My Clocking In System

They went at 20 past 2 and Danny got the chair back against the wall and the crate out of the middle of the floor, and then he came round the end of his own counter and stood in front of the machine.

Keisha was packing the holdall.

"Go on then," she said, without looking up.

"What?"

"You’ve been down that end of the counter looking at it for 10 minutes." A cloth went in the bag. "Pull one."

"I don’t know how."

"No."

So she showed him, and it took 90 seconds. Grind, dose, level it off, tamp it, lock it in, go.

Then she folded her arms and let him do it on his own.

It took him 4 minutes and he got it wrong in about 5 places.

He did not level the grounds and she said nothing. He tamped it like a man pushing a drawing pin into a wall and she said nothing about that either. He spent 11 seconds trying to get the portafilter into the group because he could not find the angle, and then he pressed it and stood back and watched.

It came out fast and pale, like a tap running.

Keisha reached past him and stopped it at 14 seconds.

"Right."

"That’s bad."

"That’s brown water and it’s cost you 18 grams." She put the cup in the bucket. "Again."

He did it 6 more times.

The fourth she let run to the end and picked up and put down without a word. The sixth she tasted, made a face, and said, "that’s drinkable and it’s not good, and nobody’s paying £3.20 for drinkable."

Then she wiped the group head down and put the portafilter back in and looked at him.

"How long have I been on a machine?"

"Nine years."

"Nine years." She put the cloth over the bar. "You’ve had 7 goes."

"I know. But you said it Monday. Six o’clock means somebody’s in here at 5, 4 days a week, and I’m the one who’s not going anywhere."

"I did say that."

"So one Friday I’m stood here on my own with 9 people waiting."

"Yeah." Flat. "You are."

Danny stood behind his own counter in front of £4,600 of machine he could not work.

Nine years.

And I’ve got 4 months and 2 of them are Christmas.

She’s known since Monday. That’s why she said Friday exists and walked off up the road. She wasn’t telling me to go and find a bloke. She was telling me to go and find out I can’t do it.

"That lad," he said. "The one with the kid."

Keisha zipped the bag.

"What about him?"

"You said he’d want proper money and a contract and to know he’s not being messed about." Danny had both hands flat on the counter. "Put me in a room with him."

"He’s on a zero hours in a chain, he can’t just walk out for a chat."

"Then I’ll go to him. Wherever he is, whenever he’s off."

She stood with the bag in her hand.

"His name’s Tobi," Keisha said. "He finishes at 4 on a Saturday and he gets the 63 from outside the shop. And if you happened to be at that bus stop at 4 on Saturday with a coffee in your hand, I couldn’t stop you."

Four miles west and a bit north, at 5 to 2, Mara Doyle was stood on the Clapham Road outside a dry cleaner’s looking for a door.

No plate up because somebody took it. It’s the narrow stairs.

There were 2 doors. One was the dry cleaner’s, with a woman inside it steaming something on a pole, and one was a flat brown door next to it with a buzzer and 4 screw holes in the brick where a plate had been.

She rang it and it went bzzt and she pushed it and the stairs were exactly as advertised.

The office was one room at the top with a window onto the road that plainly did not open, a filing cabinet with a dead plant on it, and a desk with a photograph on it turned at an angle where the person behind the desk could see it and nobody else could.

Priya Anand was on the phone when Mara got to the top of the stairs.

She had reading glasses on a chain and a biro through the buttonhole of her cardigan, and she had the handset wedged against her shoulder, and she put one finger up and then pointed it at the chair without any apology in it at all.

Mara sat down and put her folder on her knees, in a room the size of a bathroom, 4 feet from the desk, with nowhere on earth to look.

Downstairs a machine went thump-thump-thump through its cycle and the dead plant on the filing cabinet moved very slightly in time with it.

"Yes, speaking," Priya said.

A pause, and the biro went down on the pad.

"Who’s asking?"

Mara looked out of the window at the Clapham Road, because that is what you do.

"Right. And you’re at the building."

The building.

Her eyes came off the window.

"No, I understand that." Priya had gone still in the chair. "I’ll tell you what I can and what I can’t. I can confirm I acted for a client on a commercial leasehold completion in October. I cannot discuss a client’s affairs with you at all, and I would be struck off for it, so please don’t ask me anything else about him."

Him.

Mara sat absolutely still with a folder on her knees.

"No. I’m not going to confirm an address for you either. Not on a telephone, to somebody who’s rung me out of nowhere."

The machine downstairs changed note and went into its spin.

"You can write to me. If it comes from the managing agent, in writing, with a reference on it, I will consider what I can properly say, and I expect the answer will be very little." Her voice had not gone up once. "What’s the building?"

And Mara Doyle heard the next 4 words come out of a woman’s mouth as she wrote them on a pad, 4 feet away, in a room above a dry cleaner’s on the Clapham Road.

"The Sterling Riverwalk. Right."

Priya put the phone down.

She sat for a second with her hand still on it. Then she picked up the biro, turned the pad face down, and looked up.

"Miss Doyle. Sorry about that. Sit down, you’re, " She stopped. "No, you’re sat down. Right. Kettle’s there, tea’s rubbish, I’m not making it."

Mara got the folder off her knees and onto the desk and did not move one muscle in her face.

Say nothing.

You say one word about that and she stops talking to you forever, because she has just told a stranger on the phone she would be struck off for it.

Not a flicker. You are a woman who wants a letter sent about a flat.

She had done the homework.

Title register, printed. The company filings off Companies House, 3 years of them. Tom’s purchase documents from March, which she had got out of him over the phone on Tuesday night by being pleasant for 40 minutes. A printout of every message between them about the flat, in order, with dates.

Priya went through the lot without saying anything for about 6 minutes.

Then she put her glasses up on her head.

"You’ve done more than most solicitors would."

"I’ve had 8 months."

"Yes." She pulled the messages towards her. "This is the useful one. This, here. The 14th of March. ill get it put in your name once its all gone through, give me a fortnight. That’s him saying it in writing, which is not a contract and is not nothing."

"Is that good?"

"It is a great deal better than a conversation." She wrote something. "Right. Here is what I think and then you can tell me I’m wrong."

"Go on."

"Your brother is not being difficult. He has had a number put in front of him by a man in Marylebone and he has not liked it, and he has done the thing everybody does with a number they don’t like, which is nothing." The biro stopped. "And he has not told you because you will ask him how much, and then he has to say it out loud."

Mara sat in a chair in a one-room office above a dry cleaner’s.

That’s it. That’s exactly it, and I worked out half of it on Monday and she’s just done the other half in 4 minutes.

"So what do we do?"

"I write to Marylebone. Not to your brother." Priya pulled a pad over. "I write a short letter that asks 3 questions and makes it clear somebody is now going to keep asking them, and I copy your brother in so he can see it has left my desk."

"And then?"

"And then a man who has been ignoring a sister for 8 months has a letter on a file from another solicitor, which changes what it costs him to keep ignoring it." She was writing. "That is the whole of what I am selling you. I am not clever. I am just somebody whose name goes on the bottom."

"Three questions," Mara said. "Yes."

"Good." Priya started writing. "Twenty minutes and then I’ll want your signature on the engagement letter."

So Mara sat in the chair two women had cried in over a dog groomer’s, with a folder on her knees and her heart going, while a woman at a desk 4 feet away wrote a letter about her brother.

The Sterling.

She acted for somebody on a commercial leasehold in October.

October.

Which is when a grey dash turned up in a directory on the 40th floor of my building.

And she’s not the one who rang. The building rang HER. Which means it’s not her looking for him, it’s Naomi Adeyemi looking for him, and Naomi has got this woman’s name from somewhere and it wasn’t from me.

Because I’ve had it 13 days and I’ve told nobody.

She made herself go slower.

Careful. Careful, because this is where you make it fit.

She said commercial leasehold. That’s a shop or a unit, that’s not a flat, and a solicitor in one room does 40 of those a year.

And there’s nothing that says the client she acted for in October is the same man Naomi’s asking about. She never said a name. She wouldn’t.

You have got a correspondence address off Companies House and a phone call you heard one side of.

That is 2 things. It is not a man.

She looked at the pad on the desk, face down, with the biro sat on top of it.

It’s 2 things and they’ve both got this room in them.

"Miss Anand."

"Mm."

"Can I ask you a general question? Not about anybody."

"You can ask."

"If somebody owns a flat through a company," Mara said, "and they didn’t want anybody to know it was them. How hard is that?"

Priya Anand looked up over her glasses.

"Easier than it should be," she said, and went back to writing, and Mara sat very still and let it go, and outside the window the 155 went past towards Clapham with its top deck lit up.