He woke at ten past five because the light came in from the east, and he lay still for a while and listened to a house he did not know yet. Boiler. A door on the ground floor at twenty past. Gravel under a vehicle at six, one vehicle, going out rather than coming in. At half past six there was a sound outside his own door that stopped and did not knock. The clothes were folded on the floor in the corridor. A grey shirt, dark trousers, socks, and a pair of house shoes with the price still on the sole of one of them. The shirt was too wide across the shoulders and the trousers were exactly right in the leg, which meant they had belonged to somebody who was not exactly his shape and who was not in the house any more. He did not ask, then or later. He dressed and turned his own collar down, and looked at what the mirror gave him back, which was a man in borrowed clothing with a band of black steel sitting close under the jaw and nothing at all in his face. Then he sat in the chair by the window for twenty minutes and watched the east lawn come up out of the dark, the flat grass and the wall at the end of it and the roses along the base of the wall going from black to green. He went down at five to seven, because Mrs Seo had said seven. * * * The kitchen was at the north end and it had one long scrubbed table in it and a smaller one by the window with three chairs. Ji-won was laying the long table. She saw him in the doorway and put down what she was holding and then picked it up again. "Good morning," Georgij said. "Good morning." "Where would you like me?" She looked at Mrs Seo, who did not look up from the stove. "Anywhere at that end," Mrs Seo said. He sat at the end she meant and put his hands on the table where they could be seen, which was a habit from other kitchens and which he did not notice himself doing. In the car Annie had told him he would eat what she ate. He had thought about that for a good part of the night and had decided it before he came down, and the decision had not been about breakfast. Mrs Seo had run this house since before anybody had ever heard of him. To walk past her into the dining room on his first morning, holding a sentence Annie had said in a car, would be borrowing somebody's authority to correct a woman who had done nothing wrong. He had watched a man do a version of that six hours earlier and had taken his eye out for it. So he sat where she put him, and he was still sitting there when a gardener came in for coffee, looked at his throat for slightly too long, and took the coffee outside. * * * At two minutes past seven Annie came into the kitchen. Ji-won stopped with a plate in each hand. Annie was dressed for the day, jacket on, and she came in the way somebody comes into a room they own and had until that morning not particularly used. She took a cup off the hook by the window herself. She poured her own coffee. Nobody got there first, because nobody had worked out that they were supposed to. She went past the small table by the window, which was where anybody in that kitchen would have put her if she had asked, and sat down at the far end of the long one, with her back to the glass and the whole length of scrubbed wood between herself and Georgij. "Good morning," she said, to the room. "Good morning, ma'am," said Mrs Seo, after a pause of about half a second that Georgij would think about later. Nobody explained anything. Nobody asked. Ji-won put the plates down and then had to be told twice where the second one went. Mrs Seo produced eggs, and toast, and a small dish of something pickled, and did all of it at exactly the speed she would have done it anyway, which was the most impressive thing Georgij had seen since the gavel. Annie ate about a third of what was in front of her, drank all of the coffee, and read nothing while she did it. At twenty past she stood up, put her own cup in the sink, and went out. The kitchen sat with that for a moment. "Ji-won," said Mrs Seo. "The stairs." Ji-won went. Mrs Seo wiped the same part of the counter twice. Then she said, without turning round and without any edge on it at all: "Nine years I have taken that woman a tray at seven." "Yes." "You didn't say a word." "No." "I know." She put the cloth down. "That is why I am going to be polite to you for a while longer than I had planned." * * * She sent for him at nine, which is to say Ji-won came to say that ma'am was in the study, and the study turned out to be the room on the right off the hall, the one that had been shut on the first night. Two things were lying on the desk. A laptop, closed, and a telephone, face down. "Yours," Annie said. "Which is to say mine, and you will use them." He picked up neither. "They're managed," she said. "Everything on both of them comes back to a company that bills me monthly. I'm telling you that instead of letting you find it, because you'd find it before lunch and then we'd have an afternoon about it." "Thank you." He said it plainly. "Then I'll write on them as though you're reading, because you will be, and I'd rather never have to remember which version you got." Annie looked at him for a moment. "You have three weeks," she said. "There's an evening at the end of it. Grand Hotel. You'll go as a guest and not as anything else, and between now and then your time is your own as long as you're in the house at night." "What am I looking for?" "That's your problem." "Then may I have the guest list." "No." He waited to see whether anything came after it. Nothing did, so he took the next step himself. "May I ask why not." "Because if I hand you a dozen names, you'll spend three weeks proving me right about all twelve." She sat back. "I've had that. I've paid a great deal of money for that. Men come back with exactly the shape of what I gave them and they are very pleased with themselves, and I learn nothing except that they can read." "That's fair." "It isn't fair, it's expensive." She turned a pen over on the desk once. "I'd rather find out what you bring me when nobody has told you what to want." "Understood, Mistress." He put both hands behind his back, which was an old posture and an easy one. "I'll get the list anyway." "I know you will." "Then let me say the rest of it out loud, because the rest of it is the part that's worth anything." There was no hurry in it anywhere. "You've told me no and I'm going to go round you. In three weeks you'd have seen it on a machine you pay the bill for, and then you'd have had to sit and work out what it meant that I never mentioned it. I'd rather you didn't spend an afternoon on that question. You'd only reach the wrong answer slowly." "Quid pro quo," Annie said, the way you would sign for a delivery, and went back to what she had been reading. He was at the door when she spoke again. "Georgij." "Mistress." "You counted twenty-two." "I did." "I'd count again before the tailor comes." * * * He spent the day on the ground floor with the laptop and a pot of tea that Ji-won brought without being asked and left just outside his reach, which he decided was an accident. By four he had the hotel, the date, the charity that was nominally hosting the thing, its board, its four previous years of the same evening, and the two photographers who had covered all four. Photographers keep everything. Nobody has ever once told a photographer to delete anything. By six he had a shape but not a list, and he had learned enough to know that the list was going to come out of a florist or a car service and not out of anything with a name on the door. He shut the laptop at nine. Then he waited until the house had gone quiet, and at half past eleven he went round turning off lights. * * * Twenty-two he already had. He stood in the dark of the long room with the telephone held up in front of his face, using the camera on the front of it, because the one on the back had a filter behind the lens that ate most of what he was looking for. The room came back to him on the screen in grey and grain. In the upper corner, where he knew the lens was, there was a small hard cluster of white that was not there when he lowered the phone. Infrared. Invisible to him, and perfectly obvious to a piece of glass that had cost her nothing and that she had put in his hand herself at nine o'clock that morning. He walked the ground floor in the dark, room by room, and confirmed each of the twenty-two. Then he stood in the hall and lifted the phone, and the hall gave him a bloom of white above the front door, where he had not once thought to look. The twenty-third was over the front door. Not in the upper corner of the room, which was where all the others were, but flush in the moulding above the doorframe, tilted down at something much shallower than forty-five degrees, and looking at a strip of the hall perhaps two metres long. Georgij lowered the phone and looked at what was in that strip with his own eyes. The stone shelf. The bowl for the keys. And the remote, still lying next to the bowl where she had put it at one o'clock that morning, in a house where nobody had moved it and nobody had mentioned it. He stood there for a while. That shelf had been photographed for years and would go on being photographed every day he lived in this house. Nobody in Yeouido was ever going to look at any of it. She would. That was the whole of the difference, and what it meant was that there would eventually be a file showing a man in a collar reaching for the thing on that shelf, or a file showing him not reaching for it, and there was no third file. Then he went up to the landing window on the first floor, put the lens flat against the cold glass to kill the reflection, and looked east. The twenty-fourth was in the eaves above the ground-floor windows on that side, and it was not looking at the house at all. It was looking out across twenty metres of flat lawn to the base of the wall and the old rose bushes planted close along it. He put the phone in his pocket and went to find her. * * * She was in the study with one lamp on. "I found the other two." "That took you fifteen hours," Annie said. "I had a bet with myself about three days." "You handed me a telephone at nine o'clock this morning." "I did." "You sat three days over those angles and sent a professional away twice. A woman who does that knows what a camera does in a dark room, because it is the same thing your cameras have been doing to my dark rooms since I got here." He let that stand, courteously and without any pressure on it. "So either it went out of your head while you were putting it in my hand, which I don't believe for a moment, or it didn't matter to you that I'd have it. I'd rather be told which." "Would you," Annie said. It was not a question and she did not follow it with anything, so after a moment he went on and gave her what he had come to give her. "One is over the front door. Shallow angle, about two metres of coverage, and inside those two metres there is a stone shelf, a bowl and a remote control." Annie did not say anything. "The other is in the east eaves and it is pointed at the roses." "Yes." He waited. She let the lamp hum. "You want to ask me whether I put the first one in for you," she said. "No, Mistress. It's been there for years. The moulding has been cut for it and painted over twice." "Then what." "Nothing. It's a good place for a camera. Anybody who comes through that door either puts something on that shelf or takes something off it." He turned his hand over. "I'd have wanted the same picture." That was true, and it was also not the whole of what he had stood in the hall thinking about, and he did not offer her the rest of it because she had not paid for the rest of it. He asked the only question he had actually come to ask. "Has the house listed lot eleven yet?" Annie looked at him across the desk. She did not answer. She did not change her face, and she did not say she wouldn't answer, and she did not tell him to go to bed. She simply let the question sit on the desk between them like something that had been delivered to the wrong address, and after a while she looked back down at her papers. "Goodnight, Georgij." "Goodnight, Mistress." He went up the stairs, past the shelf and the bowl and the small dark thing lying next to it, at the same speed he always did.

Count again