The Version in the Portal

A white van was parked so close to the door of the industrial unit that Lena had to lift her bag over her head to squeeze past. A new tile lay face down on the ground. The electrician in the unit next to hers was replacing the threshold he had been meaning to do since January.

‘Needs a bit longer to dry,’ he called from behind the van.

‘You could say that about quite a few things.’

‘You keep walking over it.’

She put the tile back against the wall, then freed the top of her bag from a handle it had caught on. Her office smelt of the radiator. She had turned it up on Friday morning and forgotten to turn it down again. The desk stood beneath the long window; all three plants were leaning the same way. She put down her bag, turned off the heating and hung her coat over the back of the chair.

After a site visit, she normally finished writing up her observations before doing anything else. Transfer the photographs, check the numbers, go back over each room while she could still picture it. Later, one stiff window was hard to tell from another. She had learnt not to trust a tidy memory when a scrappy note would do.

Today she opened her sent emails first.

6 May. Bremstraat. The folder held her original photographs and the file she had saved after the visit. She opened it and left the cursor beside the first paragraph.

Property occupied by tenant at time of inspection.

Further down came the damp patch. She had described it as localised. No serious structural defects identified within the scope of the visual inspection. At the bottom, a qualification about the areas she had been unable to see. Her own phrasing: draw a boundary between what you knew and what you had not investigated.

She opened the official portal alongside it. The two windows would not fit on her old monitor. Even with one pushed to the left and the other to the right, she had to keep zooming out. The cropped photograph made the difference clear again. In the original, the loose shelf was propped beside the fridge, a brown ring from a plant pot on its upper surface. In the portal version, everything beside the damp patch was gone.

That need not have been deliberate. Eva often cropped personal belongings out of photographs circulated in a large project file. Lena had asked her to do it. But she should not have changed the finding about whether the house was occupied. Or the more serious conclusions.

Lena clicked on the attachment to her email of 7 May. 9.12 a.m. Two days after she and Eva had last had coffee together; the following day they were due to combine their reports for a meeting with RietWonen. The email said: here's the text for 18, could you export it with the other three? Numbers 12 and 22 to follow tomorrow.

Beneath it was Eva's reply, sent that morning: Will do.

Lena read those two words several times. She had written them often enough herself. You handed over a small job because it was only a small job. If you had to go through everything somebody else did all over again, you might as well work alone. She had even written that down on a course for the self-employed.

She left the email open and rang Eva.

‘I'm in a meeting,’ Eva said at once. Somebody was still talking in the background.

‘When can we speak?’

‘This afternoon. What's up?’

‘Bremstraat eighteen. The text in the file isn't the same as my attachment.’

‘Different how?’

‘A different occupancy status. Different conclusions. My initials underneath.’

The conversation in the background went on. A man said he would send the list again.

‘I'll need to see what you mean,’ Eva said. ‘Email me both versions and I'll compare them.’

‘I've got the original open. You replied that morning.’

‘I can't get to it now. You know how many addresses we were dealing with that week.’

‘It says the house has been empty since March. Sofie was there when I inspected it.’

‘It might be a field in the job details. I'll call when I get back to the office.’

‘Will you leave it as it is until we've talked?’

‘Lena, I'm not going to start changing your files. Send me what you're looking at first.’

She hung up. Lena went on listening to the sound that was no longer there. The radiator ticked softly against the wall of her office.

She saved a separate copy of the portal file, with the date and time. She left the original email in its folder and made a copy of the attachment too. Then she wrote to Pieter. She had stopped the inspection and wanted the discrepancy in the file investigated before any new statement went out under her name.

The email grew longer than it needed to be. She deleted two sentences explaining how careful she usually was. That would be no use to Pieter today. In their place she listed the three factual differences.

Once she had sent it, the rest of Monday returned. A report for a buyer had to be ready by five. A couple buying privately: no portal, no intermediary. They had an appointment with their mortgage adviser the next morning. The floor by their bathroom flexed underfoot. It had nothing to do with Bremstraat. She opened her notes and wrote three paragraphs, then found she had put the wrong house number in the last sentence.

She deleted the whole sentence, not just the number.

Then Jip rang.

‘Can I take this thing off?’ she asked.

‘What thing?’

‘Mum.’

‘Your sling. What did they tell you?’

‘Take it off if I can. Put it back on if it hurts. It's really annoying when I'm eating.’

‘Then take it off to eat. Can you make yourself a sandwich?’

‘I can make a sandwich with one hand. I wanted to know if you were coming home.’

Lena checked the time. Quarter past twelve. On Mondays Jip had no lessons after third period. The revised timetable was on their kitchen table. Lena should have read it on Sunday.

‘Half past one. I need to stop at the shop.’

‘Don't bother. We've got bread.’

‘And something to put in it?’

‘We've always got cheese. You buy cheese whenever you don't know what we've run out of.’

‘Right. No cheese, then.’

‘Could you get some milk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not another two litres. There's only me.’

Lena wrote milk on a loose sheet of paper. There was already a phone number on it. She drew a line between the number and the milk, as if that would keep them separate jobs.

At home, the sling was on the sofa. Jip sat at the table with her feet on the bottom rung of her chair. Her hair was still wet, and one side of her T-shirt clung to her back. Evidently she had tried to wash her hair one-handed. Three uneven pieces of crust lay on a plate.

‘Do you want a hand drying your hair?’ Lena asked.

‘Done it.’

‘Your back's still wet.’

‘It'll dry.’

Lena put the milk in the fridge. Beside two unopened packs of cheese stood half a bottle of milk. She tucked the small new carton behind them, out of sight.

Jip's book for Dutch lay on the table, a leaflet from a gym marking her place. Lena looked at the page.

‘Is that the book you're meant to be reading?’

‘No. I've hidden my Dutch book inside a completely different book. For a laugh.’

Lena pulled out a chair. Jip raised her hand.

‘Forget it. Bad joke.’

‘How's the reading going?’

‘Finished it. Now I have to explain what the writer meant by everything.’

‘Maybe he just meant somebody wanted to catch the bus.’

Jip smiled briefly. ‘Don't think I'm allowed to put that.’

Lena took an apple from the bowl and found a brown patch underneath. She cut it away, then sliced the rest into wedges. Jip took one without moving her book.

‘Why are you so late?’ she asked.

‘There's something wrong with one of my reports. I had to go back through it.’

‘Did you miss something?’

‘The version somebody sent on isn't the version I wrote.’

‘Can't you prove that?’

‘I can prove which text I wrote.’

‘Well, then.’

Lena put down the knife. ‘That's where it starts.’

Jip glanced at Lena's phone on the edge of the table. ‘You'll answer that in a minute.’

‘It's not ringing.’

‘You keep checking it.’

Lena turned the phone face down. Its corner tapped against the wood. She asked how the discussion at school had gone, and listened. Jip and her friend had to give a presentation together. Her friend wanted everything on the slides, including what they were going to say. Jip had removed two slides without telling her. They weren't exactly angry with each other now, but they hadn't finished the conversation either.

‘Perhaps you should explain why first,’ Lena said.

‘I did.’

‘Before you took them out, or after?’

‘After.’

Jip examined the apple wedge between her fingers. ‘It was better.’

‘It might have been.’

‘You say it like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like you don't agree, but you want me to work it out for myself.’

Lena thought of the photograph of the window. The loose shelf and the fridge, cropped out of the picture. Sometimes things did look tidier after somebody else had worked on them. That did not settle who had the right to change them.

‘I'd want to know why first,’ she said.

‘Yes. Well. I'll message her later.’

The phone was still face down when it vibrated. Lena left it there. Jip looked at it, then at her mother. They went on talking about the physiotherapy appointment in Lena's diary. Perhaps Tom could go with Jip. They would have to ask him. She could manage an appointment perfectly well herself, Jip said, without three people hovering round her.

Only when Jip had gone to her room did Lena pick up the phone.

Pieter had called. In his email he said the maintenance coordinator was not immediately available, but the project administration had confirmed the occupancy status. Could she upload the photographs from the inspection in the meantime? Payment for the completed sign-off would then be released.

Lena read the last sentence again. Her agreed fee was a fixed amount for the visit and the report. She was not paid for a particular result. She had put that in her terms after somebody had once commissioned an inspection on the condition that the house would be found suitable to let.

She opened a reply and wrote that the final inspection had not been completed. She would submit her current observations separately, recording that she had stopped. She asked for confirmation of the occupancy status and of the permission on which it rested.

Before she pressed send, she deleted incomprehensible. The word carried more accusation than information. The three questions stayed.

She copied the email to her own business address.

Music came from Jip's room. The same song her daughter had kept restarting halfway through for the past few days. Lena rinsed the knife and put it in the rack. On the sheet with the milk and the phone number she wrote a fourth line: check final export myself.

She would do that today for the buyers' report. She went back to the unit. Before leaving, she knocked on Jip's door and said the latest time she would be home. This time she checked her own diary before making a promise.