Above the V

Erik had put the sheet in a clear sleeve. He slid it across the table, waited for Anouk to move her coat off the chair, then held on to the bottom edge a moment longer.

‘This goes back with me,’ he said. ‘You can copy the entry. Or take a photograph while I'm here. I'm not sending you my whole route book.’

They were in the little canteen at Rondrit. His van stood at an angle outside a doorway where it could not stay; he had given a colleague the keys. Vera heard a window open, a shout and someone starting the wrong van. Erik did not look up. They had agreed an hour. No more.

Anouk laid the cropped image from Dorus's message beside the sleeve. Her printout was smaller. The V at the bottom looked thinner, but when Vera leaned in she recognised the movement straight away. The downward stroke, the short second arm because she was already handing the pen back.

Above the V there was a whole sheet now. Client's name. Date. Destination: the café, for Anouk Meijer. A space for the load. One presentation folder.

Vera did not read it aloud at once. She had supplied the words in her head so often that she was afraid of seeing only what she expected. Erik turned the sheet towards her.

‘There.’

‘One presentation folder,’ she read.

Anouk drew her notebook closer. Was that the delivery date or the invoice date? Erik pointed to the field for the journey. It appeared on his route sheet too. He laid that beside the receipt, covering the other customers' entries with a loose sheet.

The short note he had shown Vera the previous week referred to this job. Presentation. Station destination. A few lines down was the other station stop, in another town. Not five boxes, not Anouk, not the same address. Before, Vera had only heard station. Now she could see the other place, the customer and the description Erik had refused to guarantee from memory.

‘That's the other journey you were thinking of,’ she said.

‘The other stop that day. Not a second visit to you.’

He explained the route using the sheet. No minutes remembered exactly, no precise sequence of tea and signing. He pointed to the entries he had marked off at each delivery. Beside the presentation folder was a reference to this receipt. Vera's signature belonged to it.

‘Did you unload boxes for me at the café?’ Anouk asked.

‘For you that day? No. This folder.’

Erik let go of the sleeve. With his own papers in front of him he could say it plainly now. Vera remembered the questions she had fired at him the previous week, closer and closer together, as though his hesitation were a door she must push harder.

‘Is there another receipt for the same delivery?’

He shook his head. ‘Not in my book. One job, one folder. This is the signed sheet I collected from the records yesterday.’

Anouk opened Dorus's message. She kept her phone and read out the sentence claiming that all five boxes had gone back through the café on that Tuesday, with this driver. The attached receipt was offered as proof of that one shipment. She read it again, more slowly, stressing nothing.

Erik moved his chair back. Apparently he had prepared for an argument about his memory. Instead his work was in the middle of a story someone else had made from it.

‘I didn't carry those,’ he said.

‘No,’ Anouk said.

Someone went past the door with a crate of empty bottles. Vera pulled her bag against her chair. The ordinary canteen noise did nothing to fill the silence at their table. She wanted something to do with her hands: straighten the sleeve, line up the papers. Erik's sheet was already square in front of him.

Anouk opened her messages with Vera from that Tuesday evening. Her thanks for taking delivery. Vera's short, ordinary reply below. There had been no reason then to send back an inventory of boxes. Anouk had collected the folder, looked at the small copies at home and sent the message. She had confirmed the collection to Dorus too.

‘Could I see the folder?’ Erik asked.

She had not brought it. She showed him her own photograph of it closed, an ordinary picture that made clear the flat object they meant. He nodded. He did not start reciting exact dimensions on the strength of that. It fitted the description and what the receipt now helped him remember.

Vera put her hand flat beside the sheet. ‘That's what I took in. And you collected it that evening.’

Anouk nodded again. Not relief, Vera thought. More anger that it had been a question for so long.

Erik asked whether they wanted their photograph. He covered the other route entries more thoroughly, took the receipt out of its sleeve to stop the light reflecting from the plastic and laid out just the relevant papers. Vera photographed them with his permission. She checked the images, then turned her screen to him. The load description, the V, the destination and date. Nothing legible about the other customers beneath the covering sheet.

‘The other station name is fine,’ he said. ‘Just don't put the customer's full details in. Or someone will go asking them where your photographs have got to.’

Vera showed him exactly what she had included. Anouk recorded his explanation alongside her notes so they would not end up with a photograph of a sheet and none of what he had said. Erik spotted a digit she had copied wrongly in the journey reference. She corrected it.

His phone rang. He dismissed the call and checked the clock above the door. Twenty minutes left, but the questions they needed had been answered. Vera still wanted to ask about Dorus. Did he drive for him often, recognise the boxes, know what his house looked like? She looked at the closed route book and heard herself asking last week's first question all over again.

Instead she asked for a short email to accompany the photographs: confirmation that the receipt covered one presentation folder. He agreed. Not a statement that nothing could ever have been delivered anywhere else. He did not know that. This particular job he could describe.

‘I don't want anyone saying I've conducted an investigation,’ he said.

‘They won't,’ Anouk said. ‘You've explained your own delivery.’

Erik picked up the receipt and put it back in the sleeve. Vera felt an odd reluctance to let it go. They had good photographs and his explanation now, yet the paper itself had done something the scan had not. Given her back the space above her signature. No grand revelation in elaborate lettering. A filled-in field.

She stopped him briefly at the door to thank him for collecting and checking it. He was going to the records office that Monday anyway, he said. ‘But I'm glad my part's sorted.’

Vera said she was too. She meant it, although she did not know which part she could call finished herself.

The wind was against them outside. Anouk did not want to start cycling yet. They walked to the end of the fence and stopped, the canteen behind them, the ordinary street ahead. Vera brought up the receipt photograph. Harder to read in the daylight. She shaded the screen with her hand.

‘You didn't get them back through my café,’ she said.

‘I told you that.’

It hurt precisely because Anouk said it calmly. For weeks Vera had been defending something whose outcome Anouk already knew: she did not have her boxes back. Only the route was uncertain.

‘I know,’ Vera said. ‘I don't mean you've only just become right.’

Anouk wheeled her bicycle on a little. ‘I had the folder. I went home. I didn't ask if five boxes were waiting for me somewhere else. Because nobody had brought five boxes for me.’

Vera put her phone away. They were in the driveway. A car was waiting for them to move. They walked on until the pavement widened. Anouk took a glove between her teeth to pull it over her other hand, gave a brief laugh at herself and let go.

‘I'm glad your part's down on paper now,’ she said. ‘Really. But I still can't look at my own negatives without someone making an appointment for me.’

Vera looked at the fence. She had expected relief to happen by itself, some sound her body made when she no longer had to imagine a pile of boxes. Instead she felt how tired she was. She wanted the café, an order she could simply finish.

She said the first part aloud, not the part about orders. Anouk wanted to go home too. They would each keep the photographs in their own folders and compare the documents at Sanne's tomorrow. Anouk would add the full receipt and the confirmed discovery at Bente's to her report. She was not going to ring Dorus from Rondrit's gate. Her papers in order first, then the next conversation.

Vera cycled ahead as far as the turning. At the café Milan was counting a crate from a mistaken delivery. He looked up, saw her face and asked whether it had gone badly.

‘It was one folder,’ she said.

He put down a bottle. ‘Yes.’

‘Now we've got it in writing.’

Milan nodded and passed her the delivery note. ‘You can try your signature here again, then. Once you've checked I can count.’

Vera took off her coat and checked the quantities. Six bottles of one kind missing, six of another in their place. She rang the supplier while Milan stocked the fridge with what was right. It was past five. His extra hours lasted until seven, followed by his regular Tuesday evening. No need to send him home early out of gratitude. No need to keep pretending she had not had the whole afternoon away.

At six they sat down briefly for the handover. Milan asked what was happening about the photograph evening. Vera looked at the poster in her window. She had recommended the evening as though she had checked where the material came from too.

‘We need to discuss it with the foundation tomorrow.’

‘And what do I say until then?’

She took a blank card from beside the till. Don't wait. Don't leave Milan to find some vague wording she could correct afterwards. She wrote that there were questions about the material and the announced presentation could not yet be confirmed. He read it, raised an eyebrow and asked whether confirmed made it sound as though it had always been uncertain.

Vera crossed out the word. ‘It's not going ahead for now. I'll ring the people who've put their names down tomorrow.’

He set the card by the till. The poster was still on the glass. She did not tear it down in a rush between his stock count and an arriving customer. First she took the interested visitors' names from the drawer and noted the calls for the following morning.