The Room at De Werf

Milan wrote 19.00 on the rota and underlined it. Not because Vera was making difficulties; he wanted it on paper before he moved his own appointment.

‘You'll be back here at seven.’

‘Well before that, I think.’

‘That'll be a bonus, then.’

He left the pen beside the notebook. Four extra hours, three until seven. Vera added that they would be paid, like any other cover. That morning she had worked out how much was left of the money she had set aside for her own absences. She didn't want to discover that a visit to some old photographs suddenly required unpaid staff.

Anouk couldn't come. Her job that afternoon had been moved twice already; if she cancelled now, the client would probably find someone else. She had messaged Vera to say she could look at the material showing work, if Sanne agreed. Taking anything away or making copies would need a separate arrangement.

Sanne hadn't objected to the time. She had said three times that the room was a workspace, not an exhibition. Vera had replied that she wasn't bringing an audience. Only afterwards had she heard how that must have sounded.

She entered the community centre at half past three. Two mothers with a pushchair stood by the noticeboards in the hall. Chairs scraped across the floor in one of the rooms. Someone had leaned a wet mop against a radiator, leaving a long dark patch on the wall.

Sanne came to meet her, a key card on a lanyard. She wore a jumper with one sleeve pushed up and carried an empty coffee mug.

‘We're upstairs.’

‘Is it always this busy?’

‘Not when I need it.’

On the stairs they had to wait for a man carrying a folded table. He was trying to turn the corner without trapping his fingers against the wall. Sanne held the door at the top; Vera took the mug from her. The man set the table in the corridor and thanked them without turning round.

‘That's Hugo,’ Sanne said. ‘He keeps everything standing.’

‘Mostly tables today,’ he said.

The room was smaller than Vera expected. Two worktables together, a cupboard, a stack of chairs that didn't quite match. In front of the window, two boxes rested on a clean cloth. Flatter and wider than the archive boxes Vera had pictured. Numbers and a name marked the sides.

She stood by the table until Sanne showed her where to put her bag: on a chair, not the table. Sanne set the empty mug on a little cupboard by the door and washed her hands at a sink in the corner.

‘I've got Anouk's message,’ she said. ‘For looking. Not photographing everything.’

‘That's fine.’

Vera didn't get her phone out. She had deliberately left it in her coat so she wouldn't keep checking notifications.

Sanne opened the first box. Rather than lift the whole pile, she placed one mounted print on the clear part of the table. The mounting board was larger than the photographs in the presentation folder. Its white border gave the man at the door more room than he had on the poster.

‘They came as a group,’ Sanne said. ‘Fourteen and fourteen. We counted.’

‘From Dorus.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ask who they belonged to?’

Sanne looked at her, still supporting the corner of the board.

‘It's in the offer. We haven't agreed a final loan yet. It had to be assessed first.’

‘But the poster was already in my window.’

Sanne put down the print. She looked at its corner as though she needed something else there now.

‘I sent that out too soon.’

‘With his name on it.’

‘Yes.’

Vera felt the words coming before she decided how to say them. The two boxes were simply here. The night before, Anouk hadn't known where all her material was. And Vera's V on a receipt was coming back to her as five whole boxes.

‘If he says I took everything back in, why are those boxes with you? You must know who they belong to.’

Hugo's table creaked as he pushed it in from the corridor. He paused on the threshold. Sanne took her hand away from the print. She didn't fold her arms, but let them hang at her sides.

‘I know what he wrote,’ she said. ‘Now I also know Anouk says it's different. That's why you're here.’

‘She's not just making it up.’

‘I didn't say she was.’

Hugo raised the table again. ‘Where would you like this?’

‘Against the wall, please.’

A chair needed moving. Vera stepped back to let him past, then took the chair out of his way and set it beside her bag. The table unfolded and its legs scraped, filling the brief silence. Once Hugo had finished, he didn't stay to look at the photographs.

‘I'll be downstairs if the lock plays up again,’ he said.

‘It's working,’ Sanne said.

‘For now.’

He left the door half shut. Sanne opened it a little wider so she could hear the stairs. Vera realised how shallowly she was breathing.

‘I'd like to see the list,’ she said.

Sanne fetched a file from the cupboard and put it on the second table, away from the photograph. A provisional description, a receipt form and a printed message from Dorus. In it he called himself the owner of a coherent collection he was offering for the presentation. Vera read the receipt entry next. Two boxes, twenty-eight mounted prints. No negatives, no family photographs, no fifth box of papers.

‘Nothing else came in from him?’

‘Not as part of this delivery.’

Sanne pointed to the list. She had noted that every front and back had been photographed. Twenty-eight times two. The images were in their ordinary intake folder on the computer.

‘Could I see them?’

‘I'd like to do that with Anouk. We'll agree what we're comparing and who gets copies. Otherwise I'll be sending things out again before everyone knows what they are.’

Vera wanted to say she already had permission. Anouk's message allowed her to look at the boxes, not pass on a set of photographs. She said nothing.

‘Can we arrange that?’

‘Yes. I'll need to set aside some time.’

Sanne sat at the table and opened her diary. It was full of different colours. Vera saw jobs Sanne had to do behind those colours, not stages in their investigation. They agreed that Anouk would contact her directly with a time she could manage. Sanne would have the original intake photographs ready.

Vera went back to the first box. Sanne showed her a few more prints. Workers beside a cart, someone with keys at a door, a man lifting a plank with his back to the camera. Small actions. On the large boards they carried weight without anything spectacular happening.

‘Lovely prints,’ Vera said.

Sanne nodded. ‘That's why we were interested.’

She lifted a print from the second box. A dark window above a workbench. Vera thought briefly of Ria's phone footage but said nothing. Different people, a different room.

‘Dorus came back to help with the presentation,’ Sanne said. ‘We needed reproductions for the explanatory material. And he knew better than we did how the group was intended to work.’

‘With a key?’

‘No. I let him in.’

‘Were you with him?’

‘I was in the building. Not beside him all the time. There was an appointment downstairs too.’

Vera looked at the half-open door. Hugo had just walked in quite easily with a table. Sanne put the print back in its place.

‘He filled in a checklist,’ she said. ‘That everything was back where it belonged, and what he would supply separately. That's in the file as well. But I don't want to give you bits of things out of context.’

She shut the box. It wasn't quite a refusal to show her, Vera thought. It was the end of a visit for which she hadn't asked enough. She had expected something to become clear simply by seeing the boxes.

‘I want Anouk to get them back,’ she said.

Sanne looked up. ‘That needs discussing with Anouk, then. Not because you say so.’

Vera nodded. She had earned the curt reply.

A ball rolled against the door from the corridor. A small foam one that wedged in the gap underneath. Sanne opened the door and picked it up. A little boy stood on the stairs, apologising so fast Vera caught only half.

‘Not in the corridor,’ Sanne said, handing it back. ‘Downstairs in the hall.’

She waited until he had gone and picked up her empty mug. A faint ring from an earlier use marked the cupboard beneath it. Vera took her bag. A splinter in the chair seat caught the fabric; she felt it drag and lifted the bag higher.

Sanne stopped at the stairs.

‘I sent you that text too early. I can take it back. But I didn't ask you to sign for things you never received.’

‘I know.’

‘Good.’

Vera wanted to add something to make the conversation end better. That she was only trying to help, for instance. Then Sanne would have to give a polite answer to something she couldn't change.

‘I'll tell Anouk what I've seen,’ she said. ‘And what we need to arrange.’

Sanne nodded and led the way down.

On her way back Vera bought a new packet of felt chair pads at the shop next door. She had been forgetting them since Monday. The packet wouldn't fit properly in her bag; she carried it as far as the underpass.

At the café Milan was dealing with a delivery that had come earlier than agreed. He was bent under a shelf with a crate of water against his stomach. Vera set down her bag and took the crate.

‘You're early,’ he said.

‘I said I would be.’

‘You said you thought you would.’

They put the bottles in the rack together. Vera didn't immediately repeat everything Sanne had said. She asked first what he had sold and whether the rolls had gone. As she carried the empty-bottle crate to the cupboard, she noticed the top shelf. The brown wrapper was still there, flat under two menus.

She left it. Tomorrow she would go through it and the other papers of her own, she had decided. For now a driver wanted his empty crates back, and Milan hadn't had a break.