The statement was given at half past eight, in Ferrante's office, with the shutters closed against the street.
Harper had slept three hours on Benefit Street and woken convinced she would be sent home and forgotten. Instead there was coffee, a clean blouse lent by someone's housekeeper, and Sylvia Grant, waiting with a notebook she clearly did not need.
Sylvia was in her sixties, grey hair cut short and exact, reading glasses on a cord, a good suit kept good by care. Nico had said, "Sylvia was clerk to a judge for twenty years. If she asks you a question, it is because the answer matters." Watching her arrange two pens in parallel, Harper believed it.
"Miss Lane," Sylvia said. "Harper, if I may. I am not police. I advise Mr. Barone, badly if I work from guesses. Detective Okafor will join us by telephone, and she will want what I want — not a story. What you actually saw."
"I can do that," Harper said.
"Most people cannot," Sylvia said pleasantly. "Most people remember the evening they have since invented. Begin when you first found the man unfamiliar."
Detective Mara Okafor's voice came through the phone, clear and unhurried, with a request that the call be recorded and Harper's agreement given aloud. Harper gave it, then began, slowly, in order.
"I was serving water. Table Nine was set for twelve. I saw a busboy come out of the service corridor with a tray. I did not know him. We had six staff on service that I knew by sight, and he was not one of them. I noticed him because his jacket was too short in the sleeve, and because he was not looking at the tables. Staff look at tables. He was looking at the doors."
"Age?" Okafor asked.
"I won't guess his age precisely. Between thirty and forty, I would say, but that is an impression. He was taller than me, maybe five foot ten. Lean. Dark hair, cut short. There was a scar through his left eyebrow — through it, not beside it. The hair does not grow there. It was pale, an old scar, not fresh."
"Which eyebrow, Miss Lane?" Sylvia said. "Be certain."
"His left. My right, as I faced him. I am certain, because later, when he turned at the service door, I saw it again in the light over the door."
"Go on."
"On his right hand, holding the tray low, there was a tattoo. An anchor. Small, dark blue or black, on the back of the hand, between thumb and wrist. A harbour anchor, with a rope. I saw it twice, at the sideboard and at the door. And he limped."
"Describe the limp," Okafor said.
"Not a large one. He favoured his right leg — no, wait." Harper closed her eyes. "His left. He put his weight down carefully on the left, as if the knee did not like it, and the tray dipped that way. Left side. I am correcting myself because the first answer was too fast, not because anyone suggested it."
Sylvia wrote something, for the first time. "That correction," she said, "is worth more than the answer. Continue."
"He went out by the service door. The door closed behind him. That is the last I saw of him. After that, I was clearing the side station, I crouched to get the spare jug from the low shelf, and I saw under Table Nine. A black box with a blinking light and wires. And the token beside it. I did not touch either of them. I stood up, I went to Mr. Barone's chair, and I said what I said."
"Now," Sylvia said, "the part people spoil. What did you not see?"
Harper opened her eyes. "I did not see the man touch the table. I did not see him crouch, or reach under it, or carry anything except the tray. I did not see him in the cloakroom, or speak to anyone, and I do not know if he was alone. I cannot say when the box was put there. It was there when I looked. It may have been there before he came in, for all I can prove. I think he is connected to it because he was wrong — wrong jacket, wrong face, wrong way of looking. But thinking is not seeing. I won't dress it up as seeing."
There was a small silence, in the office and down the telephone line.
"Detective?" Nico said. He had said nothing until then. He stood by the shutters, out of Harper's sight, as if he knew a witness speaks truer when she is not watching the most powerful man in the room for cues.
"Miss Lane," Okafor said, "if every witness I dealt with made that distinction, my job would be half its size. Two more things. Would you know him again?"
"Yes. The scar and the tattoo together. And the walk."
"And has anyone, since last night, told you what you ought to remember?"
"No," Harper said. "Mr. Barone told me to keep the habit of looking. Mrs. Grant told me not to give her a story. That's all."
"Miss Grant," Sylvia murmured. "But I will allow it, in a good cause."
When the call ended, Sylvia closed the notebook she had barely used and looked at Harper over her glasses — not unkindly, but as a person looks at a bridge she intends to drive over.
"You left a service training course, I am told. Part-trained."
"EOD awareness and support," Harper said. "I left when my brother was killed. I couldn't finish it and be what Mum needed. I recognised something wrong under a table. That's the extent of it. I'm a waitress saving for paramedic exams, Miss Grant. Not a heroine from the papers."
"No," Sylvia said. "A heroine from the papers would have added three details by now. You did the opposite. Mr. Barone, she will do."
The last piece of the morning came an hour later, and Nico reported it himself, coming into the kitchen where Harper was making tea she did not want because her hands needed a task.
"The Kovacs have been told," he said. "Carefully, and by me. That there was a danger at the table, that it was found by good eyes, and that it was not of my making. Their elder asked one question: whether the dinner was ended by the man who planted it, or saved in spite of him. I told him it was saved. He said that in that case, the peace is not dead. It is postponed, which is a different thing. He holds no Barone responsible for a coward who hides under furniture."
"Under a table," Harper said.
"Under a table," Nico agreed. "You have been precise with everyone today, Harper. Allow an old phrase its moment."
She almost smiled. Then she thought of a man with a scar, watching a yard in the rain, and the smile went, and she drank the tea anyway, because the day was not finished with her yet.