The Price of Your Silence

How it begins

The anonymous letter corrected Maya's arithmetic and complimented her shoes.

She trusted neither observation.

At the bottom, beneath a neat table of missing payments, someone had written: The red ones make you look ready to argue.

Maya was wearing the red ones now.

She turned toward the office window.

Across the road, a man was feeding coins into a parking meter. A cyclist was shouting at a van. Nobody looked like a person composing financial disclosures with an interest in footwear.

She opened the secure reply form.

How do you know what I wore?

The answer arrived before she had finished her tea.

You were on the inquiry broadcast. I was trying to listen to the numbers.

She should have felt reassured.

Instead she clicked the link to yesterday's recording.

The camera had shown her shoes for three seconds.

She wrote: Try harder.

The next reply contained a corrected invoice, a reference number and no compliment.

Maya checked the figures.

Then checked them again.

The missing amount was enough to repair every lift in the housing block the inquiry had declared beyond saving.

Her phone rang.

Ben Cross's name appeared on the screen.

She let it ring twice before answering.

"If this is about my report, put it in writing."

"It is in writing. You called my response evasive."

"It was evasive."

"You asked the wrong question."

"Then you had an excellent opportunity to answer a better one."

A pause.

On her laptop, a new anonymous message appeared.

Don't let them turn this into an argument about your tone.

Maya looked from the message to the phone.

Ben was still waiting.

"Are you there?"

"Unfortunately."

"I'd like to show you something."

"Send it to the inquiry."

"I tried."

The anonymous correspondent typed again.

Ask about the lift contractor.

Maya gripped the phone more tightly.

"Ben," she said, "who repaired the lifts?"

For the first time since she had known him, he answered without preparing the sentence first.

"Nobody."