Martin left the wet name label alone.
He turned the steel rule over and eased its unmarked edge beneath the flap. Warm air brushed his knuckles as the metal lifted. It smelled of cooking oil and laundry powder. There was no kitchen in the passage. No laundry either.
A cream envelope lay inside, folded in half.
It had no stamp and had never been sealed. Across its face ran eleven little boxes for a contact number. The fold concealed most of them. The last four had been outlined twice in orange ink.
He knew those digits.
His hand went in before he had decided to move. Evelyn caught the edge of the envelope with the rule.
“Look at how it's lying first.”
A thin sheet of paper was trapped beneath its right-hand corner. The other end disappeared into a seam at the back of the box. Pulling would tear it. Martin pushed the envelope half a centimetre farther in, released the sheet, and brought them out together.
ROUTE AMENDMENT—MANUAL RETENTION COPY.
Before he could unfold it, a chair scraped on the other side of the letter box.
“The last four digits. Once more, please.”
A man's voice, close enough to be in the next room.
Someone answered with the four digits in orange.
Martin looked at Evelyn. She had set the old clock on the floor beside the boxes. It read 1:14. Her phone, still offline, said 2:27. The gap remained seventy-three minutes.
“Don't assume it's a way out,” she whispered.
He crouched to look through the seam that had held the paper. There should have been a steel backing plate.
Instead, he saw the underside of a desk, two blue plastic chairs and a patch of white light on the floor. A shoe rested in the light, wet cement clinging to its heel. Somewhere farther away a washing machine gave three completion tones.
The apartment lobby.
He recognised the chipped laminate on the security desk. That morning the visitors' book had covered the damage. Now a police document folder lay there, one metal corner hanging just within his narrow field of view.
He knocked twice on the box.
The shoe did not move.
At his next knock, a hand reached across the desk and steadied a loose cup lid. The conversation continued.
Even the noise he made had acquired an acceptable explanation by the time it reached the other side.
Martin switched on his phone and restored mobile service. The time settled at 2:28. Three missed-call notifications appeared, all from the same police duty number. A message followed: PLEASE CONTACT US REGARDING THIS MORNING'S SCHOOL VISIT.
He did not call the number in the message. He used the public-service directory already on his phone to reach the station switchboard. Only after the duty clerk had confirmed the officer's name, identification number and attempts to contact him did Martin ask to be put through.
“Martin Tan.”
Behind the letter box, someone picked up a phone. Two sounds of breathing became one conversation.
“We've been trying you for twenty minutes,” the officer said. “Ian Cheong's aunt tells us you took a phone that wasn't his. She also says you've encouraged him to expect someone to come back.”
“Where is she now?”
“At work. The school is looking after the boy until his father collects him. There's something else we need to establish. A man went to the side gate last Friday to pick him up.”
Martin's fingers tightened on the envelope. “Did he take Ian?”
“No. Security refused to release the child. He said the collection route had changed, left a contact number and asked the school to confirm with a woman. We traced him through the visitors' book today. He's here to clarify a delivery record.”
“What was the woman's name?”
Paper moved against paper.
“There's no name here.”
Martin stared at the orange outline. For the first time, he could imagine the case becoming something he knew how to investigate. A man had approached a child under the pretext of a changed collection arrangement. Someone had copied contact details, then used an old phone to lead Martin off his usual route. Perhaps Hannah was being held somewhere. Perhaps the anomalies were the means of hiding her.
A person could be questioned about motive, whereabouts, time. None of those questions required a corridor without an exit.
The officer sent a verification sheet. The man's name and the start of his number were masked. The last four digits appeared in large blue type above three supporting sources: SCHOOL VISITOR ENTRY. LEGACY-ROUTE DELIVERY RECORD. ANOMALOUS FAMILY CONTACT MATCH.
The third source was the Municipal Data Consistency Center.
“Your temporary review this morning noted these digits,” the officer said. “We need to establish whether it's the same number.”
“I only saw the last four.”
“But the old phone also called a number ending in those digits?”
“It called my full number.”
A pause. “Then you also think somebody copied the contact details?”
The explanation fitted so well that Martin almost said yes.
Evelyn laid the steel rule across his screen, covering the blue digits.
Without them, the page was three narrow source notes. Beneath the delivery record, faint grey text said ORIGINAL ROUTE VERSION NOT VERIFIED. He hadn't noticed it. It had been there all along.
“Take away the four digits,” she said. “What have you actually got?”
A man who had not taken the child. An unverified delivery record. An observation Martin himself had made, now returned to him as a match.
He was no closer to knowing where Hannah was.
A zip rasped behind the box. The man asked if he could take something out of his insulated bag; the document folder wouldn't fit and his lunch was going to spill. The officer told him to stay seated. He did not sound hostile. But Martin could already see how a bag containing lunch became a bag containing unidentified items.
“Please don't use my record to confirm his identity.”
“Are you withdrawing your statement?”
“The last four digits matched. I'm not withdrawing that. I never said the numbers were identical.”
Evelyn opened the envelope flat. Moisture had stuck the fibres together at the crease. She worked the rule beneath them a little at a time, saving the contact field from splitting down the middle. All eleven boxes emerged. At the far left someone had added a faint handwritten tick.
They laid it on the old clock's clear cover. Martin copied the first digit, then slid the rule over it and moved to the next. Evelyn made a separate copy.
Both pencils hesitated at the seventh box. It contained a zero, not a space. Martin wrote the zero and continued.
Their copies agreed.
The number on the envelope was not his. Its last four digits matched perfectly; its beginning did not.
He remembered his own note from the review room: LAST FOUR CONFIRMED. FULL NUMBER NOT ESTABLISHED. He knew the distinction. Yet the moment somebody offered him a man the police could question, he had been willing to let it blur.
Evelyn wasn't looking at him. “The part they show you doesn't have to be false. It just has to make everything else look unimportant.”
“Did your mother say that too?”
“She called it the View Gate. A situation arranged so you notice what you're meant to notice. Not one where everything you see is a lie.” She touched the envelope. “You saw a name and nearly tore up the paper underneath.”
Martin put his copy beside the subscriber details on his phone. Neither number changed or tried to become the other. There had never been any reason they couldn't both exist.
He asked the officer to compare the man's complete number. There was no need to send it to him. They could check each position, starting at the beginning.
“We've compared the last four.”
“Then let's start at the first.”
Martin read from the envelope. At the third position the officer stopped him: different. The sixth was different too. The remaining five matched, including the zero.
“Have you checked the registered number?”
“It agrees with his device and his delivery slip.”
That did not make the man innocent. Numbers could change hands. Delivery records could be forged. His visit to the school still required an explanation. But the claim that these were the same number did not hold. Martin asked the officer to record that limit—not to turn it into a finding that no connection existed.
The officer asked him for a supplementary statement under his own name.
The form accepted personal evidence; no senior clearance was required. Martin separated his three observations and their sources. The old phone had called his number. He had distinguished only the last four digits in the morning's cache. A paper record now showed a different complete number. He marked the last as a personal observation, pending examination of the physical evidence.
He did not upload the envelope. He did not name Evelyn. No new query led from the paper to apartment 8-05.
Before submission, a confirmation appeared: STATEMENT CONFLICTS WITH AUTOMATED FINDING. IN-PERSON CLARIFICATION AND FORENSIC EXAMINATION OF HELD DEVICE REQUIRED.
The old phone pressed against his chest through its evidence bag. It had scarcely any charge left when Ian gave it to him. It would call only him. He did not know what would remain if he handed it over.
“When?”
“Nine tomorrow morning. Bring the phone and the paper you mentioned. We can't close the inquiry on the strength of this call.”
Martin signed beneath his own name.
The receipt did not say anyone had been rescued. MATCH ESTABLISHED became MANUAL VERIFICATION PENDING. His designation as the Center's field contact was suspended; further visits to the family would have to be reassigned. Beyond his disabled grey pass, another ordinary way into Ian's life had closed.
The blue chair moved. The officer told the man to finish his account of the delivery before they decided what happened next. At last, the shoe shifted out of the white light.
Martin stopped listening.
“We may have slowed them down with the right man,” he said.
“We may have.”
Evelyn offered him no safer version of the decision. She folded the envelope along its old crease, uncovering the retention sheet beneath. It had three staple holes. Someone had marked the middle hole with orange ink, much the same shade as the two pens in Hannah's grey bag.
The upper half wasn't a letter. It was an old allocation table for route contact numbers.
Six-digit prefixes ran down the left. Assigned routes and changeover dates ran down the right. A footnote explained that this was an internal batch index from the pilot's distribution of contact numbers by route. It had nothing to do with telephone area codes. A pasted strip covered the last four digits; that part of the number wasn't used in this lookup at all.
Similar numbers didn't always lead back to the same person. Some began with the same batch of assigned roads.
Martin aligned his eleven-box copy with the left-hand column. First digit, second, through to the sixth. He did not have to supply anything from memory.
A grey stamp covered the corresponding route entry.
WITHDRAWN.
The date was three years old.
He opened the public transit directory on his phone and searched only the route identifier. No name. No phone number. It was absent from the current list, but a short withdrawal notice remained: the Northern Loop branch service had ended, with its stops reassigned under the Safe Routes pilot.
Where its map should have been, a clean white rectangle filled the page. The legend, scale and download button remained. Only the line was gone.
Evelyn's hand rested on her drawing tube. Three years of survey photographs had disappeared. To recognise this route by its old stops, windows and side paths, she would have to go back through her original drawings. Or walk it again.
“Do you still have a map?”
“Some of one.”
“Don't fill it in yet,” Martin said. “Leave the gaps where they are.”
He closed the directory. They had not found Hannah, or a door home. They were still on this side of the letter box. Nobody in the lobby heard their knocking; the fire door behind them still had no handle. But the number no longer pointed at somebody convenient to suspect. It pointed at a route they would have to retrace.
Evelyn turned over the retention sheet. A narrow delivery receipt had been pasted to its back. Its newer ink lay over the faint impression of the old withdrawal stamp.
RECEIVED: FRIDAY, 4:10 P.M.
Three minutes before the school bus struck the barrier.
The route had been withdrawn for three years. That afternoon, it had still delivered something.
The recipient wasn't Hannah Teoh.
It was Ian Cheong.