The police page had stayed open on the laptop all through breakfast, because Neil had been keeping it open for weeks the way other people keep the weather open, so that it was he who turned the screen towards her saying look, this one here; and Dawn looked, and knew it from three metres away, before she had even read the description under the photograph, not by the colour, since the green of those Carltons was the green of all Carltons, but by the weld on the rack, that patch of solder and cable tie her father had made one Saturday fifteen years before, left a finger's width crooked because a finger's width crooked was how he had left it, maintaining that straight is how it is done by the people who then load heavy things on top.

The recognition took two seconds for her, who was looking at the photograph, six for Neil, who read the caption first, as was his way of proceeding in all things; and in the four seconds of difference Dawn had time to think the one thing she would never from that moment stop thinking, namely that in their house their father's bicycle was in the cellar, that it had been in the cellar for six years, that they said so at Christmas whenever the talk turned to clearing it out, that she had said so herself, more than once, in that calm voice one uses for the things about which there is nothing to decide.

Neil read the reference number aloud twice, the first time for himself and the second for her, who was not writing it down, then he called, naming the weld on the telephone, naming it well, explaining the solder and the cable tie to someone at the other end who had evidently never seen a rack mended at home; while he spoke Dawn stood beside the table, her hands on the back of the chair (the back was of bent wood, warm on the side the sun was on, over which she ran her thumb back and forth until she found the place where the varnish had chipped, returning to it twice, three times, the way the tongue returns to an aching tooth), saying nothing, because saying nothing was, in that family, the form agreement had always taken.

She did not write it down.

The property store was behind the station, along a corridor with a green resin floor where the bicycles stood against the wall in a row, each with its yellow tag tied to the fork, nineteen or twenty of them together, which is a quantity that tells you more about a neighbourhood than anything else does; the Carlton was third from the left, and the red Boardman, the road bike, fourth. The officer, who had not the air of a man accusing but that of a man who has forms to fill in, drew a wide-ruled ledger towards himself and unscrewed the cap of a pen he kept tied to his wrist with an elastic band, which, Dawn would think much later, is the worse thing, because a man accusing you can be resisted.

He asked whether they were there for the Carlton, and Neil said yes; then he asked, in the tone in which one asks a matter of routine, when she had last seen it, addressing Dawn, looking at Dawn, since it was Dawn who had the sheet with the reference number in her hand.

Neil answered, having meanwhile shifted half a step to bring the ledger into his field of vision, and said: since our father died, six years. He said it with the calm certainty of a man who has never had reason to check; and he was right about the six years, their father had died six years before, in November, and on that she could not have contradicted him even had she wanted to, which was precisely the point, because a true thing said by somebody else, in that room, was the nearest thing to shelter that had come her way in years.

Then Dawn did the thing; or rather, she did not decide it, if deciding is what one does once and for all, but did it in the way one does the things one has already decided a thousand times in the abstract and never once in the concrete: she put out her arm, laid her hand on the handlebar of the red Boardman, the metal smooth, cold under her palm, no welds, nothing there to be recognised, in order to tell the officer that hers was that one. Then she did not take her hand away, she kept it there while she said it, while the officer wrote it down, while Neil beside her made in his throat a small noise that was not yet a word, a noise which, had she been asked, she would have described as that of a man correcting a sum.

The officer turned the ledger round.

He had her wheel the red one out along the service corridor. The saddle was four fingers too high, and she did not lower it, since lowering it there, in front of Neil, would have been the gesture of somebody who knows the bicycle. The green one came out shortly afterwards on another trolley, pushed by a boy in uniform who could not have been more than twenty, who held the handlebar from underneath, the way one holds a thing that is not one's own, and who was taking it towards a door at the far end: it passed two metres from them, the weld a finger's width crooked passed two metres from them, without either of them looking at it.

Neil held the door for her, as she had wanted him to, holding it open a second longer than was necessary, looking out at the street the way one looks at a street one knows. On the pavement the red one would not go into the boot, so they walked back, he on the right, she on the left, the bicycle between them; and it was he who talked, because talking was his part, until at a certain point, without malice, looking ahead, he asked her whether she was pleased.