“Not today. My name’s Eleanor Falkner. I delivered a chair here a few weeks ago.”

His face became suspicious. “A policeman was here about that this morning.”

“I wanted to check up on it.”

“What for?”

“When I delivered the chair, I signed a receipt. They said I collected it from you. But I didn’t.”

He walked over to a filing cabinet against the wall and pulled open the top drawer. He took out a file and flicked through it. “We have a slip for everything that’s collected or delivered. Here we are. It’s just a note saying, ‘Docket retrieved for Ms. Falkner’.”

“When?”

“That would be yesterday.”

“I don’t understand. Who wrote it?”

He examined it more closely. “Looks like my writing.”

“So was it me who collected the docket?”

“That’s what it says here.”

“But can’t you remember the woman who collected it?”

“What I mainly do is sort out deliveries. Twenty, thirty, forty a day. That’s why I need the pieces of paper.”

“But why did you let someone take a piece of paper away just like that?”

“Because it wasn’t important. The receipts for documents go upstairs and we keep those. This is just office stuff, you know, pens, photocopying fluid. Every couple of months we chuck it out.”

“So anyone could have walked in off the street, asked for the docket and you would have given it to them?”

He looked back down at the file. “It says Ms. Falkner here.”

“Yes, but . . .” I stopped. I’d realized the futility of pushing it any further.

EIGHT HOURS LATER, or thereabouts, I was drunk. In the afternoon I had phoned Gwen and Mary, left messages and assumed they were busy, out of town or understandably sick of hearing from me. Of hearing about me. Of even knowing I existed. But later in the afternoon, Gwen rang and said that the two of them were taking me out. I had that infallible sixth sense when you know that people have been talking about you and making arrangements for you without your knowledge. I told her it was very kind of her but it was a Monday night and they had lives to lead. Gwen said that was nonsense. I had to put a dress on and they would pick me up at eight.