Chapter 18
The Front Room
It rang once.
"Yes," said a man's voice, low, tired, with the faint rounded vowels of a boy from a valley. It was not the old quavering voice of a Welsh schoolmaster. "Go on, Mr. Kamara."
Idris had rehearsed a short cold speech on the stairs. It was gone. He stood in a dark front room with the phone to his ear and found he had only one sentence.
"They've taken her."
There was no sound. It was the silence of a man who has put down a cup carefully so as not to break it.
"At about eight this morning. Outside the house. Two men in police uniform, in a marked car. They said I'd sent them. I did send for police. I asked my superior to arrange it, a man named Lindqvist. He's my friend." It was the first time he had said it aloud, and it sounded like a word in another language. "He told someone, and someone sent a different car. I've been a fool. Your sister is somewhere because of something I wrote on a form."
"Stay there," said the voice. "Don't ring anyone. Don't leave. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"You're in Cardiff?"
"For three weeks, Mr. Kamara. A friend of mine watched the street this morning. She saw my sister get into the car with a smile, because a man in uniform said your name. She told me it was fine. I said, good."
The line went dead.
He came on foot, in a long dark coat, with no hat, up the wet slate path between the dripping rosebush and the wall. He did not knock. He stood on the step, waiting, with his face half turned away.
Idris opened the door.
It was not the face he had expected. It was much younger than the old man in the café. It was lean, tired and ordinary, with a long jaw and grey eyes both steady and raw. There was nothing legendary in it. It was the face of a man who has been told a house is on fire.
"Mr. Pryce."
"Hale, as it happens. I've been so many people, I've forgotten how to be one."
"I think I'm supposed to arrest you."
"I think you are."
"I don't think I'm going to."
"No," said Daniel Hale. "Not tonight."
He came in and stood on the mat, looking at the house. Idris watched it go into him in small separate pieces: the coat hooks, the narrow stairs, a child's drawing of a cat in a frame, a paper lantern shaped like a swan. The smell of toast and floor wax.
He went into the front room and stopped. The tartan tin stood open on the table, with twenty-two white cards in plastic sleeves. He didn't touch them. He read the labels, one after another, his head a little on one side, like a man looking at faces in a school photograph. 2 March. Cardiff. 2 March. Dublin. 2 March. Vienna. When he reached the newest, Lisbon, a small sound came out of him, like a door closing far away.
"She kept them."
"Every one. She steamed the flap of each envelope open with a kettle so she could keep the postmark."
Daniel Hale put his hand over his mouth. In the hall the old clock said twenty-five to nine. The man who had walked through the best-guarded building in Lisbon sat down on the arm of his sister's sofa, in his wet coat, and put his face in his hands.
Idris went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. He found the tea, a bottle of milk and a packet of ginger nuts. When he came back, the man on the sofa was calm and his face was wet.
"It's your sister's tea."
"She'd say it was stewed."
"It is."
Idris told him everything, in order, as he did all things: the warm ink, the numbers going up, the walnut cake in Geneva, the boy with the quill, a friend who said well done, a second pen on a telephone line, a pub in Llanrumney, a pair of grey eyes.
Daniel told his, in the same calm voice. The stairs, the watch, the old man with the bad chest, the envelopes. A column of numbers in a Minister's margin. A woman in Istanbul who looked at his hands. A table in a house on a lake, on the last Saturday of April, where seven people sat each year to count their winnings.
"The Archivist's list stops at forty-four-two," he said. "The next entry isn't a man. It's a meeting."
"And Strake looks after the room. And Lindqvist looks after me."
"I think so."
Idris gave a short, hard laugh. "I'm a policeman, Mr. Hale. I've never in my life asked a criminal for help."
"I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking whether, if I find her, you'll be there."
"To arrest you?"
"If you must."
"I will arrest you when it's done," said Idris slowly. "Because that is what I am. And if you've any sense, you'll run."
"I know," said Daniel Hale. "That's why I'm asking you."
Something loosened in Idris that he hadn't known was knotted, like a man told he can put down a weight.
Then the telephone rang in the hall.
It was an old cream plastic one on a little table by the stairs, with a curly cord. Its bell was loud and brazen in the silent house. It rang a second time.
"Don't," said Idris.
"I know. It is."
David went out onto the dark boards in his wet coat and stood looking at it as if it were a snake. The bell shrilled again. Idris saw the lean shoulders go back and a look cross that tired face that he'd never forget. It wasn't fear. It was a terrible, gentle, absolute attention.
On the fifth ring, David Morgan lifted the receiver and said nothing.
"Hello, Daniel," said a pleasant English voice. It was so clear that Idris heard it from the doorway.
"I've been wondering when you'd come home."