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The name M. Holloway resolved, after a day of the patient unglamorous work that was most of Nadia's job, into a woman called Marian Holloway, who was a probate clerk at a firm three streets from Costa's office, and who had no criminal record, no connection to Daniel Vesper that any public record would admit to, and no obvious reason to have eaten dinner at the back of the Lantern on the night Helen Crane died. Probate. Nadia sat with that word for a while. Probate was wills. Probate was what happened to a person's estate after they died. Probate was, when you stripped the law-firm gentility off it, the machinery by which the possessions of the dead were moved into the hands of the living. She pulled what she could on Helen Crane, the victim, the woman everyone in this case kept describing as the victim and nobody described as anything else — as if being killed were the only fact about her that mattered, as if she had not had thirty-eight years of life before the eleven calls rang out into her empty flat. Helen Crane had been, it turned out, a reasonably wealthy woman. Not dramatically so. But she had inherited a house, free of mortgage, from an aunt some years before, and she had owned it outright, and a house owned outright in that part of the city was worth a sum that could rearrange the lives of several people who did not currently have it. And Helen Crane, as far as Nadia could establish in two long evenings, had no children, no living parents, and no spouse. Which raised, quietly and with great force, the question that the police file — focused entirely on the manner of her death and the movements of Daniel Vesper — had never thought to ask out loud. Who got the house. Nadia did not yet know. Probate took time; an estate that size would still be grinding through the system. But she knew that a probate clerk named Marian Holloway had sat at the back of a restaurant on the night of the death, performing strangerhood with the very man whose alibi that restaurant existed to provide — and she knew that wills could be written, and rewritten, and that the date on the most recent one would tell her, with the clean brutal honesty of paperwork, whether Helen Crane's death had been a tragedy or a transaction. She thought about Costa, billing in his careful increments, insisting the eleven calls were someone else's problem. She thought about the pleasant unhurried voice on her phone, taking the trouble to assure her the alibi was sound. The alibi *was* sound. That had been the point of it. Daniel Vesper had spent three hours building an unbreakable, camera-verified, linen-tablecloth account of where he was — and a man only builds an alibi that good when he knows, in advance, the precise window of time he will need to be accounted for. You could not know that. Not unless you knew, in advance, when Helen Crane was going to die. Nadia closed the notebook. The simple job was three weeks old now and had cost her a night's sleep for most of them, and Costa would not pay for a single hour of what she had actually found, and the correct, professional, self-preserving move was still, even now, to write the tidy report and walk away. Instead she took out her phone and looked at the untraceable number, the one that had called Helen Crane eleven times. She had been treating it as a dead end. A number that led nowhere. But a number was only untraceable from the outside — somewhere there was a handset, and the handset had been somewhere on the night of the calls, and a handset that called the same flat eleven times in three hours had almost certainly been somewhere it could watch that flat and wait for an answer that was never coming. She thought she knew, now, why Daniel Vesper had flinched away from his phone all evening. He had not been waiting to make a call. He had been waiting for someone else to confirm a thing was finished — and the eleven calls were that someone, growing more and more certain, ring by unanswered ring, that it was. Nadia stood up and got her coat. It was past eleven and the city had gone to its late quiet, and she had no business going anywhere, and she was going anyway, because the report could wait and the truth, in her experience, never did. She had one stop to make before morning. Helen Crane's flat had been released by the police a week ago; the file said so. Released, and empty, and waiting — like every estate, like every house owned outright by a woman with no children and no spouse — for the machinery of probate to decide whose it became. Nadia wanted to stand in it. She wanted to stand where the phone had rung eleven times, and look out of whatever window faced the street, and find out exactly what a patient man with an untraceable handset would have been able to see while he waited.