"I'm going to say something and you're not going to like it," James said, on the fifth night.
"Go on."
"I don't want this."
"I know."
"I'm thirty-four. I fit locks. I have a brother in Swindon and a van and about nine friends and I have never in my life had anything happen to me that wasn't ordinary." He was sitting on the floor again; he had stopped pretending the sofa was the natural place. "And I bought this flat because it was forty grand cheap, and it was forty grand cheap because of you, and I have known that since the first day and it did not bother me for one single second."
There was a silence.
"That's fair," said Sylvie.
"It's not fair. That's the point I'm making." He rubbed his face. "I bought your death at a discount. That's the transaction. And now you're standing in my front room asking me for something and I have no idea how to say no to that."
"Then let me make it easy," she said. "Don't help me."
"Sylvie —"
"I mean it, and I have had nine weeks to think about this and you have had five days." Her voice was very steady. "You will not be able to explain it to anybody. You will not be able to tell your brother. The police will not take a word of it and if you push they will look at you, because you are the man who bought the flat of a woman who died and started making enquiries about how. There is nothing in this for you. Nothing. Not money, not closure, not even the story, because you can never tell it."
James Byrne sat on the floor of his own flat with his back against a radiator.
"What was your job?" he said.
"What?"
"You said you lived here six years. What did you do?"
"I was an interpreter," said Sylvie Marsh. "Sign language. British Sign — hospitals, mostly, and police stations, and sometimes court."
James looked at the ceiling eleven feet above him for a long moment.
"So your whole job," he said, "was being the reason somebody got heard."
"...Yes."
"Right," said James. "Well. That's that, then, isn't it."