Adrian looked at the photograph for a long time without saying anything.
She had forwarded it to him at midnight and he had called her immediately and she had told him not to come over, that she was fine, that she just needed him to look at it. He had agreed and then showed up at her door at eight in the morning with the photograph printed out and a very specific look on his face.
She let him in because arguing about it would take longer than just dealing with him.
He set the printout on her kitchen table and studied it with the focused attention of someone who knew what they were looking for. His finger moved to the angle of the shot. "This wasn't taken from street level," he said.
"I thought the same."
"Third or fourth floor. The building directly opposite mine has office space on those floors. A letting agency and two private firms." He took out his phone. "I'm going to make a call."
"To who."
"My head of security. He'll pull the access logs for that building."
He stepped into the hallway to make the call and Diane stood at the window and looked at the street below and thought about the particular unpleasantness of being watched without knowing it. The photograph had been taken from forty metres away at least and yet whoever held the camera had known exactly which moment to capture. Not when they arrived. Not when they left. The in-between moment, when she had turned to say something and he had been looking at her and the gap between them was smaller than strictly necessary.
He came back in. "Thirty minutes," he said.
"Okay."
He sat down at her table without asking and she decided not to have the conversation about whether she had invited him to do that. There was coffee in the pot. She poured two cups and put one in front of him and he said thank you in a way that sounded like he meant something slightly different by it.
The silence between them was not uncomfortable, which bothered her a little. It should have been uncomfortable. She should not be at ease with this man in her kitchen at eight in the morning.
"Tell me about your mother," he said.
She looked at him. "Why."
"Because my grandfather mentioned her. In letters I found with the codicil. He wrote about the agreement and the people involved and there's a line about a woman named Evelyn who understood the terms better than anyone on either side of the table." He held his coffee mug with both hands. "He wrote it like he admired her. Or felt guilty. I couldn't tell which."
Diane was quiet for a moment. "My mother never talked about her family. Ever. I knew her parents were dead and that she had a brother she didn't speak to. I knew she grew up with money and chose not to live that way." She paused. "She was the most self-contained person I've ever met. She didn't explain herself. She didn't justify things. She just — moved forward."
"She sounds like someone who made a decision and lived with it."
"That's exactly what she was." Diane looked at the photograph on the table. "She died four years ago. Whatever she knew about all of this, she took it with her."
"I'm sorry."
It landed simply and she accepted it the same way.
His phone buzzed. He read the message and something changed in his face, not alarm, more like the particular stillness of a man who has just had a suspicion confirmed in the worst possible way.
"The office space on the fourth floor," he said. "It was let six weeks ago to a private company. My security team pulled the registration." He set the phone down on the table and turned it so she could read the screen. "The listed director of the company is a man named Kelvin Ade."
She stared at the screen.
The name sat there in clean black type and she read it twice because the first time felt like a mistake.
Kelvin.
Her Kelvin. The man with the grey jacket and the bakery bag and the handwritten note. The man whose first feeling at the possibility of fatherhood had been relief.
"He rented an office across the street from your building," she said slowly. "Six weeks ago."
"Six weeks ago you didn't know about the clause. I hadn't approached you yet." Adrian's voice was measured. "Which means someone told him to be there before either of us made a move."
She sat very still.
"He's not doing this alone," she said.
"No," Adrian said. "He isn't."