Something Moved

The fourth drawer of Jo’s filing cabinet was not quite flush on Monday morning, and it was the kind of thing nobody else in the office would have noticed, because nobody else measured a drawer’s closure by the sound it made rather than by whether it looked shut. She stood in front of it a full minute before she touched anything, the way she stood in front of everything before she touched it.

Nothing was missing. She went through the Grey file twice to be certain — the eighteen-month gap, her private notes on the export licence, the printed transparencies from the first visit, all of it present, all of it in the order she had left it, except that the order was not quite the order she had left it in, the way a room tidied by someone trying to be careful was never actually the room it had been before.

She photographed the drawer’s contents where they sat before she moved anything, a habit that had cost her nothing for eleven years and had, twice, saved her from a colleague’s confident misremembering of what a file had once contained. Then she went through it a third time, comparing against the photograph she had taken the previous Friday, a precaution she had started keeping a year before anyone had given her a reason to.

Two folders had swapped places. Her notes on the eighteen-month gap sat an inch further forward in the drawer than she had left them, as though someone had pulled the folder out to read it and put it back without checking the depth first. Nothing torn, nothing copied that she could prove, nothing gone. Just a drawer that remembered being opened by a hand that wasn’t hers.

She checked the cabinet’s own lock next, the cheap kind that came standard with office furniture and that she had never once trusted, and found no scratches around the barrel, no scoring on the strike plate, nothing to suggest force. That told her either that whoever had opened it knew what they were doing, or that they hadn’t needed to force anything at all, and she sat with both possibilities for longer than either deserved before writing down neither, because a finding she couldn’t defend under questioning wasn’t a finding, it was a feeling wearing a report’s clothes.

“Cleaners,” Marijke said, when Jo raised it, not looking up from the report she was signing. “They’ve had a new contractor in since January. Half of them can’t find the recycling, let alone your filing cabinet.”

“The cleaners don’t have a key to a locked drawer.”

“Then IT, doing whatever IT does when nobody’s watching them do it.” Marijke set the pen down and looked at Jo properly, the look she reserved for conversations she suspected were about to cost her more time than she wanted to give them. “Is anything missing?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not a security incident, Jo, it’s an inconvenience, and I don’t have a form for an inconvenience.” She said it without unkindness, the flat efficiency of a woman with four other files on her desk and a partner meeting at eleven. “Log it if it makes you feel better. I’ll ask facilities to look at who’s had access to the floor.”

Jo logged it. She had learned, over eleven years, that being told a thing wasn’t worth worrying about had never once made her stop worrying about it; it had only taught her to stop mentioning it out loud a second time.

Ruben caught her at the printer an hour later, coffee in hand, the brightness he brought to a conversation whenever he wanted to know something without asking outright.

“Marijke says someone’s been in your files.”

“Someone tidied them. Badly.”

“You still doing that gallery case, or is Grey basically wrapped now the reauthorisation’s through?” He said it lightly, watching her over the rim of the cup, and Jo understood, not for the first time, that Ruben’s questions were rarely about the thing they claimed to be about. “Bottom line, I’ve got capacity coming free next month if you need a second pair of hands closing it out.”

“It’s not closed.”

“No?” Something behind his eyes sharpened, briefly, before the brightness came back down over it like a shutter. “What’s left, then? The pigment’s confirmed, the client’s happy, Marijke’s happy. What’s actually left to run down on a routine reauthorisation that’s already three weeks past routine?”

“Paperwork.” She took her printouts and left before the conversation could ask her anything she’d have to decide whether to answer honestly, because the honest answer — a locked study, a torn ledger page, three letters neither she nor Anselm could place — was not a sentence she intended to hand Ruben before she understood it herself.

She thought, walking back to her desk, about that flash of sharpness before he’d covered it over again, and filed it the way she filed everything she couldn’t yet prove: not as an answer, just as a fact worth keeping. Ruben wanted the file closed. He had wanted it closed since the moment it had stopped being simple, and a man who wanted a thing that badly was rarely scrupulous about how he got it.

She spent what was left of the morning at the Chamber of Commerce register, searching HKB against every company name, trading name and historic filing she could find, and came back with nothing that matched cleanly — a hair salon in Almere, a defunct haulage firm, a set of initials belonging to a private foundation that had dissolved itself a decade ago and left no forwarding address for its former directors. None of it sat anywhere near an eighteen-month gap in a gallery’s provenance, and none of it explained why a cataloguer’s private ledger would carry the same three letters a dozen times across a year and a half, in handwriting that grew smaller each time as though it were trying to disappear.

She called Anselm from the tram, mostly because she had told herself she’d give him an update by end of day and partly because eleven hours had passed since she’d last heard his voice and she had noticed, with some irritation at herself, that the gap had started to feel like something rather than nothing.

“Nothing clean,” she said, without preamble, because he had stopped expecting her to soften a null result into something more encouraging than it was. “No company, trust or foundation registered under those letters that comes anywhere near your gallery, your wife, or that ledger. Either it’s not a Dutch entity, or it’s not registered under that name at all.”

“A front, you mean.”

“I mean I don’t know yet, and I’d rather say that than guess at something that sounds better.” She watched the canal slide past the tram window, flat and grey, exactly the colour it had been the day she’d first stood on the bridge outside his gallery wondering what he’d been looking at. “Have you found anything else up there? Since I left.”

“Three more boxes of correspondence, none of it recent, none of it HKB. A second ledger, older, that stops the year before the gap starts.” He said it the way he reported everything to her now, plainly, without dressing it up to sound like more progress than it was. “I keep expecting the room to run out of her, and it doesn’t. There’s more of her in that room than I let myself remember there being.”

“That’s not nothing.”

“No. It’s just not an answer.” A pause, brief, the kind she was learning meant he was deciding how much of the next thought to say out loud. “Sanne asked if she could come up and look, this weekend. I said yes before I’d thought about whether that was mine to offer.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know yet. It felt like the first true thing I’ve said to her in months, so I’m inclined to let it stand.”

Jo let that sit a moment before she said the part she’d actually called to say. “Someone went through my case files at the office this weekend. Nothing taken. Nothing I can prove was even moved, except that I know my own drawer, and it wasn’t where I left it.”

There was a pause on the line long enough that she thought the connection had dropped. “You think it’s connected.”

“I think I don’t have enough to think anything, which is a sentence I hate saying almost as much as I hate not saying it.” She heard herself admit that much and let it stand, because pretending to more certainty than she had would have cost her more, eventually, than admitting to less. “It’s probably nothing. Cleaners, a careless IT contractor, a coincidence built entirely out of me being tired enough to notice a drawer that’s a centimetre out of true.”

“But you don’t think it’s nothing.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

“Then don’t go home to an empty flat without telling someone where you are.” It wasn’t quite an order, and it wasn’t quite a request either; it landed somewhere she hadn’t given him permission to land yet, and she noticed, with the same irritation as before, that she didn’t especially want to take the permission back.

“I’ve been going home to an empty flat alone for eleven years, Anselm. I have locks.”

“How many?”

“Three.” She said it before she’d decided whether it was a strange thing to admit to a client, and found, having said it, that she didn’t regret it. “One came with the building. I added the second the year I moved in, because the first one was the kind a determined teenager could open with a library card. The third I added after a run of break-ins on this stretch of the canal two winters ago, and never saw a reason to take it back off once they stopped.”

“That’s not really an answer about whether you’re safe. That’s an inventory.”

“It’s the only kind of reassurance I know how to give that I actually believe myself.” She surprised herself, saying it, with how true it was. “I don’t do the other kind. The kind where you say I’m fine because it’s easier than describing exactly what you’ve done to make sure it’s true.”

· · ·Scene break

Her flat in De Pijp held two rooms and a view of a courtyard nobody used in February, and she went through the locks that evening the way she went through everything, one at a time, testing rather than assuming: the original mortise, stiff after years of the same key; the second cylinder she’d fitted herself with a manual and more patience than the job strictly required; the third, newer, smoother, the one that had cost more than the other two combined and had never once, in two years, given her a reason to regret it.

All three held. She stood in her own hallway afterward, coat still on, and felt the foolishness of a grown woman checking a door that had never once failed to do its job, and did it anyway, because foolish and unnecessary were not the same thing as wrong.

She made tea she didn’t finish and sat at the small table by the window with the Grey file spread in front of her — not the official version, thinner and more careful than the one at the office, but her own working copy, the one with the eighteen-month gap and the torn ledger page and three letters that led nowhere she could yet prove — and found she couldn’t concentrate on any of it the way she usually could, the facts refusing to arrange themselves into the quiet, orderly rows she relied on to feel like herself.

She told herself it was tiredness. It was a story she was good at telling herself, and one she had never yet managed to make last past midnight.

Outside, a car she didn’t recognise sat at the kerb with its engine off and its lights on, longer than made sense for anyone waiting on a passenger. She counted two minutes, then three, telling herself the whole time that a stationary car on a residential street after dark was not evidence of anything at all, only the sort of detail she’d have dismissed without a second look a fortnight ago. It pulled away eventually, unhurried, and turned left at the corner rather than continuing straight, which told her nothing whatsoever and which she wrote down anyway, in the small notebook she kept for exactly this kind of nothing.

She checked the locks once more before bed, all three, in order, the way she always did — and found herself, for the first time in longer than she wanted to examine, not entirely convinced that three was enough.