Every Friday after she had done the weekly shop at Four Square, Dan’s grandmother would unpack the plastic bags of groceries onto the kitchen table, stacking the tins and boxes and bottles in order of size.

Then she would sit down, put on her black framed reading glasses and work along the table, crossing each item off the receipt as she came to it. Only when the printed numbers and the stacks of tins and boxes and bottles matched up perfectly was the shopping done.

“Because people make mistakes,” she told Dan when he asked her why she bothered. “They’ll take your money and they’ll cheat you blind if you let’em.”

Only once, when Dan was nine, did his grandmother find what she had been looking for: she had been charged for two packets of butter instead of one. So she marched straight back to Four Square, holding tight to the curl of paper and demanding her dollar forty back.

“He had to pay up cause I had proof,” she told Dan. “That’s why you always need proof, see?” Dan remembered how the triumph of vindication had given her creased face a martyred glow, like the pictures of saints in Sunday school.

Even as a child he did not see the point to her thoroughness. Yet here he was twenty years later on the other side of the world searching for proof in someone else’s shopping receipts.

He raised the piece of paper up to the level of his eyes, as if this might help the information penetrate.

Cable hoodie, it said. £55.00. There was other information too: product codes and shop location, but offline, these were just so many numbers.

So far – a month into the records that Sara had given him – and all Dan knew for certain was that the subject was female and she seemed to like shopping. What did that prove?

The cable hoodie – some sort of cardigan, maybe – was part of a haul that included cheap jewelry (two bracelets at £3.00 and £4.50 respectively) and a padded plunge, a bra he guessed, in medium, white. £88.50 in total in two different shops. This was how the subject had spent her Saturday afternoon three weeks ago. Maybe she was shopping again right now – if she existed, it there was even a real person behind this, instead of another Reeve & Lamb headfuck.

Dan tipped his head back. The moulded plasterwork of the ceiling above him was blurred with a patina of old grease and nicotine. Late September sun filtered through the rain-streaked glass of the room’s only window.
He wondered what his grandmother would have made of his latest home.

She would not have approved of his latest home; he knew that much. A one room studio in Seven Sisters, Dan had moved in as soon as he arrived in London. One of five carved out of a Victorian terrace house, the flat was too small with sudden corners and inconclusive doorways. Dan could hear every sound from neighbours all around him – the tart grumble of conversation, the melodious boom of televisions, the staccato taps of footsteps from above. In the flat below his an old mattress was pressed against the bay window. When Dan tried to peer past it he could see only a couch shrouded in plastic with a carton of orange juice balanced on the arm. Day after day Dan watched the carton swell as the juice inside fermented – and day after day the carton stayed in the same place, until it was ballooned as tight as the cardboard would allow. Dan wondered how bad it would smell if it was opened.

He had not yet decided whether to stay at the flat – he’d be able to afford somewhere better, much better, as soon as he got his first paycheck from Reeve & Lamb. Yet the idea of moving again filled him with torpor.
Dan’s grandmother would have deplored this attituted. Oh she would have understood the need for somewhere cheap that wasn’t too particular about references. But her grandson’s careless attitude to his surroundings – in a month and he hadn’t even unpacked properly – would have made her hard, blue eyes narrow and her knotted fingers twitch with impatience at the filth to be eradicated, the order to be restored.

She’d been dead for six years now but he still found himself looking at each new place through her eyes, trying to measure how far he had come and if it could ever be far enough.

On the scarred wood of the flat’s only table, his laptop lay: a temptation. It would be so easy to jack into the phoneline and find out something real about Sara’s subject: there was enough information on the receipts for him to hack a card number. Then he’d have the lot: name, address, bank details. Everything.
That was not the only reason Dan’s fingers trembled every time he looked at his computer. At first he had simply been too busy to check his own mail or drop by any of the usual sites – to see where the fuck Benny had vanished to or if there was any word from Jessica yet.

He was head of communications for the department, Williams had told him. “You need to be aware of everything that’s going on,” Williams said. “Not just what’s being said, but who is saying it,” Williams hesitated, just the slightest pause. “It might be useful for you to build up a complete picture of the different country heads in Easter Europe: use whatever means you think necessary, eh.”

Now the longer Dan left it to get in contact with his friends, the smarter that decision felt. After all, he couldn’t be the only person at the firm ‘building up a picture’ of colleagues and rivals.

“You’re being paranoid,” Dan told himself. Possibly. But his grandmother would have been the first to recommend caution.

“What were you doing in Taipei anyway?” Sara had asked him yesterday, a casual sounding question as she looked
at one of the maps on the wall of his office.

“It’s an interesting place,” Dan evaded. “And I like to travel.” Which was all true and made no mention of Jessica walking out on him – hazel eyes bright with tears, yet determined – she’d been so determined, like a child steeling herself for something that would hurt and then be done with.

“Yes, I’ve seen your profile,” Sara said, she was smiling now. “You’re really not one to settle, are you, Daniel?”

“You’d know, of course,” Dan countered. “When was it you left Poland?” Sara gave a shrug that could have been a grimace and might have meant anything.

It was Williams who’d let that one drop when Dan had requested a translation for a report in from Wrocùaw.

“Just give it to Sara.”

“She speaks Polish?” Dan asked.

Williams looked up, amusement creasing the skin around his eyes. “She is Polish, Daniel: from Katowice. Did she not mention it?” He looked delighted to be the breaker of confidences It occurred to Dan that it might suit the old man to play himself and Sara off against one another.

Sitting in his filthy flat on a Saturday afternoon, Dan wondered again about Sara.

Fawkes didn’t sound very Polish name, but there was nothing to say that she wasn’t using a borrowed name like him: maybe that’s what everyone at Reeve & Lamb did. Dan wondered what Sara’s shopping receipts would say about her.

Sighing, he turned back to the mess of paper. Get under the skin, Sara had said, whatever that meant. £88.50 in one afternoon, spent in two high street stores in Hammersmith on jewellery, a bra and what looked like a cardigan. What was he supposed to deduce from this? Why do people buy things? Why do women always seem to need new clothes? Perhaps a special occasion?

Cheered by this breath of inspiration Dan scoured the records for the following weekend. No restaurant bills, no train tickets, though that didn’t have to mean anything: she had a monthly zone 3 travel card. Any extra supplements would almost certainly have been paid for in cash. But there: 20 camel lights, a cheap bottle of wine and a four-pack of beer at an off-licence in Blackheath. Not unusual purchases but the area stood out: from the concentration of spending Dan guessed the subject lived in West London. The booze could be supplies for a party or a dinner – some social occasion at which Dan would bet that she had been wearing a pair of new bracelets, perhaps even a new cargidan.

Under the skin, Sara had said: join the dots, deduce a life from spent currency. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.