phone as if it had turned out heavier than it looked, and I watched the detective's last sentence work its way through her, that one wasn't from me, and I saw her arrive at the same place I had, that there were now two strangers in the world who knew I was alive, and only one of them had just told us which one to be afraid of.

"She has the number," Nadia said at last, to the windscreen. "The clean number. The one I bought an hour ago from a half-asleep boy who has already forgotten my face." She turned the phone over in her hand, slow, looking for the place the world had got in. "I have spent eleven years making numbers that cannot be traced. I am good at it. I am the best you can afford, and you could not afford me, which is the only reason you're alive." She finally looked at me. "And a detective two hundred miles south called it before I'd finished paying for it."

"She said she'd rather find me alive."

"People say a great many true things on their way to doing the other thing." But there was no heat in it. Nadia was frightened, and Nadia frightened was a thing I had seen exactly once before, eleven years ago, in a part of her story I was not allowed to read, and the sight of it now did more to wake me than any cold sea could. She pressed the screen until it went dark, and then she pulled the back off the phone with her thumbnail and took its small bright soul out and snapped it, and rolled the window down on the grey street and let the pieces fall into a drain like coins into a well, and that was the end of the cleanest number nobody on earth was supposed to have. "We do not call her back," she said. "Not today. Not from anything I give you. A door that opens both ways is not a door, it's a wound. Do you understand me, Vivian."

It was the name that did it. Vivian. She had been using it on me since the coast road the way you use cold water on a fainting woman, and somewhere in the night, between the emptied account and the dishwater dawn, it had stopped landing on me like a slap and started landing like a coat. I heard her say it and I did not flinch, and I noticed that I did not flinch, and I understood that the noticing was the last of Noor, standing at a window watching the new woman walk down a street she would never get to use.

"I understand you," I said. And then, because I was so tired of being the thing that was understood and managed and kept, I said the first sentence of the rest of my life. "Where do I sleep tonight."

Nadia looked at me, and something in her face eased, the way a held rope eases when the weight comes off it. "Now you're asking the right size of question," she said, and started the engine.

The flat she had rented for Vivian Roost was three rooms over a chandlery on a street that ran down to the water, and it smelled of other people's salt and the cold iron of a building that had never been warm and had stopped apologising for it a hundred years ago. Nadia walked me through it flat and quick, the same brisk handing-over she did with everything, the boiler that needed coaxing, the window that had to be shouldered, the back stair to the yard. There was a bed with a cover the colour of a mussel shell, and a chair, and a table under the window where the light came in off the harbour, grey and moving and alive, and I stood in that light and felt something I had no name for until I had stood in it a while, and then I had the name. It was the light I used to chase. It was the wrong green made right. It was a north light, the kind every painter is taught to want and I had not stood in for eight years, because Aldermoor faced south into a flatter, richer, deader gold, and Gideon had liked me lit like the art.

"You'll want to not love it too fast," Nadia said, watching me watch the window. "Loving a place is how they find you. You put down roots, the roots show on a map." She set a brown envelope on the table, thick, ordinary. "Three months' rent, paid. Enough after that to be careful for a year if you are careful. The eleven thousand is in an account Vivian Roost has every right to. Don't let it become a fortune. A nobody with a fortune is just a somebody who hasn't been caught yet." She put her keys in her pocket. "I leave in the morning."

I had known she would. I had known it the way you know the tide will turn, as a fact about the universe and not a thing you get a vote in. But hearing it in the cold flat, with the envelope on the table and the north light on the water, I felt the old animal panic come up, the wife's panic, the one that had kept me small for eight years, do not let the person who manages you out of the room, you do not work without them.

I let it come, and I looked at it the long flat way I had learned to look at a colour I had used too much of. And then I did the thing the bible of my new life required, which I was only just learning to read. I let her go in my mind before she went in the morning. I made myself the woman who could be left.

"Then tonight you tell me the rest of it," I said.

She went still. "The rest of what."

"Eleven years ago. The number on the burner. Edwin. The job that went wrong." I sat down at the table, in my light, and I did not look away from her, because the artist's eye does not look away, it is the one thing it cannot be taught to do. "You have been carrying a dead woman the whole way north, Nadia, and I have been letting you carry her because I was busy being the live one. But she is in this car with us. She has been in every car. And tomorrow you drive south and leave me alone in a town with a detective who already has my number, and I would like to know, before you go, exactly how the last woman you placed got found."

For a moment I thought she would refuse. She had a face built for refusing; it was most of why she was good. But the north light is honest, that is the whole point of it, it is the light that shows you the true shape of a thing, and in it I watched Nadia Sefton decide to be seen by one person before she vanished again, and it was like watching a tide go out and show you the floor of a thing you had only ever known as water.

She sat down across from me. She put her hands flat on the table, where they could be seen.

"Her name was Marin," she said. "And I did everything right. I did everything exactly the way I did it for you. The death, the paper, the new sea." She looked at her own hands. "And she lived eight months, in a town she loved too fast, and then one ordinary Tuesday a man walked into the cafe where she'd let herself start working, because work is how the lonely ones get found, and he said her old name in a kind voice, and she turned around." Nadia lifted her eyes to mine, and they were dry, which was somehow worse. "She turned around, Vivian. Eight months dead and she still owned the old name with her whole body. That is the only thing that kills you, in the end. Not the cameras. Not the detectives. The name. You spend your life answering to a thing, and the body keeps the appointment long after the mind has cancelled it." She drew a breath. "So when I'm gone, you practise. You answer to Vivian in your sleep. You become a woman who would not turn around if Gideon Roche stood behind you in the street and said the only word that could still reach you."

"And the man who said Marin's name," I said. "Who sent him."

Nadia opened her mouth to answer.

And the chandlery bell rang below us, the shop bell, two storeys down, the small bright domestic sound of a door being opened by a hand that did not know the shop was shut, and we both went absolutely still in the north light, two falsely dead women in a borrowed room, and through the floor, faint and unhurried and climbing the back stair toward us, came the sound of a man's slow tread and a voice that said, to no one, to the empty shop, in a tone of someone reading a name off a piece of paper, "Vivian Roost?"