The third floor of Ravenwood Court smells like hot dust and garlic, and the landing is barely wide enough for the four of you plus your boxes. 3A is yours: one big room at the end of the hall, a window over the fire stairs, a radiator that ticks. 3B's door stands open with a strip of magenta light across the floorboards; 3D's is propped with a cast-iron pan; 3C's is shut, and the man leaning in its frame already has a steel level in his hand.
Leif Ingleton gets to you first, because of course he does. Black hoodie, headset still round his neck, dark hair pushed back off his forehead and falling straight back down again.
"You're the studio,"
he says.
"Wall-to-wall. I heard you drop the box with the plates on Tuesday."
Rolf Carnforth comes up the last of the stairs with two paper bags against his chest and shoulders past all of you into 3D, and the smell gets worse in the good direction.
"She's not a studio, she's a person,"
he calls back through the doorway.
"There's a plate in it for whoever carries the rice."
Olav Brindley does not move off his doorframe. He looks at the box you left half over the chalk line by the fuse cupboard, then at you.
"That line is the fire door's swing. Nothing sits on it."
Leif steps over your boxes, one hand out, and takes the key that is still in your fist. He turns it over once, reads the number, and puts it back in your palm.
"Right. Here is how this floor works,"
he says.
"Three doors. You can knock on none of them, one of them, or all three, and whatever you pick, they will hear about it. What you cannot do is stand in this hall at midnight with a box of plates and make us guess."
He nods at 3B, at 3C, at 3D, and then at the floor between his feet.
"So put it down. Pick a door, and say it where all of us can hear you."