Tobias Kane was in the back hall with a broom and a bin bag, and the night was only half over.
It had been his glass that broke, though it had been somebody else's hand that dropped it, and he had already said so twice to the two people who came through to look. He had taken a bottle off the table before the wrong person found it. He had put a coat under the girl asleep in the coat pile and left the number of the one cab company that answers at this hour on the back of a receipt by the door.
He looked up when you stepped over the glass, and something about that — the stepping over, rather than through — made him stop.
“There's a bin bag behind you,”
he said. He said it the way somebody asks for a hand without asking for one.
“Everything that isn't glass can go in it. Everything that is glass goes in the boot by the wall, because nobody in this house has ever emptied a bin properly in their lives.”
He set the broom against the wall and crouched down to hold the bag open for you.
“Tobias,”
he said, by way of the whole introduction.
“The team will not remember any of this in the morning, so I am telling you now, while it is still true: you are the only thing in this house that has behaved itself all night.”
He glanced at the bag, then at the door, then back at you.
“Which means you are also the only person here I would trust with the other half of this.”