Chapter 16
The Order of Things
"His name is Daniel," said Ravi. He said it again like a word in a language he was learning. "Daniel Hale. Your father was a bookkeeper, your sister's a nurse. I've worked for you four years. I've seen you cry at a Pixar film. I've had your passport in my hands. And I didn't know your name."
"Nobody did."
"I did not guess," said Camille from the window. "He told me at six o'clock Saturday morning. It was the first time in my life I wished to hit him."
It was Sunday, in a whitewashed farmhouse room near Dresden, with a stove and a view of a frozen field. David had told it all once, standing, for an hour. Now the faces in front of him had settled on a silence.
"I owe you an apology."
"You owe us a good deal more," said Nell. She sat straight in her cardigan with her cards face down. "I was married thirty-one years to a man who told me he was in insurance. When I came to you, I thought I'd found the only honest man in a dishonest business. I didn't think he'd have a secret in the middle of it."
"I couldn't say it. If I had, you'd have known it was personal and stopped believing it was right."
"Is it right?"
"I thought so. Until this week. Now I think it's both. It's right and it's my father. I don't know how to separate them. I'm only asking you to know."
Anselm spoke from the stove, immense, arms folded. "For nineteen years I drove a man who told me nothing. A driver is a part of the car. I came to you because you said in a Vienna kitchen that a man should not be a part of anything he cannot see. Have we been a part of a thing we could not see?"
"Yes."
"Then we have been your trick. The hat. It is not an insult. I would only like the truth."
David looked at him a long time. "I think you've been the only people who ever told me no."
Nell turned over a card with a small dry sniff. "Well. It's a start."
Ravi had been staring at the strip of numbers. Now he sat cross-legged on the carpet in a circle of white cards, pencil behind his ear.
"I was looking at what they were. I should have looked at when." He laid them down in turn. "AF-0411, Marseille, two years ago. 0416, Zurich. 0417, Lisbon. 0431, Istanbul. 0438, Rotterdam. 0442, Prague."
"Yes."
"They go up." His voice cracked. "It's not random. We've been going through a list in order. Every dossier is the next name in somebody's register. And she writes at the end, for those counted last. I thought it was an expression."
"Counted," said Nell.
"It's a ledger. She's been reading to us from a book, a line at a time. And Strake doesn't have to follow us. He can count. He knows the next client on the list. He puts a man outside each house and waits." Ravi put his hands over his face. "I'm so stupid. I saw it four days late."
"You saw it before anyone," said David. "It's the only thing that's ever saved anyone."
"Your Archivist has a copy of the real Aldermoor Book," said Nell slowly. "Every client, every number, every date. She's been reading it to us for nine years."
"And never wrong, because she's looking at the answers," said Camille.
"Then why," said Anselm quietly, "does a woman with all the answers need a man in a hat?"
The question sat in the room like a stone dropped in a pond.
"Because she can't use it herself," said David. He spoke as if reading a clue aloud. "She knows the bolt on every vault, a coal chute on no drawing. She's clever, patient, never caught. And she cannot walk out of a room."
"A prisoner," said Camille.
"Or someone afraid of what's outside. Or someone inside, close enough to read a page and not close enough to leave. Someone who works for them. Or used to."
"There's something else," said Ravi in a small voice. "The numbers stop at 0442. In the house style, I think the last block, the four hundred forties and fifties, wouldn't be clients. They'd be the firm's own. Its principals. Its members." He put the pencil down. "I think the Archivist's list stops there because the next thing on it isn't a man with money. It's a table."
Later, Nell found him washing up alone at one in the morning, the stove down to a red glow.
"You'll wear the pattern off them. They're Anselm's mother's mugs." She took a tea towel and dried beside him. "You were brave tonight. I'm going to say something and you're not to answer. When my Alan died, the firm said his pension had a shortfall. A man on the telephone with a very nice voice. I sat in my kitchen in Leeds with the receiver in my hand and thought: I know that voice. It makes you think it's you who's being unreasonable. That's how they take it. Not with a gun. With a voice. A year later a man in a flat cap met me in a café in Wakefield and said he had an honest job for my gift."
"I remember."
"You told me the rules, and I thought, he'll never keep them. Nobody does. And you did, for eleven years, even when it cost you." She hung the towel up. "So I don't care if your name's Daniel or David or the King of Siam. I'm not going anywhere. I just wanted it said by somebody old enough to say it."
"Thank you."
She patted his arm twice, like a horse's. At the door she stopped. "One thing. Your sister. If I were the gentleman with the watch, and I'd found a hat with a Cardiff shop in it, I wouldn't be looking for a thief any more. I'd be looking for a family."
"I know."
When she'd gone, he took out the cheap phone and set it on the draining board. A number he had used twice. A number a man in a grey cardigan might hold. He did not dial it.
He turned and looked at the farm calendar on the door, with its photograph of a tractor and days crossed out in Ravi's blue ballpoint. In an empty square at the foot of the page was a date he had been careful not to see for five weeks.
2 March.