"Oh, no," Ford said immediately (maybe too quickly, again — this was becoming a running theme of the conversation, he was vaguely aware, and he really needed to work on it if he was going to come out of this without making her think he was up to no good). "No, we're not — I wouldn't say we're close," he specified. Ford was not sure why it was particularly important to him that Miss Fisk not think Ford and her brother were close, but it felt like maybe the sort of thing that could get him into trouble if it came up later. And he and Dorian Fisk weren't close, not by any definition of the word, so it wasn't like he was lying.

"It's just..." he started, his brain working quickly to try and think up another lie. "We're meeting for drinks later, and he forgot it. So he asked me to grab it for him. That's all."

That sounded believable, right? At least on the surface of it. The timeline didn't quite work, because a quarter of an hour (or maybe twenty minutes, by now) wasn't really enough time for Dorian Fisk to have left work, reached a pub, and then sent an owl or something asking Ford to grab his scarf, unless he'd left early. Or — maybe he'd been out on an assignment all afternoon, and he realized he'd forgotten his scarf hours ago and had told Ford to grab it. That could work — but it was also making a lot of assumptions about Dorian Fisk's afternoon, assumptions that Miss Fisk, as someone who worked in the same department as him, might be able to easily verify (or might already know to be untrue). Best not to specify, then, and hope she didn't ask.