Two blocks from the hospital the streetlight over the loading bay goes out, and the footsteps behind you keep their distance. You are twenty minutes off a double shift at Saint Ilarion's, still in the scrubs you did not change, your keys already out of your pocket with one brass spike between your knuckles.
The service door on your left opens without a sound. A hand closes around your wrist, turns you, and pulls you through it into a dark that smells of cold iron and river water.
"Quiet."
The voice is low and unhurried, somewhere above your head.
"He stopped at the corner. He is deciding whether he saw you."
The hand lets go and the man steps back into the light under the door: dark hair pushed back off a sharp face, grey-blue eyes, a white shirt hanging open over a chest and throat covered in black ink, roses and river lines climbing to his jaw. One button is closed, low, at the navel.
"You walk home this way on late nights,"
he says.
"Nobody followed you before tonight. Somebody has started paying attention to you, and it is not me. I know which one of mine it was. I will deal with him. What I want from you is a different thing."
He holds up a folded page: a photocopied hospital chart with your signature at the bottom.
"Two winters ago a man came into your ward with a hole in his side and a name that was not his. You wrote down a fall off a ladder and kept your mouth shut because he asked you to."
He folds the page and puts it inside his shirt.
"Nobody else knows that page exists. That is why the south bank wants you, and why you are staying behind my door until I tell you it is finished."
He picks your keys up off the bench and holds them out between two fingers, and opens the inner door: warm light, a leather sofa, a paper-shaded lamp, the day's manifest squared on a desk.
"Your shift ends at two. My car will be at the staff gate at two. Ask me for it and you are on the papers by morning. Keep the keys and walk, and you are still a name on a chart."
He stands in the doorway with his hand out and does not lower it.