The Job Sheet from 10 May

Cor had not opened the shop. The usual Sunday hours still hung in the window. He waited at the front door and let Lena in without switching on the light above the counter. The back of the workshop was lit. A dismantled wooden drawer lay on his workbench.

‘Doesn't belong to a customer,’ he said as she looked at it. ‘So I'm allowed to break it.’

Clamps held one side of the drawer. Cor picked off a dried drop of glue with the tip of a screwdriver. He had said she could come that morning because he would be working on the cabinet anyway. Lena had not wanted her questions to cost him a day off. It turned out he spent much of his day off in the same few square metres where he worked.

‘I spoke to Nora yesterday,’ she said.

‘Did she get my message?’

‘Yes. She knows you have some of her father's things. She wants to decide what happens to them herself.’

Cor nodded. He put the screwdriver beside a cloth and pushed the drawer back from the edge.

‘I haven't given them to anyone. You included.’

‘I'm not asking.’

‘People sometimes say that just before they ask.’

He went to a cupboard by the back door. Through its window Lena could see the narrow path between the workshop and the low fence, with the street at the end. A delivery cyclist passed and vanished round the corner. The room smelt of wood glue, so Cor hooked the door open. The draught ran through to the dark shop, whose front door stayed shut.

Lena hung her coat on a chair. She had left her tablet behind and brought only the printed page listing seven sets of keys. Cor sat beside her and read the line twice.

‘And your first report said two.’

‘That's what I recorded. I didn't check all the housing association's key records. I wrote down what Sofie showed me and told me.’

‘That's clear enough.’

He tapped the seven. ‘Writing down a number doesn't prove you've seen all those keys.’

‘That's why I've come to you.’

Cor turned his chair a quarter-turn. Storage boxes were stacked on the cupboard. He reached for the middle one without pulling at the top. Lena got up to hold the top box. He waited until she had both hands free, then put the one he wanted on the table.

‘I know what an ordinary job sounds like,’ he said. ‘A maintenance man brings a set in. Wants extra sets for people working at an address for a few weeks. It happens.’

‘Did he tell you the house was empty?’

‘He said they needed to get in. There was work planned. I didn't ask about the tenant.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Niels Vos. He often came in for RietWonen. I knew his name. He didn't have to introduce himself every time he brought me a job.’

Rubber bands held bundles of job sheets, some handwritten, some printed. Cor did not put a whole stack in front of her. He searched for himself, read a page and slid it beneath another bundle. His phone rang in the shop. He waited for it to stop.

‘I said I'd ring you back,’ he said to nobody in particular.

He drew a sheet from the May bundle and laid it in front of himself. Then he turned it round.

‘This is the job. Just this one.’

One edge of the paper had been torn off. Bremstraat 18. Five sets. 10 May. RietWonen in the client field, and below it N. Vos with a mobile number. Lena read without reaching for her phone.

‘The tenth was a Sunday too.’

‘Yes. He rang to ask if I could do something. Needed it the next morning. I was here. Like today.’

‘Did he sound as though it was urgent?’

‘In a hurry. He often is. He didn't say anyone was out in the cold. An ordinary request for work.’

‘Five extra sets?’

‘Five. He had a set I could copy. He took that away again, along with the ones I'd made.’

Lena looked back at her own page. Two sets present on 6 May. Five new ones on the tenth. The number fitted, almost too well. She wanted to lay a whole chain of events behind the match: seven keys, seven ways into the house without Sofie. But the job sheet did not say who had received a key. It said what Cor supplied, and to whom.

‘Did he bring that set back?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know who went to the house with it afterwards?’

‘No. I shut my own door after that. I don't follow my customers.’

Lena bent over the date. The sequence was there in front of her. The export listing seven sets had been in the portal on 8 May; the order came two days later. Somebody had recorded a number that Cor's delivery could not explain at that point. Even that needed qualifying. Another set might have existed elsewhere, or there might have been an earlier plan. She wrote the dates side by side in her notebook and left a gap where the conclusion would go.

Cor looked at the printout. ‘I told you about the duplicates the first time. I wasn't going to open up all my accounts. There are people in there who lost a key on holiday.’

‘I understand.’

‘Yesterday I kept wondering who I was being careful for. I don't want to spread a story about a customer I can't back up. I don't want to pretend this job never happened either.’

He put a hand on the sheet, not to take it away, but to stop the draught shifting it.

‘You can write down what it says. No photographs of the piles. I'll speak to the police about this job sheet myself.’

Lena gave him Anouk's contact details and the reference number. She said he should use his own words, including about the questions he had not asked. He studied the little piece of paper, then copied the name into his address book.

‘They need to ring me,’ he said. ‘I'm not sending a photograph somewhere and assuming that's it.’

‘You can arrange that.’

He fetched his phone from the shop and added the number. Then he slipped the job sheet back into its bundle. Lena could not take a copy. For a moment she was disappointed, and ashamed of it. His decision would help her less in an argument with Noordhuis, and help the investigation more by letting him provide his own records.

Cor offered coffee. She helped him find the mugs. Three stood in different places, one filled with little screws. He took a fourth from a cupboard over the sink.

‘The good one's for visitors, is it?’ Lena said.

‘The one with screws used to be the good one.’

He made coffee in a small machine whose lid stayed open. A puddle formed beside the cup. Cor pulled a cloth from beneath the drawer and wiped it up.

‘Henk didn't call this coffee. Said I shouldn't go out of my way to insult the beans.’

‘Nora said he thought her brand was too expensive.’

‘Everything cost too much when he was buying. Then a neighbour needed something and he'd lend him half the money in his wallet.’

Cor set down the second cup and sat. Air moved through the open doorway, stirring the sleeves of Lena's coat.

‘I don't want to repeat everything he said,’ he told her. ‘I can hear myself making him into nothing but a good man already. He could hijack any conversation. A customer of mine had trouble reading. Henk started on three letters at once. All the man wanted was to know when he'd get his lock cylinder back.’

Lena drank. The coffee was indeed strong, with a taste that lingered at the back of her tongue.

‘Was he here on 14 May?’

Cor looked at the cupboard holding the boxes. ‘I'll need to think about that properly. I've attached things to a day in my head because of what I heard afterwards. His things are here. That's certain. I'm not naming a time now because you hope I know it.’

‘I don't want you to.’

‘You look as though you do.’

Lena put her cup down. He was right. Each limit felt like a little gap somebody might escape through. She had to let the gaps exist before trying to fill them.

‘I'd like to know where he was that evening. I don't have any first-hand information.’

‘The police can ask me what I know. Nora decides about the things. Both can happen.’

He nudged a stool towards the workbench with his foot, picked up the drawer and examined the glued corner. Lena asked whether Niels had contacted him since he heard her questions.

‘Not about this. He messaged to ask whether a different job was ready. Nothing to do with this street.’

‘Did you answer?’

‘Told him to collect it on a working day. I'm not making everything he's ever asked for suspicious.’

She nodded. The small exchange about an ordinary order restored something she had been losing: people still doing their jobs while reconsidering one particular piece of work. An altered report did not automatically turn all the accounts into one great body of evidence.

Cor asked what the client had said about her correction. Lena told him the job had been stopped and payment was still in dispute.

‘So you'll have time on your hands,’ he said.

She looked up. He held the drawer with his thumbs against the inside.

‘That wasn't a joke. You can't spend all of it here waiting to see what I might remember.’

‘I only come by arrangement.’

‘That's what I mean. Make sure you do something else too. I used to tell Henk you couldn't sort out every letter at once. He took it to mean I wasn't taking the problem seriously.’

Lena put away her sheet. He had not told her to stop. She might have found that easier than the distinction he was making.

She left by the back. Cor had put his bicycle in the narrow passage; opening the front door would mean going through the shop again. The back door was beside the sink. In one direction the path ended at a solid fence; in the other it led to the street. Lena stepped round the front wheel and held her folder close as the wind lifted the pages. Behind her the door stayed hooked open. Cor carried the box of job sheets to the cupboard.

At home she sent Anouk a short message: Cor wanted to speak about his job of 10 May himself. She added that, with his permission, she had seen the relevant job sheet and taken no original away. She recorded the five sets separately from what she herself had observed. Somebody altering her report did not entitle her to present every connection as something she had witnessed.

Then her phone rang. The Noordhuis number, the same one on the written instructions. She let it ring until the caller gave up. A message followed immediately: Marten Sloof wanted to speak to her on Monday about the situation that had arisen. Not about the new findings. Not about Sofie.

She put the phone on the table and read it again before taking off her coat.