Chapter 8: Aleksa Arrives with a Thermos

The car she arrived in was a sensible grey hatchback with a Site Survey: Kirkwall Quay sticker on the rear windscreen and a crack in the passenger-side mirror that had been there since last February and which she had assessed, with professional thoroughness, as cosmetic rather than structural. She pulled it into the single remaining space on Ashmore Court's access road — the space everyone else on the street had silently agreed was not quite a space — and turned off the engine and sat for a moment with the thermos wedged between her thigh and the gearshift, looking at the building.

Victorian terrace, she thought, in the methodical way she thought about all buildings when she met them for the first time. Late Gothic Revival pretensions in the window casings, subsequently embarrassed about it. The brickwork had been repointed at two distinct periods, one of which had used the wrong mortar compound, which she could identify at thirty feet by the slight colour variation running in a horizontal band across the second storey like a tide mark. The front bay windows had settled unevenly — the right side fractionally lower, the kind of differential movement that took a century to produce and two decades more to become anyone's immediate problem. The building was not about to fall down. The building was engaged in the slow, committed process of arguing with the ground it stood on, and the ground was currently winning on points.

Aleksa picked up the thermos and got out of the car.