Maggie Foster had been running her fruit stall at Watney Market since 1952, and in thirty three years she had not missed a Wednesday. The stall was a wooden cart with a striped awning that had been her father's awning and her grandfather's awning before that, and the stripes had faded from red and white to pink and grey but the awning still kept the rain off the apples and the sun off the oranges, and that was enough. On the Wednesday that everything changed, Maggie noticed three things in the first hour of trading. First, the morning regulars were buying less than usual, a pound of potatoes instead of five, a single cabbage instead of three, because the dole queues had grown longer since the dock closed and the miner's strike had ended with nothing to show for it except empty pockets and a bitterness that sat in the air like smog. Second, the council had put up another sign on the empty warehouse across the road, a sign that said Docklands Development Corporation in letters that were too clean for the East End, and Maggie had been alive long enough to know that clean letters meant the old life was being replaced, brick by brick, person by person. Third, Frank Molloy had not come by for his morning apple. Frank Molloy came by for his morning apple every Wednesday at ten minutes past eight, and he had been doing so since 1963, when he took over the Prince Albert on Commercial Road and decided that a publican who did not eat an apple a day was asking for trouble. Maggie waited until half past eight and then she asked the boy who delivered the newspapers if he had seen Frank. The boy said Frank's pub was still locked, and the lights were off, and the morning regulars were standing on the pavement outside with their hands in their pockets and their breath steaming in the March cold, and no one had a key. Maggie did not close her stall. She gave the awning rope to the boy and told him to watch the apples, and she walked the six streets between the market and the Prince Albert, and when she arrived the regulars were still standing on the pavement, and the pub was still dark, and the lock on the door was still intact, and there was a piece of paper taped to the window that said closed until further notice in handwriting that was not Frank's. Maggie had known Frank for twenty two years. She had buried her husband in 1971 and Frank had closed the pub for the funeral and opened it afterwards and stood behind the bar pouring whiskey for mourners without charging anyone a penny, and she had repaid him by bringing him apples every Wednesday and listening to his stories about the old East End, the East End before the docks died and the high rises went up and the Bengali families moved into the streets around Brick Lane. She knew that Frank would not close the Prince Albert without telling her, and she knew that handwriting that was not Frank's on a note that was taped to Frank's window meant something had gone very wrong. She went to the police station on Leman Street and asked if Frank Molloy had been arrested. The desk sergeant looked at his log and said no one by that name had been brought in, and then he looked at Maggie in a way that suggested she should go home and wait for someone else to solve the problem. Maggie did not go home. She went back to the market and sold her apples and her potatoes and her cabbages, and at the end of the day she counted her takings and found that she was short by three pounds and change, and she could not remember making any mistakes. Rashid Ali had come to London in 1972, the year the Bangladesh Liberation War ended, and he had come with nothing except a sewing machine that had belonged to his mother and a letter of introduction to a cousin who lived in a flat above a curry house on Brick Lane. The cousin had moved to Birmingham by the time Rashid arrived, but the flat was still available, and the curry house below it was willing to give a young man work washing dishes, and Rashid washed dishes for three years and saved every penny that did not go to rent and food, and in 1975 he opened a fabric shop in a space that had previously been a tailor's workshop. The tailor had been Jewish, and his grandfather had opened the workshop in 1903, and the wooden counter was worn smooth in the places where bolts of cloth had been unrolled and measured and cut for seventy two years. Rashid kept the counter. He polished it every morning and he learned the names of every fabric in English and Bengali and Yiddish, because the customers who still came from the old neighbourhood liked to hear the old words spoken by a new voice. Frank Molloy had been his second customer. Frank had come into the shop in the first week, when the shelves were still half empty and the sign above the door was written in Bengali script that no one on Commercial Road could read, and he had bought three yards of cotton twill without haggling over the price, and he had come back the following week with two of his regulars from the Prince Albert, and he had told them that Rashid was a good man who sold good cloth at a fair price, and in the East End of 1975, when the National Front was marching through the streets and the brick walls were covered in graffiti that told people like Rashid to go back to where they came from, a publican's endorsement was better than a bank loan. Rashid did not hear about Frank's disappearance until the evening, because he did not go to the pub in the mornings and he did not read the English newspapers and the Bengali newspapers did not report on publicans who failed to open their doors. He heard about it from a woman named Mrs. Chowdhury who came into the shop at five o'clock to buy silk for her daughter's wedding sari, and she mentioned that the Prince Albert was closed, and Rashid put down the bolt of silk and asked her to repeat what she had said. She repeated it. Rashid closed the shop half an hour early, which he had not done since the day his daughter was born, and he walked to the Prince Albert and found the note on the window and the handwriting that was not Frank's, and he stood on the pavement for ten minutes trying to think of a reason why Frank Molloy would close his pub without telling the Bengali shopkeepers who owed him their livelihoods, and he could not think of one. He did not go to the police. In Rashid's experience, the police did not help Bengali shopkeepers whose publican friends went missing. The police were the men who stopped you on the street and asked for your papers and called your papers suspicious even when your papers were in order. The police were the men who did not investigate when the windows of your shop were broken in the night, and the broken glass was swept up in the morning by your own hands, and the brick that broke the glass was still lying on the floor with a note wrapped around it that said words in English that your children could read but that you could not bear to have translated. Rashid went back to his flat above the fabric shop and he called his cousin in Birmingham and his brother in Tower Hamlets and his friend who worked at the halal butcher on Whitechapel Road, and none of them had heard from Frank, and none of them knew why the pub was closed, and Rashid lay awake that night staring at the ceiling and wondering whether the men who had written the words on the bricks had finally done something worse than break a window. Tom Brennan had been a docker for twenty six years. His father had been a docker, and his grandfather had been a docker, and his great grandfather had been a lighterman on the Thames before the docks were built, and every Brennan man for four generations had earned his living from the river and the ships and the cargo that came up from every port in the world. The Royal Docks had closed in 1981, and Tom had been forty two years old with a wife and three children and a skill set that the new economy had no use for, and he had spent the following four years on the dole, visiting the Jobcentre every Thursday and watching the vacancies board fill up with jobs that required qualifications he did not have and languages he did not speak and a willingness to work for wages that would not cover his rent. Frank Molloy had kept him alive during those four years. Not with money, although Frank had lent him money more times than Tom could count, and not with food, although Frank had fed his children on Sunday afternoons when the fridge was empty and the giro had not arrived. Frank had kept him alive by giving him somewhere to go that was not the flat and someone to talk to who did not look at him with pity, and in the East End of 1985, when the old solidarity of the docks had been broken by the unions defeat and the miners defeat and the long slow defeat of everything that had made working class life bearable, a pub where you were still called by your name and treated like a man with a future was not a luxury. It was a lifeline. Tom heard about Frank's disappearance from a neighbour who had heard it from a woman at the laundrette who had heard it from a man at the newsagent who had seen the note on the window. Tom did not believe it. He put on his coat and walked to the Prince Albert and read the note himself, and the handwriting was not Frank's, and the pub was dark, and the regulars had dispersed from the pavement because it was lunchtime and they had jobs to go to, or they did not have jobs and they had gone to the betting shop instead. Tom stood outside the pub for a long time, and then he did something that he had never done before: he walked around to the back, to the alley that ran behind Commercial Road, and he looked at the back door of the Prince Albert. The back door was unlocked. It was unlocked, and it was slightly ajar, and there was a mark on the doorframe that looked like it had been made by a crowbar, and there was a footprint in the mud beside the door that was the size of a policeman's boot. Tom did not go inside. He had watched enough of his friends get arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a back door that was unlocked and ajar and marked by a crowbar was a wrong place. He went home and he told his wife what he had seen, and his wife told him to stay out of it, and Tom nodded and agreed and then he did not stay out of it. He went to the telephone box at the end of his street and he called an old union contact who worked as a security guard at the Docklands Development Corporation offices, and he asked if there had been any trouble with the compulsory purchase orders on Commercial Road. The contact said there were compulsory purchase orders on half the properties in the East End, and Commercial Road was not on the priority list but it would be soon, and property owners who resisted the orders had been known to receive visits from men who did not introduce themselves and did not leave calling cards. Tom hung up the telephone and walked home through the streets of the East End, past the empty warehouses and the half built luxury flats and the billboards that showed smiling families in apartments that cost more than Tom had earned in his best year on the docks, and he understood what had happened. The Corporation had taken Frank, or men working for the Corporation had taken Frank, and they had taken him because Frank owned the Prince Albert freehold and the Prince Albert sat on land that was worth more without a pub on it, and Frank would not sell, and men who would not sell to the Corporation tended to disappear. Tom understood this completely and Tom was completely wrong about everything except the footprint beside the back door, and the footprint was genuine, and it was the size of a real boot, and Tom would never know whose boot it was or what the boot had been doing in the alley behind Frank's pub, because Tom's part of the network did not connect to the part of the network that knew the truth. Sheila Donovan lived on the fourteenth floor of a tower block in Poplar, and the lift had been broken since November and the council had promised to fix it six times and had not fixed it once, and Sheila had two children under the age of five and a pram that weighed as much as a small car, and she carried the pram up fourteen flights of stairs every morning and down fourteen flights every evening, and the pram held her daughter and the groceries and sometimes a bag of laundry and always the exhaustion that settled into her shoulders like a second spine. Frank Molloy had found her in 1983. She had been sleeping in a hostel in Whitechapel with her son, who was then six months old, and her husband had left two weeks after the son was born, and the landlady of the flat they had been renting had evicted her because the rent was four months behind, and the council had put her on a waiting list that was eighteen months long, and she had no family in London and no friends and no money and no hope. Frank had come to the hostel to deliver a food parcel from the pub's Christmas collection, and he had seen Sheila sitting in the corner with her baby, and he had sat down beside her and asked her name and asked her story, and then he had left the hostel and made eleven telephone calls and visited four council offices and spoken to two housing officers and one councillor and a woman who worked at the Citizens Advice Bureau whose brother drank at the Prince Albert, and within a week Sheila had been moved to the top of the waiting list, and within a month she had keys to a flat in Poplar. She had never asked Frank how he had done it, and Frank had never told her. When Sheila heard that the Prince Albert was closed and Frank was missing, she did not think of compulsory purchase orders or racial violence or back door crowbar marks. She thought of herself. She thought of the hostel and the baby and the corner where she had sat waiting for something that was not going to arrive, and she thought of Frank sitting down beside her, and she understood that Frank was gone because she had been too much for him. She had taken his help and given nothing back, and he had carried her for two years, and the weight had finally been too heavy, and he had closed the pub and left the East End and gone somewhere where no one would ask him to make eleven telephone calls on their behalf. She understood this with the certainty of a woman who had been abandoned by her husband and her landlady and her landlord and the council and the dole office and every institution that was supposed to catch people when they fell, and because she understood it so completely, she did nothing. She did not go to the pub. She did not call anyone. She sat in her flat on the fourteenth floor and she fed her children and she waited for the letter from the council that would tell her she was being evicted again, because Frank was the only thing that had been keeping the eviction at bay, and Frank was gone, and everything she had told herself about deserving the flat and deserving the help and deserving to be caught rather than dropped turned out to have been a story, and the story was over. Jimmy Kwok was nineteen years old, and his parents ran a Chinese takeaway on the Mile End Road, and Frank Molloy had been his unofficial godfather since the day Jimmy was born. The Kwoks had arrived in London in 1965, and Frank had been the first Englishman who did not look at them as if they were an infestation, and when Jimmy was old enough to understand that the world outside the takeaway was not always kind to people who looked like him, Frank had taken him aside and told him that the East End had always been full of people who looked different and sounded different and worshipped different gods, and the people who lasted were the people who learned everyone's language and everyone's story and never forgot either. Jimmy had taken this advice literally. By the age of nineteen he spoke English and Cantonese and enough Bengali to order a meal on Brick Lane and enough Yiddish to say hello to the old Jewish men who still sat on the benches in Stepney Green and enough Cockney rhyming slang to make the market traders laugh. He was studying for his A levels at a sixth form college in Bethnal Green, and Frank had paid for his textbooks and his bus pass and the calculator that he needed for his mathematics exam, and Frank had never asked for repayment and never mentioned the money to anyone. Jimmy was the one who found the truth, and he found it because he was the only person in the network who had access to all five corners of it. He heard about Frank's disappearance from his mother, who had heard it from a customer, and he went first to the Prince Albert and read the note on the window, and then he went to Watney Market and talked to Maggie, and then he went to the fabric shop on Brick Lane and talked to Rashid, and then he went to the betting shop where Tom Brennan spent his afternoons, and then he climbed the fourteen flights of stairs to Sheila's flat and sat with her while her children napped and listened to her certainty that Frank had abandoned them all. He listened to four stories: the police story, the racial violence story, the compulsory purchase story, the abandonment story. And because he had been trained by Frank to listen to everyone, he heard the thing that none of them could hear on their own: each story was a piece of Frank, but none of them was Frank. None of them accounted for the fact that Frank's coat was still hanging on the hook behind the bar, visible through the window if you cupped your hands around your eyes and pressed your face to the glass. None of them accounted for the fact that the till was still behind the bar, and the glasses were still on the shelves, and the ashtrays were still on the tables, all of them full of the cigarette butts from the last night the pub had been open. None of them accounted for the fact that no one in the hospital had been admitted under Frank's name, and no body had been found in the Thames, and no one at the morgue had been asked to identify a man matching Frank's description. Jimmy went to the police station on Leman Street, the same station where Maggie had been dismissed by the desk sergeant, and he asked a different question. He asked if anyone named Molloy had been transferred to a hospital under an emergency order. The desk sergeant looked at his log and this time he went to a different page, and on that page there was an entry that had been written in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Frank Molloy, aged sixty two, had been found unconscious on the floor of the Prince Albert at two fifteen in the morning by a patrolling constable who had noticed the back door ajar. He had suffered a stroke. He had been taken to the London Hospital. He was alive. He was unable to speak, but the doctors said his condition was stable, and the police had not notified anyone because no next of kin had been listed, and Frank had no wife and no children, and the constable who had found him had been reassigned to a different shift, and the entry in the log had not been cross referenced with the inquiries that came later in the day, and the system, as systems do, had failed at every point where a human being might have asked a second question. Jimmy went to the London Hospital. He sat beside Frank's bed for three hours, and Frank's eyes were open but his mouth would not form words, and his left hand was curled at the wrist, and his right hand reached out and gripped Jimmy's hand with a strength that the rest of his body had lost, and Jimmy understood that Frank was trying to say something and could not, and the something was probably about the pub and the regulars and the people who would be standing on the pavement outside wondering why the lights were off. Jimmy made a list. He wrote down every person who needed to know that Frank was alive: Maggie at the market, Rashid on Brick Lane, Tom in his council flat, Sheila on the fourteenth floor, the Bengali families who had been protected by Frank's name when the National Front came calling, the old dockers who drank in the snug on Thursday nights, the young mothers who collected their food parcels on Saturdays, the bookies and the barbers and the butchers and the bakers and all the tiny nodes in the network that Frank Molloy had built across forty years of running a pub on Commercial Road. The list was fifty seven names long. Jimmy was nineteen years old, and he had never been responsible for anything larger than his own homework, and he looked at the list and he looked at Frank's hand gripping his own and he understood that the network was not broken. It had never been broken. It had only been waiting for someone to pick up the threads. He started making telephone calls at six o'clock in the evening, and by midnight every person on the list knew that Frank Molloy was in the London Hospital, and that he could not speak, and that the pub would reopen as soon as someone could find the spare key that Frank kept in the drawer behind the bar, and that the person running the pub until Frank came home would be Jimmy Kwok, aged nineteen, supported by a Greek Cypriot barman named Andreas who had worked at the Prince Albert for fifteen years and who had the key in his pocket the entire time, because he had taken it home on Tuesday night to clean it after it had fallen in a bucket of soapy water, and he had not heard the news until Jimmy called him. The pub reopened on Friday. The lights came on and the ashtrays were emptied and the glasses were polished and the till was rung, and the regulars came back, and they brought flowers and cards and fruit from Maggie's stall and fabric from Rashid's shop and a new pair of boots from Tom Brennan, who had bought them with money he did not have and who left them behind the bar with a note that said for Frank's feet when he walks back in here. And Sheila Donovan came down from the fourteenth floor with her two children and her pram and her exhaustion, and she stood in the doorway of the Prince Albert for a long time without coming in, because she was trying to reconcile what she had believed with what was true, and the difference was the width of the pub's threshold, and she could not cross it, not yet, but she could see through the door and she could hear the voices and she could smell the beer and the cigarette smoke and the fried food from the kitchen, and the smell was the smell of the East End before the docks died and the towers went up and the developers started circling, the smell of a place where people still knew each other's names, and she stood in the doorway while the spring rain began to fall on the streets around the pub, and she did not go in, but she did not go home either.