Spare Parts & Sorcery: The Diner Where Strangers Become Regulars

The brass bell above the door of Dolly's All-Nite Diner gave a thin, exhausted clang as Wren Alderton shouldered inside. The sound was smaller than the cold that had chased her from the garage three streets over, where the salamander furnace had chosen the worst possible hour to develop a wheeze. Her hands smelled of axle grease and regret. Her boots left grey smears on the linoleum, and the linoleum, in turn, smelt of old coffee and floor polish and something fainter beneath, the ghost of a thousand late-night suppers no one remembered ordering.

The hour sat somewhere past midnight. The windows were dark, the street outside a wash of fog and gaslight, and Dolly's had the particular hush of a place that never quite closed because it never quite opened. A counter ran the length of the room, topped with yellow formica scarred by decades of elbows. Behind it, a coffee urn ticked and gurgled to itself like a slow, contented engine. The woman behind the counter glanced up, nodded, and slid a clean mug onto the drip tray without being asked.

Wren had not expected company. That was the first wrong thing.

The second wrong thing was the corner booth.

It was the big one, the one tucked under the painting of a stag drinking from a loch, the one with the cracked red vinyl seats that the owner refused to replace because, she claimed, they had been sat upon by a duke once. Half the town, it seemed, had crammed itself into it tonight. Three figures hunched close together over a table that was too small for them, their coats still on, their breath making little clouds above the remains of a pot of tea.

Wren recognised them in the order her eyes found them. Bertram first, because he was the loudest by far, even when he was whispering, which he was not. He sat with his back to the door, which was either careless or intentional, and his shoulders were hunched up around his ears in the particular posture of a man who enjoyed being important. Mayor Eldwyn Pock was beside him, nursing a cup of something that steamed with suspicious vigour. Across from both of them, spine straight as a ruler, sat a woman in a dark coat whose collar was turned up against nothing in particular, because Dolly's was warm enough for anyone with a shred of sense.

Wren paused three steps inside. Her left hand drifted, by old habit, toward the wrench in her belt. She caught herself. She was not, in point of fact, on call.

The bell was still tinkling. Bertram's voice, pitched low and carrying regardless, cut through it like a knife through newspaper.

"She cannot simply be told, Eldwyn. She must be managed. There is a difference, and the difference is the only thing standing between this town and a very awkward conversation with the Bureau."

"The Bureau," Mayor Pock repeated, in the tone of a man who had heard the word many times and never enjoyed it. "Yes. Quite. The Bureau. You are sure she is from the Bureau, Bertram? Absolutely certain? Because the last time you were absolutely certain about something, we ended up with the goat in the clocktower, and I do not think the clock has forgiven us."

"The goat was a misunderstanding," Bertram said, in a voice that suggested misunderstandings happened to other people. "And the clock has had six months to recover. The point stands. The Chief Inspector has come to Gearswick on her own recognisance, which means she has her own reasons, and her own reasons are almost certainly not the ones she has stated in writing."

Mayor Pock made a small, strangled noise and reached for his waistcoat pocket. Out came a pocket watch on a thin gold chain. He pressed the crown, and the watch began to tick. Wren, who had drifted two steps closer under cover of pretending to study the laminated menu, noticed that the tick was not quite singular. It was three ticks, layered, one slightly ahead of the others, as if the watch were keeping time in three places at once and could not quite agree with itself.

Across the table, the woman in the dark coat lifted her teacup and drank without looking at either man. When she set it down, the porcelain made no sound at all against the saucer. That was the third wrong thing. Dolly's saucers were not quiet. Dolly's saucers clattered like small accusations.

"Mr. Bertram," the woman said. Her voice was the colour of cut glass and about as warm. "I am beginning to wonder whether the Crown sent me to Gearswick to investigate a minor magical infraction, or whether the Crown sent me to investigate whether Gearswick is capable of governing itself without adult supervision."

Bertram made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a cough. "Chief Inspector Vance, I must say, the Council takes very seriously any suggestion that we are not, in fact, entirely competent to manage our own affairs.

"...manage our own affairs."

The sentence petered out into the particular silence of a man who had heard himself finish and wished he hadn't. Bertram's chin stayed lifted, a posture of conviction maintained through what appeared to be sheer structural willpower.

Clarissa Vance did not look at him. She looked at the laminated menu propped between the napkin dispenser and the chrome sugar shaker, as though she were weighing the lunch options and finding them wanting. Her finger traced the edge of the laminated card without touching it.

"The Council," she said, tasting the word the way a physician tastes a tincture. "Yes. I had been told the Council was, how shall one put it, distinctive."

Behind the counter, Dolly Vance, who had been polishing the same stretch of counter since the Pock administration began, paused with her rag in hand. Her eyes flicked from Clarissa to Bertram to the Chief Inspector's left hand, which rested on the table beside her teacup. The fingers were very still. The stillness was the kind that comes from long practice.

Mayor Pock cleared his throat. It was a small, damp sound, the cough of a man who had spent thirty-two years converting anxiety into mucus. He patted his waistcoat pocket where the layered watch ticked its triple rhythm.

"Chief Inspector, the Council, I must say, the Council is, ah, fully committed to, ah, the transparent and proper exercise of, ah, municipal authority. Any suggestion to the contrary is, ah, ah..." He trailed off. He produced a handkerchief and dabbed at his moustache, although nothing had appeared upon it.

"Any suggestion to the contrary," Clarissa supplied, "would be slander, if it were uttered in writing. Which it shall not be. In writing."

The bell above the door stirred. Dolly's hand resumed its circuit of the counter without her eyes leaving the booth. She had served breakfast to every mayor Gearswick had elected in her lifetime, and she had long ago learned that the most interesting part of any meal happened after the second pot of coffee, when the people at the table had forgotten she was there.

The door swung inward and the morning came with it: a wedge of cold air smelling of diesel and damp tarmac and the faint mineral tang of the canal. Wren Alderton stepped inside and stamped her boots on the mat. The print she left was grey. She had a smear of grease across her left knuckle and a coil of copper wire looped over her shoulder like a miser's necklace, and she had not noticed either of these things because she had been thinking about a carburetor that refused to behave.

She paused at the threshold and took stock. Mayor Pock, halfway through extracting himself from the booth with the grace of a man dismounting a horse. Bertram, still pretending he had finished his sentence. Dolly, polishing. And the woman in the dark coat, whose teacup sat on its saucer without sound.

Then the woman in the dark coat looked up, and Wren understood, with the particular lurch that only happens when the world rearranges itself without permission, that the Chief Inspector had not come to Gearswick for the infraction in the file.

The Chief Inspector had come for her.

Clarissa Vance's gaze settled on Wren with the unhurried precision of a surveyor's transit. She did not smile. She did not frown. She simply registered, the way one registers the position of a familiar star.

"Alderton," she said. Not a question.

Wren's hand found the coil of wire on her shoulder and adjusted it. The copper was cold against her collarbone. "Chief Inspector."

"Please." The word was an instruction. "Sit."

There was a booth three down from the Pock party. Clarissa did not wait to see whether Wren would obey. She gathered her gloves, her file, and her teacup, and she crossed the floor in three steps that made no sound at all. The hem of her coat cleared the chair before the chair had time to consider whether it wished to be sat upon.

Wren sat. The vinyl was cold through her trousers.

Clarissa placed a single sheet of paper on the table between them. It was a warrant, Wren realised, although the language on it was not the language she had seen on warrants before. The seal at the bottom was the seal of the Crown's Bureau of Arcane Regulation, pressed in red wax that still held the warmth of the desk it had come from.

Before Wren could read the first line, a plate arrived at her elbow. It was set down without ceremony by Dolly, who had crossed from the counter with the particular footfall of a woman delivering a thing that was not on the menu.

The thing on the plate was a cinnamon roll. It was the size of a hubcap. It was glazed with a frosting that caught the diner's fluorescent light and held it the way a lens holds a flame. Steam rose from its spirals in a slow, deliberate curl.

"I didn't order that," Wren said.

"No," Clarissa replied. "You did not."

Dolly withdrew. The diner resumed its quiet commerce of coffee and complaint.

Clarissa lifted her teacup. She did not drink. She held it the way a lecturer holds a pointer.

"You are wondering why I am here, Miss Alderton. You have been wondering since the inspector from the regional office arrived last Tuesday and asked to see the engine logs at the municipal works. You have been wondering since the postmaster informed you that a registered letter from the Bureau had been delivered to the Mayor's office and not to your uncle's address. You have been wondering, I suspect, since the morning you woke and found that the cat who sleeps on your uncle's roof had taken to sleeping beneath his window instead."

Wren said nothing. The cinnamon roll steamed.

"I am not here for the infraction in the file," Clarissa continued. "The infraction in the file is a parking enchantment cast upon a market stall by a fishmonger who had consumed too much plum brandy on the feast of Saint Erkenwald. The infraction is a matter for the regional office. The regional office will handle it. They have already handled it, in fact. The matter is closed."

She set the teacup down. The saucer accepted it without sound, and the silence it produced was louder than any clatter.

"I am here because Gearswick is a place where cars are repaired by human hands, and human beings are enchanted by cars in return. A man finds a parking spot where no parking spot ought to be. A woman pulls a perfect loaf from an oven that has not been preheated. A child recovers from a fever after sleeping in the back seat of a particular old saloon. These things are small. These things are charming. These things are, in the language of my Bureau, examples of minor transactional enchantment, and they are, in the language of the Crown's own charter, perfectly legal."

She paused. The pause was the kind that invites one to consider the word "perfectly" and find it wanting.

"They are perfectly legal," she repeated, "so long as the exchange remains balanced. So long as a human repairs a car, and the car repays the human with a minor favour. So long as the wheeling-and-dealing, as the locals call it, proceeds in harmony. So long as nobody tips the scale."

Wren's throat was dry. She reached for the coffee Dolly had set down beside the cinnamon roll without being asked, and drank. The coffee was good. It was very good. It was the exact temperature she had wanted without knowing she had wanted it.

She looked at the cup, then at Clarissa.

"The Talbot-Lago," Wren said.

Clarissa inclined her head. It was not quite a nod. It was the motion of a person acknowledging that a student had read the correct page.

"The Talbot-Lago," Clarissa agreed. "The engine that runs without fuel. The engine that hums in a key the Bureau has no name for. The engine that your parents were researching when they vanished, and that someone, I suspect, is still researching, in this town, in this diner, beneath this very unremarkable roof."

She lifted a gloved finger and tapped the warrant between them.

"This warrant," she said, "authorises me to inspect any magical engine in the district of Gearswick. It does not authorise me to inspect a citizen without cause. It does not authorise me to confiscate a vehicle without evidence of infraction. It does not authorise me to act outside the charter of the Bureau."

She folded the warrant once, precisely, and slid it beneath the plate holding the cinnamon roll.

"What it does authorise me to do, Miss Alderton, is to sit in a booth in a diner and eat a piece of Dolly's excellent cake, and to wait for someone in this town to break the wheeling-and-dealing in a way I cannot ignore."

The diner hummed. Dolly's coffee pot hissed. Outside, a lorry ground through first gear on the cobbled slope toward the canal bridge.

Clarissa smiled. It was a small, precise smile, and it reached exactly as far as it intended to.

"Eat the cinnamon roll," she said. "It will keep. And you will need the sugar before I am finished asking my questions."

She lifted the warrant from beneath the plate and laid it flat on the table, red seal upward, and waited.

The cinnamon roll was good. Wren hated that it was good. She ate another bite anyway, the sugar and fat and clove settling heavy in her stomach while Clarissa watched her with the patient attention of a cat watching a mouse decide whether to cross a flagstone garden.

"There's nothing under the booth," Wren said. "There's nothing under the floor. Uncle Bram's garage doesn't have anything that would interest the Bureau."

Clarissa lifted her coffee cup. Steam curled between them. "I am not here to inspect your uncle's garage, Miss Alderton. Not today."

"Then what are you here to inspect?"

The door chime rang.

Both of them turned. Mayor Eldwyn Pock stood in the doorway of Dolly's, hat in hand, his thin neck craned to scan the booths with the wary swivel of a pigeon who had learned to distrust breadcrumbs. Spotting Wren, he made a small, relieved noise and shuffled toward them on his crepe-soled shoes.

"Ah," he said, without quite looking at Clarissa. "Miss Alderton. Might I have a word. A small word. A private word." He cleared his throat. The sound was wet and apologetic.

Wren knew that throat-clear. She had heard it across council chambers and funeral processions and the awful afternoon the dam upriver cracked and the town spent six hours piling sandbags. Pock only throat-cleared like that when he was about to deliver news he wished he didn't have to deliver.

"Mayor Pock," she said. "I'm in the middle of something."

"Yes. Quite. I see that." He risked a glance at Clarissa. Recognised the Bureau crest on the warrant lying flat on the table. His moustache, which had been bravely waxed that morning into two small horns, wilted by a degree. "Ah. The Inspector. Yes. Lovely. Welcome. Lovely to have you. Jolly. Jolly good."

Clarissa inclined her head. "Mayor."

"Just a moment, Miss Alderton," Pock said, and his hand came to rest on Wren's elbow with the faint, papery pressure of a man who had once been a father and still remembered how. "A moment. If you would. I shall be very brief."

He steered her three steps toward the counter. It was not enough distance to be private from a woman trained by the Crown's Bureau of Arcane Regulation, but it was the distance the Mayor considered polite, and so it was the distance he imposed.

"A delegation," he said, dropping his voice to the conspiratorial register he used when discussing sewer repairs with the town clerk. "A delegation, Miss Alderton, is en route."

"En route to where?"

"To Gearswick."

"From where?"

"The Motor Court of Capital Concerns." He said it as if naming a wolf he had glimpsed at the tree line. His Adam's apple bobbed twice. "They sent a telegram this morning. Coded, naturally. Bertram decoded it. Bertram is. Well. You know Bertram."

"I know Bertram."

"Bertram decoded it and brought it to me and I must say, Miss Alderton, I am not at all happy about the tone. The tone is. The tone is the tone of people who intend to do something and would prefer not to be argued with."

Wren set down her fork. The tines made a small, final sound against the plate.

"What do they want?"

"They want to evaluate your uncle's garage licence."

The diner hummed. Dolly's coffee pot cycled. Outside, a child laughed somewhere near the canal bridge, high and bright and belonging to a different morning entirely.

"Evaluate," Wren repeated.

"Yes. Evaluate. The phrase they used, and I am quoting from Bertram's transcription, was: 'philosophical consistency of operations as pertains to the integration of arcane motive principles within registered civic trade.'"

"And what does that mean."

Pock glanced toward Clarissa's booth, then back to Wren, and his eyes carried the particular terror of a man who has been a mayor for thirty-two years and has learned, in that long span, that the words of distant offices always mean worse than they sound.

"It means," he said, "that if the work your uncle does in that garage cannot be described, on paper, in terms that satisfy a committee in the capital, then the licence will be. Revoked."

"Revoked."

"Yes."

"And the garage will be."

"Closed."

Wren looked at him. He looked back. In his warm, soft Home Counties voice, with its frequent nervous swallowings, he had delivered the worst news he could deliver, and the doing of it had cost him something visible. His moustache had given up entirely. It drooped.

"Who," Wren said, "is on this committee."

Pock lowered his voice further. "I do not know. Bertram did not say. Bertram did not have the names. Only the seal." He swallowed again. "The seal of the Court, Miss Alderton. The actual seal. Not a copy. Bertram said he had never seen an actual seal before and he looked quite faint about it."

The actual seal. Wren filed that away. The actual seal meant the Motor Court had decided this was not a routine visit. The actual seal meant someone, somewhere, had filed something.

"Who files a complaint," she said, "against a garage in Gearswick."

Pock cleared his throat. The sound went on rather a long time.

"Anyone," he said, "may file a complaint."

"And did anyone?"

"I. I do not know that either, Miss Alderton. I am. I am sorry. I am deeply sorry. I have been mayor for thirty-two years and I have learned to send the unpleasant things up the road to the capital before they arrive in my parlour, and I am afraid this one has arrived in my parlour."

He put his hat back on. The hat made him look older and not larger, the way hats do on small men who have tried, for decades, to be tall.

"I wanted you to know," he said. "Before the delegation arrives. So that you might. So that your uncle might. Prepare the paperwork. The philosophical consistency paperwork. I am sure there is philosophical consistency paperwork. There always is."

"You think we should prepare paperwork."

"I think you should prepare something, Miss Alderton. I do not know what. I am only the mayor." He took a breath. "I have tried, for thirty-two years, to be a good mayor, and I confess that I have not always known what a good mayor does. But I know that warning a citizen before a delegation arrives is among the small mercies I can offer, and so I have offered it, and now I will go home and drink a great deal of tea."

He straightened his waistcoat. He turned. He took two steps toward the door, then stopped.

"I am sorry," he said, without turning around. "About your uncle's shop. It is a good shop. It has been a good shop for longer than I have been mayor." Another swallow. "I should hate to see it closed."

He went out. The chime rang after him, and the door settled shut, and the diner was quiet.

Wren stood by the counter for a long moment. Her reflection stared back at her from the steel of the coffee urn: a young woman with flour on her sleeve and grease beneath her thumbnail and the particular expression of someone who has just discovered the floor they trusted is not as solid as it looked.

Clarissa did not turn around. Clarissa continued to eat her slice of Dolly's cake with the unhurried precision of a woman who has heard what she needed to hear.

"The Mayor," Clarissa said to her plate, "is a kind man in a difficult position. I have always found that combination tiresome."

Wren returned to the booth. She sat. She looked at the warrant on the table, red seal upward. She looked at the cinnamon roll.

"Eat the roll," Clarissa said. "It will keep."

"You heard him."

"I heard him. I have been listening to mayors warn citizens since I was younger than you. They always sound the same. The throat-clearing does not vary."

"And you. You are sitting here with a warrant and a slice of cake and you. You are part of this."

Clarissa set down her fork.

"I am part of many things, Miss Alderton. I am part of the Bureau. I am part of the Crown. I am part of a delegation that will arrive in this town when it arrives. I am not, however, part of the Motor Court of Capital Concerns. The Court and the Bureau are separate institutions with overlapping mandates and a mutual dislike that has lasted since the second year of the current reign."

She folded her napkin. Precisely. In thirds.

"Eat the roll," she said again. "Then go home. Tell your uncle what the Mayor told you. Prepare his paperwork. File his philosophical consistency. And when the Court arrives, I will be sitting in this diner, eating Dolly's cake, and I will be watching."

"Watching what."

Clarissa smiled. The small, precise smile, reaching exactly as far as it intended.

"Watching who flinches first," she said. "It is always instructive."

Wren looked at her for a long moment. Then she picked up the cinnamon roll, and she ate it, bite by slow bite, while the diner hummed around them, and the coffee pot hissed, and outside, on the cobbled slope, a lorry ground into second gear and carried its cargo toward whatever waited at the top of the hill.

The cinnamon roll dissolved slowly on Wren's tongue. Sweet, yeasted, the frosting catching at the back of her teeth. She chewed with the deliberate attention of someone who had decided that eating this roll was the only rebellion left available to her.

Clarissa watched her with the polite interest of a woman observing a small animal at feeding time.

Outside, the lorry had crested the hill. The street fell quiet again, save for the coffee pot's bubbling complaint and the soft clink of someone washing glasses at the back counter. A draught slipped under the door, carrying the smell of wet cobblestones and coal smoke and, faintly, of the river.

"You have flour on your cuff," Clarissa said.

Wren glanced down. A pale smear of it, transferred from the roll. She did not brush it off.

"My uncle will want to know what you said. About the Court. About the delegation."

"Your uncle will want to know a great many things." Clarissa lifted her teacup. "I would not recommend telling him everything. Some of it is not yet true, and some of it is not yet mine to say."

"That is not helpful."

"It is not meant to be helpful. It is meant to be accurate." Clarissa sipped. "You are a mechanic's apprentice. You are studying sorcery in your own time. You are, by all accounts, competent at both. Competence is rare. I do not wish to see it wasted on a young woman who cannot tell the difference between a warning and a gift."

Wren set down the last fragment of roll. Frosting clung to her thumb.

"What is the difference?"

"A warning asks you to be careful. A gift asks you to be brave. They sound similar, but they require different muscles."

The door opened. A gust of cold came with it, and the sound of someone's boots on the mat, and then the particular heavy tread of a woman who had been carrying things heavier than herself for longer than she cared to remember.

It was Dolly. Of course it was Dolly. The same apron, the same sleeves pushed to the elbows, the same forearms mapped with old burns from rigging and boiler work. She came around the counter with a fresh pot of coffee and a face that suggested she had heard every word of the last ten minutes and had opinions about most of them.

"Refills?" she said, to no one in particular.

"Dolly." Clarissa set her cup forward. "You are late."

"Lorries on the main drag. Blocked the crossing by the chapel." Dolly poured, steady stream, no splash. Her eyes moved from Clarissa to Wren and back. "You two done causing trouble, or are we just taking a breather?"

"We are concluding," Clarissa said.

"Good." Dolly straightened. She looked at Wren. "You. The Alderton girl. Your uncle rang the dock a half hour ago. Wanted to know if you'd come in. I told him I had not seen you. That was a lie. I had."

Wren's stomach shifted.

"He has been ringing the dock?"

"Twice." Dolly set the pot down. "He sounded like a man who was expecting a third call to go unanswered."

Clarissa did not look up from her tea.

"Then perhaps," she said, "Miss Alderton should answer it. The instrument is on the wall by the lavatory. If Dolly permits."

Dolly jerked her chin toward the back. Wren stood. Her chair scraped. The diner's other patrons, three grey-coated men at the counter, a young woman with a sketchbook, did not look up. They had the careful blankness of people who had learned not to.

The telephone was an old Bakelite thing, green-black, the receiver cold against her ear. The line crackled. She asked the operator for the Alderton garage on Vellum Street, and while she waited for the connection to turn over, she watched Dolly and Clarissa through the serving hatch.

They were not speaking. Clarissa was buttering a second piece of Dolly's cake, slowly, and Dolly was wiping the counter in slow circles, and the two of them occupied the silence with the ease of people who had shared many silences and expected to share many more.

The line clicked.

"Wren." Uncle Bram's voice. Rough, careful, the voice of a man who had been thinking about what to say for twenty minutes and had decided on none of it. "You are there."

"I am here."

"At the diner."

"At the diner."

A pause. She could hear, faintly, the tick of the regulator clock on his wall. The hum of the coldframe in the corner where he kept his experimental capacitors.

"I had a visit this afternoon," he said. "From the Mayor."

"I know."

"And?"

"He told me to prepare my paperwork."

Another pause. Longer.

"And the inspector? The Vance woman?"

"She is here. Eating cake."

A breath on the other end of the line. Almost a laugh. Not quite.

"Of course she is." He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Wren. I need you to come home. Not because I am telling you to. Because I am asking you to. There are things in the workshop I would like you to see before anyone else does."

"What things?"

"The things your mother left behind. The things I have been meaning to show you since you were old enough." Another pause. "I think perhaps we have run out of time to be careful about it."

The clock ticked. The regulator hummed. Somewhere on the line, a long-distance operator coughed and asked if the call was proceeding.

"It is," Wren said. "It is proceeding. I will be home within the hour."

She hung up the receiver. She stood for a moment with her hand still on it, the green-black Bakelite cool under her palm, and then she walked back to the table.

Clarissa was finishing her cake. Dolly was refilling Wren's abandoned cup.

"Sit," Dolly said. "One more sip, then you go. A girl your age running out of a diner without finishing her coffee is the kind of detail a man like Bertram remembers."

Wren sat. She drank. The coffee was bitter and dark and exactly the temperature she liked it, because Dolly had been pouring for her since she was nine and had never once gotten it wrong.

Clarissa set her fork down.

"Miss Alderton."

Wren looked at her.

"When you speak to your uncle," Clarissa said, "do not tell him I advised you to be brave. He would not believe it. And he would be correct to doubt it."

"I thought you said you were not part of the Court."

"I am not." Clarissa folded her napkin again. Precisely. In thirds. "I am part of the Bureau. But bureaus have opinions. And mine, on this matter, is that the Alderton family has been careful for a very long time. Careful is a kind of courage. So is its opposite."

Wren finished the coffee. She set the cup down.

"Thank you for the cake," she said.

"Thank Dolly," Clarissa said. "I only ate it."

Wren stood. She buttoned her coat. She left a coin on the table, more than the roll and the coffee had cost, because she had been taught that was what you did when a woman bought you a piece of herself and let you eat it in public.

She pushed through the door. The cold met her, the cobbles, the hill, the long walk down toward the workshop where her mother had once drawn diagrams of things that the Bureau had decided no one should be able to draw, and where her uncle had kept those drawings in a locked drawer for twenty years, waiting for her to be old enough, or brave enough, or both.

Behind her, through the glass, she could see Dolly and Clarissa sitting across from each other. Two women, two cups, two kinds of silence, and between them a plate with nothing on it but a few crumbs and a single used fork.

The lorry on the hill had gone. The street was quiet. The river, somewhere out of sight, kept moving.

Wren Alderton turned up her collar, and walked home.