Which of Us Is Being Followed

The rented room over the tyre place was broken into on a Sunday night in the September, eleven months after the fire, and nothing was taken.

That is not a figure of speech and it is the part that made Dov Ferreiro change his mind about the whole shape of the case. Three laptops on the desk, untouched. A bag. A coat. The door forced at the frame in a manner he described in his own report — he wrote it himself, which is not his function — as competent and unhurried.

What had been disturbed was the wall. Eleven sheets of A3, taped up in an order that only made sense to the person who taped them, and somebody had gone along them. Two were out of sequence. One had been taken down and put back with the tape on the wrong corners.

He photographed the wall before anybody touched it, from four positions, which is what he would have done at a fire, and it did not occur to either of them until much later that the only reason there is a usable record of the wall at all is that the first professional through the door was a man who photographs rooms for a living. The insurers' own investigator arrived the following afternoon and took two images and a statement.

Halina's position was that this was straightforward: somebody wanted to know what she had, they now knew what she had, and the correct response was to make copies, tell the police, and carry on exactly as before, because a person who reads your wall and takes nothing is a person who has been told to find out and not to frighten.

Dov's position was that a person who forces a door in a building where a woman works alone until eleven at night is a person you plan around whether or not they meant anything by it, and that she should not be in that room after dark on her own, and that he was not asking.

They had the second real fight about it, which was worse than the first and quieter, and the thing Halina said that ended it was that she had spent eleven years being told which rooms she could be in after dark by people who thought they were being kind, and that she would take the risk assessment from a fire investigator and not the chivalry.

He did not speak for a while. Then he said that it had not been chivalry, that in seventeen years he had been to four fires that had been set to frighten somebody rather than to destroy something, and that in three of the four the person being frightened had been told beforehand not to make a fuss, and that he would like her to consider that he might have a professional reason for the sentence and not a personal one. She has said since that it was the first time she had genuinely underestimated him and that she has been careful about it ever since.

From the September onwards they were both certain that one of them was being watched, and each of them was certain it was the other, and they were both right, which nobody worked out for four more months.

Halina's evidence was the wall, a car she saw twice on the wharf road, and a call to her office from a man claiming to be from a regulator that did not have the department he named.

Dov's evidence was thinner and he knew it: a sense, twice, of the same vehicle behind him on the ring road, and one occasion in the November when he came back to his own car outside the mortuary and found it unlocked, and he is a man who locks a car.

His argument was that Halina was the exposed one — she was the one with the wall, the one meeting the banks, the one whose name was on the reconstruction. Her argument was that Dov was the one with the criminal file, that Bellwood-Okpara had just pleaded, that a plea means a sentencing means a chance the man says something, and that the person most at risk from that was not her.

They took it, in the end, to the police, jointly, in a meeting that lasted forty minutes and produced a crime reference number and a leaflet, which is neither anybody's fault nor a scandal: a forced door with nothing taken and a woman who cannot say what she has lost is, from the outside, a burglary that failed, and there were nine hundred of those in Port Alder that year.

"You keep saying the fraud is the case," Dov said, in the café, in the November. "If the fraud is the case, they follow you. Why would anybody follow me?"

And Halina said: "Because you are the only person in Port Alder who can tell a court that this was set, and because in eleven months you have never once said out loud who you think set it, and somebody has noticed that you have never said it."

He put his cup down and did not answer, because she was right, and because the reason he had never said it was that he did not have it, and because it had not occurred to him until that afternoon in a café on the wharf road that the absence of a name in his mouth might read, from the outside, exactly like a name he was holding back.

It was neither of them, in the end. In the January, fourteen months after the fire, Bernadette Iwu-Kaplan's practice above the tyre place was burgled, and her professional indemnity insurer was told, and she rang Halina from her car.

They had taken her files. Not all of them: the Verrow & Kinsella folder, eleven certificates and two letters, in a green box she had kept on the shelf behind her desk since the day she first handed the copies over.

"They are copies," Halina said, on the phone, in the corridor of a client's office. "You gave me copies. I have them. The syndicate has them. The police have them. Bernadette, they have stolen a thing that exists in four places."

And Bernadette Iwu-Kaplan, fifty-two, said, "I know. I told them that." There was a pause of about four seconds. "Halina. I told them that in September. On the telephone. A man rang me and asked whether I still held the originals and I said yes and I said it did not matter because I had already given copies to the adjuster, and he thanked me and rang off, and I did not think about it again until eleven o'clock this morning."

Halina Zambrano stood in a corridor and did the arithmetic of four months, and the arithmetic came out at this: somebody had known, since the September, that the certificates were in her hands. Somebody had gone into her room that same month and read her wall and taken nothing. And then, four months later, they had gone and taken the originals anyway.

Which is not the behaviour of a person destroying evidence, because a person destroying evidence does it before the copies exist and not after. It is the behaviour of a person doing something else, and it took her the rest of that day and half the night to work out what, and she rang Dov at twenty past one in the morning to say it.

"They are not clearing up," she said. "They are checking. Somebody is going round every place a copy of that certificate might be and finding out where they all are. That is not defence, Dov. Nobody does that to defend themselves." She heard him sit up. "They are doing it because they are going to do it again somewhere else, and they want to know how many people found out the first time, and how."

They met at seven the next morning on the wharf, at Unit 14, which had been cleared to the slab by then and was a rectangle of concrete with weeds in the expansion joints.

Dov walked it once and stood in the northeast corner for his ten minutes, which he had not done since the first Friday, and Halina stood in the rain and let him, which she would not have done a year earlier.

Then they sat in his car with the engine off and made the only list they ever made together, and it had four things on it, and it is reproduced in both of their statements because they wrote it down twice in two hands and initialled both copies, which was Halina's idea and which Dov thought was theatrical and which turned out, eight months later, to matter a great deal.

One: the fraud required a warehouseman, and Kinsella was it, and Kinsella was frightened of one specific person he would not name. Two: the fraud required somebody who could remove a page from a two-page certificate and put the result in front of a syndicate, and that person had access to the surveyor's document before it reached the lenders. Three: the same somebody had, in the last four months, systematically established where every copy of that document now lived. Four — and this is Dov's, in Dov's handwriting, and Halina has said she would not have written it — the fire was not to destroy the receipts. The receipts were on a server and in three banks. The fire was to make the shed a crime scene so that nobody could walk into it and count.

The fourth point had taken him eleven months to arrive at and about nine seconds to say, and he said it looking out of the windscreen at a rectangle of concrete rather than at her. A crime scene is a legal object. It closes a building. For four months after that fire, nobody could have walked into Unit 14 with a clipboard and counted the stacks, and by the time anybody could, there was nothing to count and no way of establishing when the nothing had begun.

Halina argued with the fourth point for forty minutes and then stopped arguing, and it is the only occasion in the entire matter on which she changed her mind about something structural because of him.

"If you are right," she said at last, "then the fire is not the end of a fraud. It is the maintenance of one."

"Yes," said Dov Ferreiro. "And you have been telling me for a year that in eighteen months there will be another shed, and I have been telling you that I do not do sheds I have not been sent to." He started the engine. "It has been fourteen months. Where would you look?"