Chapter 18
Millbrook
Alder Street ran along the edge of the campus under a canopy of old limes, and on a Monday morning in the middle of August it was as quiet as a cloister.
The students had gone. The summer school had thinned to a few dozen: pale, earnest boys carrying library books, a girl asleep on a bench with a textbook over her face. The bicycle racks were empty. The great red-brick towers of Millbrook University stood up behind the trees, hung with ivy, with white clocks that agreed with one another, and from somewhere across the quad came the sound of a single cello rehearsing the same four bars over and over, patiently, with a mistake in the third.
Damen walked up the middle of the street with his hat in his hand.
It was nine o'clock. The sun was out. He had changed again, in the back of Varga's gym: a clean blue shirt and gray trousers, a tweed jacket with leather elbows that smelled of mothballs, and a pair of round wire spectacles with plain glass in them. He had cut his hair. A lined, tired, gentle face looked back at him from the window of a parked car as he passed, a face that might have belonged to a lecturer in medieval history, or a man who had come to collect a niece. It was not the face of the Metronome.
That's the trick, said the voice. Nobody looks twice at a sad man in glasses.
Nobody looked twice at you for eleven years.
Beside him, in the sun, walked his elder daughter.
She had been dressed by Marta Szabo from the unclaimed wardrobe in the cellar, in a yellow cardigan that had belonged to a schoolteacher, a pleated skirt, and a pair of stout brown shoes, one of which still smelled faintly of camphor; and she wore a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses from a drawer in the prep room, which made the world look, she said, like the inside of a swimming pool. She had slept for four hours. She looked, he thought, like a freshman. She looked like a girl in a brochure. It was the best disguise he had ever seen, and it was not a disguise at all.
"Don't say a word," she had told him on the cellar stairs. "You scare people. You walk into a room and everyone looks at the floor. I'm a freshman, I'm lost, and you're my uncle the lecturer."
He had said nothing at all.
Number thirty-one was at the end of the row: a tall narrow Victorian house of yellow brick, divided into flats, with a bay window, a front garden gone to seed and a sign in the window that said ROOMS. On the step a half-grown ginger cat lay in the sun. Above the bell were three names in different handwriting. Okonkwo. Shah. Osei.
He read the third.
Osei, in neat black capitals on a white card. And under it, small, in pencil, a drawing: a bird. A tiny brown bird with a short tail and its beak open in song.
A wren.
He stood on the step for some time with his finger above the button.
He had not known what he would feel. He had prepared for a number of things, the way one prepares for a surgery: the nausea, the cold, the swift calculation. What he had not prepared for was an ache. A small, simple, almost physical ache, under the breastbone, at the sight of a pencil bird on a doorbell. It was the drawing of a girl who had been told that she was safe. It was a child's joke on the world, in a house of rented rooms: you can't find me; I'm hiding in plain sight.
She chose her own name, he thought. Or Marta let her.
She kept the bird.
He pressed the bell.
"If you're the police," said the girl at the door, "you can go away. I've told your colleagues."
She was perhaps twenty. She was small and brown and fierce, in a pink dressing gown, with a mop of black curls in a scarf and a pair of glasses so thick that her eyes swam behind them like fish. She held the door a hand's width open on its chain. In her other hand, he noticed, hung out of sight against her thigh, was a heavy cast-iron frying pan.
"We're not the police," said Sofi.
She had stepped in front of him. She did it without seeming to, as though by accident, with her borrowed cardigan slipping from one shoulder and her squinting, bespectacled face turned up with an expression of such transparent anxiety that the girl at the door actually drew back an inch.
"I'm Sofi. I'm starting here in September. Nursing, the first year? They said I'd get a buddy, a second-year, and it was somebody called Wren Osei. I've been messaging her for three days and she's not answering, and this is my uncle David, he's a lecturer, he drove me over because I'm—" Her voice cracked. It was entirely natural. "I'm sorry. I'm just really worried about her. She didn't say she was going away."
The girl with the pan looked at her for some time.
"You look like you slept in a lake," she said.
"I sort of did."
"What happened to your glasses?"
"They broke." That was true, at least. "These are borrowed. I can't see a thing."
"Hm." The fish-eyes moved from the girl to the man behind her: the round wire spectacles, the tweed jacket, the plaster cast that he had hidden, clumsily, under his sleeve. "You've got a funny face," she told him. "It's the sort of face people tell things to. I don't trust it."
"I wouldn't, either," said Damen.
"I'm Priya." She did not take her hand from the pan. "You can come in. Both of you. But I'm warning you, I have a brother who plays rugby, and if either of you touches anything in this house, I'll scream so loud the dean will hear."
"That's very sensible."
"I'm a nurse," said Priya, as though it explained everything, and drew the chain.
It was a shabby house, and a happy one.
There was a long hall carpeted in a faded crimson runner, with a bicycle propped against the wall, and the smell of toast and coffee and incense. Doors stood open on either side. A kitchen with a yellow table, in which a boy in boxer shorts was eating cereal out of a mixing bowl, reading a physics text. A sitting room with a sagging sofa, a poster of Frida Kahlo, a dead rubber plant. A bathroom with a dripping tap. On every surface lay the careless wreckage of three young women's lives: textbooks, tea mugs, a stethoscope draped over a lamp, a cardigan, a half-finished jigsaw of a map of the world.
He stood in the hall and breathed in the ordinary, untidy air, and thought of his own front room in Alder Falls, with the banner and the balloons, and a chill went down his back.
"Third floor," said Priya. "The attic. She likes it. She says it's the only place where she can hear herself think." She was climbing the stairs ahead of him, in her bare feet, with the frying pan swinging. "Mind the fourth step. It talks."
It did. It said something low and creaking, with an odd resemblance to a vowel.
"She left on Sunday," Priya said over her shoulder. "At five in the morning. I was making tea. I heard her come in the front door, and I thought, that's strange, because she's been away for weeks. And then the stairs, running. She went up and I went after her." She stopped on the second landing. She turned. In the dim yellow light of a skylight her face was young and pinched and troubled behind its thick lenses. "She was in a state."
"What kind?"
"I don't know. Not crying. Past it. She had mud on her jeans, up to the knee, like she'd been wading. She had a scratch down her face. She smelled like smoke." The girl's voice dropped. "She packed in about ten minutes. Her laptop. A flashlight. A pair of binoculars. A knife from the kitchen, a bread knife. I said, Wren, what's happened? And she looked at me, and said, I found him."
"Who?"
"She didn't say. She said, I saw it all." Priya wet her lips. "And then she said, there was a little girl, Priya. She waved at me."
Damen stopped on the stair. Behind him he felt a small cold hand close hard on his sleeve. Ivy, the grip said. He did not turn his head.
"A little girl."
"That's what she said. She had this look. I've never seen anyone look like that. Like she'd been hit." The girl turned and went on, up the last flight, quickly. "She went out the door. She didn't say where. She left a note on her bed. I've read it, I'm sorry, I couldn't help it, I'm her friend. I didn't know what to do. I thought, I'll tell someone. And then the men came."
"What men?"
"The first ones came Sunday afternoon. Two of them. In suits. They had a warrant. They said she'd stolen drugs from a pharmacy." Priya's mouth twisted. "She's never stolen a pencil. She won't even take the free pens from the bank. They went through everything. They took her computer, and her books. They asked me where she'd gone, and I said I didn't know, and one of them leaned over and said, in this soft voice, Do you want to think about that again?"
"Did they touch you?"
"No." She hesitated. "But he had a gun under his coat. I saw it when he sat down."
They reached the top. A narrow door stood ajar, at the end of the landing. Beyond it, in the sloping light of a dormer window, Damen saw the corner of a bed.
"I didn't tell them anything," whispered Priya. "I swear."
"I know."
"I'm not good with lying. But I can do it when I have to. It turns out." She laughed shakily. "It turns out that I can do it very well."
It was a small room.
It was not much bigger than a cell. The ceiling sloped to the floor on either side, so that a tall man would have had to stoop; there was a single bed under the dormer, a plain deal table, a shelf of textbooks, a chair. The window looked out over the limes toward the towers. The bed was made, with military neatness, in white cotton, and on it, in the middle of the pillow, sat a folded sheet of paper.
He did not touch it at once.
He stood in the doorway with his hands at his sides, and took the room in as he took every room, all at once and then slowly. The neatness was the first thing. Every book squared to the edge of the shelf. Every pen in a row. A mug with a single teabag in it, dried to a crust. A small brass crucifix over the bed, a postcard of Lake Orrin stuck in the frame of the mirror, and on the pillow, beside the note, laid with great care, a purple elastic.
And on the wall above the table, in a tight curling pattern that filled the whole slope of the plaster from the floor to the ridge, was a map.
It was a wall. It was a long, detailed, obsessive wall of cork and pins and thread, such as he had seen in the apartments of detectives and the cells of the mad. There were photographs. There were printouts. There were pages torn from notebooks, in small fierce handwriting, and red wool running from one to another in a web, and at the center of it, pinned with a single steel tack, a black-and-white photograph that he knew.
It was the one from the newspaper. A man in a car at the end of a lane, in the rain, with the lights off. A face behind a windshield, a pale smudge. Under it, in her neat black hand, she had written a name.
K.
Beneath that, a second photograph. A color print, slightly out of focus, taken from a long way off through a long lens: a man on a porch step, in the sun, in a straw hat. A man with gray at his temples and a long scar on the inside of his arm. He was laughing at something. Beside him, on the step, a small girl in yellow boots sat with her head thrown back, laughing too.
Under it she had written:
DAMEN KNOX. 50. "Dean Whitlock." Alder Falls. Wife: Naomi. Children: Sofia (18), Ivy (12).
And beneath that, in different ink, added later, the capitals dug deep into the paper so that they had torn:
HE CARRIED ME.
Damen stood very still.
In the doorway, Sofi had put her hand over her mouth. She was staring at a line near the bottom of the print, in the same neat black hand, that he had not yet reached. Children: Sofia (18), Ivy (12).
"She wrote down my age," she whispered. "A stranger. In a room I've never been in. She knows how old I am."
"Yes."
"I don't like it, Dad."
"No," said Damen. "Nor do I."
He read the wall.
It took him a long time. He did it with the whole of his attention, from left to right, as a man reads a letter from the dead. There was the lake house, drawn from memory, in colored pencil: the porch, the study, the stairs, the little door beneath them. The date. The rain. A sketch of a man's hands on a blotter, with a glass of milk. A list, headed WHAT I REMEMBER, in forty numbered lines. 1. The smell of his coat. 2. The clock. 3. Daddy said "count." 4. The man opened the door. 5. He took off his glove.
6. He asked my name.
7. He said I should forget his face.
8. I didn't.
He turned away from it. He could not read the rest. He crossed the room to the window and stood with his back to the wall, and looked out at the limes, the towers, the clean blue sky. His hands were shaking. He put them in his pockets.
There was more.
There was a second map, on the opposite slope, newer, in different ink. It showed a coastline in careful pencil: a ragged spit of land, a quay, a long gray building with a rooftop, a cluster of sheds. COLDWATER POINT, said the legend. Dates and times were written along the edge. Sun 03:10. Arr. from NE road, 4 vehicles. Black SUV + 2 vans. 14 men. Dropped W + C at N door. C. carried (asleep). W. walked. A tiny arrow. Net Loft, 2nd floor, E side. Window #4. Light on.
Sun 21:40. Small figure at window. Waved.
Sun 22:05. Held up five fingers.
He felt something go through him like a long cold wire.
Below it, in her careful hand, ran the details of a siege. A lay-by on the cliff road, one point two miles from the gate, where a gray van could stand in the shade of a broken wall and look down on the cannery through binoculars. The guards' rotation: 6, 2, 10. A supply truck from a fishmonger's, Wednesdays, at noon. Two cameras on the north wall. A boathouse. A gate with a keypad. And beside it, circled in red, a note in capital letters, with an arrow pointing at a drain on the east side of the quay:
DRAIN. 3 FT. NO CAM. WATER LEVEL LOW AT 02:00.
She's been inside, thought Damen. Or very nearly.
She's mapped it. In one night.
He turned and picked up the folded note from the pillow.
Priya,
I'm sorry. I know you'll be frightened. Don't be. I've done a stupid thing and a good thing, and I can't tell which is which, and I'm going to find out.
If anyone comes, tell them you don't know. If a tall man comes with gray eyes and a hurt arm, don't tell him anything either. Not yet. Not until you've seen what he does.
Don't call Marta. She'll make me stop.
I know where they are. I'm going to get her out.
I love you. Water the plant.
W.
He read it twice. Then he folded it into four and put it in his breast pocket, behind Pratt's list.
A tall man with gray eyes and a hurt arm.
Not yet. Until you've seen what he does.
He heard a sound behind him in the doorway: a soft footfall, a breath. He turned.
Priya stood there, with the frying pan in both hands. Her face was white behind the heavy lenses. She had put herself between him and the stairs, small and firm in her pink dressing gown, with her feet planted apart and her chin up, and her eyes fixed on his plaster cast and the long scar showing at the edge of his cuff.
"It's you," she said.
"Yes."
"You're him."
"I am."
"You killed her father."
"Yes."
He said it plainly. There was no use in anything else. He stood with his hands open by his sides, in the sloping light, among the pins and the red thread, and let her look at him.
"She said you'd come," whispered Priya. "She said you would. She said it'd take you a couple of days." Her lip trembled. "She's been waiting for you for three weeks. She's been working it out. Every night, in here, with the door shut. I'd bring her tea. She never ate." The frying pan wavered. "She wants to kill you."
"I know."
"She told me. She said: I'm going to look at his face. And then I'll decide."
"That's fair."
"Is it?" The girl's voice cracked. "Is it fair? She's nineteen. She wants to be a nurse. She wept for a week when the cat on the corner died. You can't, you've no right to, to stand in her room, with her father's, with her wall, looking at it—"
"Priya."
"—and be polite!"
"Priya." He said it gently. "There are two men coming up those stairs."
She froze.
It was true. He had heard them a full minute earlier, under the girl's voice, as one hears a clock in another room: two sets of feet on the staircase, a flight and a half below, climbing carefully, one behind the other. They avoided the fourth step. They had been told about it. One of them breathed through his nose.
"The same ones?" he said.
"What?"
"The ones who came yesterday. Suits. A gun under the coat."
"I don't—" Her eyes flew wide. "Oh, God. Oh, my God. I left the door on the chain, I took it off to let you in, I—"
"Go downstairs."
"They're on the stairs!"
"Then go down the back way. The fire escape. By the bathroom window." He crossed the room in two strides and took her by the shoulders. She was trembling like a bird. "Sofi will take you. Go to your brother. Tell him to take you somewhere with a lot of people. A train station. A cafe. Stay there till dark." He took the pan from her hands and set it on the bed. "And Priya. You were very brave."
"I wasn't. I was—"
"You told the truth when it mattered and lied when it mattered. That's the whole art." He turned her toward the bathroom window. "Go."
Priya went. Sofi hesitated in the doorway, pale behind the borrowed lenses.
"Dad."
"The Buick's at the corner of Lime Street. Wait for me there."
"You said you wouldn't—"
"I'm not going to kill anyone I don't have to."
"That's not the same as not killing anyone."
"No," said Damen. "It isn't. Go."
She went. He heard the sash go up, and the clang of the iron stair, and two pairs of feet descending, one light and quick, one stumbling.
He took the first on the landing.
He was waiting beside the door, flat to the wall, in the dim, with the revolver in his good hand and his back against the slope of the roof. The man came up the last flight carefully, one step at a time, with a short black pistol held low: a tall, brisk, sandy man in a good gray suit, with a flat face and cold gray eyes. He reached the top. He turned toward the open door. And Damen stepped out behind him, and put the barrel against the back of his skull.
"Don't," he said.
The man stopped.
"Drop it."
The pistol fell. It struck the boards with a heavy clatter. The man stood with his hands slowly rising, looking straight ahead, breathing through his nose.
"Kessler," said Damen. "Which one?"
"Neil."
"Where's your brother?"
"At the bottom of the stairs." A pause. "He's got a rifle."
Damen heard it as he spoke: a soft metallic click below, and a shift of weight on the carpet. He did not hesitate. He took the tall man by the collar and swung him round, using him as a shield, and drove him backward toward the stair head with a blow between the shoulder blades. Neil Kessler went down the first four steps in a clatter of limbs. A shot cracked in the stairwell, enormous, deafening. Plaster flew. The tall man screamed; he had caught it in the thigh. And Damen, flat on the landing with the revolver in both hands, put two rounds through the banister into the dark and heard a heavy body fall.
Silence. Then a long, bubbling groan.
He rose. He went down the stairs, step by step, with his back to the wall and his gun leveled. On the first-floor landing, Neil Kessler lay clutching his leg in a spreading pool, his face gray, his teeth bared. Beyond him, at the foot of the stairs, a second man in a gray suit sat against the wall with a rifle across his knees and a hand pressed to his stomach, looking down at it with a look of mild surprise.
He was alive. Both were. He had been careful.
"Tell Mercer," said Damen.
The man on the landing looked up. His eyes were glazed with pain.
"Tell him I found her room. Tell him I read her wall." He stood over them with the smoking revolver in his hand. "Tell him that I'm coming to the Net Loft. And that I'll be there before Tuesday."
"He'll kill you."
"He's welcome to try."
"He'll—"
"Tell him," said Damen, "that the Metronome keeps time."
He turned and went out through the kitchen. The boy in the boxer shorts was standing in the doorway with the mixing bowl in his hands, white to the lips, and his mouth hanging open. A cereal flake was stuck to his chin. Damen paused.
"Sorry about the noise," he said.
The boy said nothing.
"Eat your breakfast."
He walked out into the sunshine. The cello was still playing. Across the quad a clock struck ten, true to the second. And he went down the front steps, past the sleeping ginger cat, with a folded paper in his breast pocket and a map in his head, and the sure cold knowledge, as clear as the sky above the limes, that a nineteen-year-old girl with a bread knife had been sitting on a cliff for twenty-four hours, looking down at a window, waiting for a small hand to wave.
Five fingers, he thought.
She noticed.
And so did the girl who waved.
He found the Buick at the corner of Lime Street with the engine running. His elder daughter sat behind the wheel with both hands locked on it and her inhaler clamped in her teeth, and Priya's pink scarf was lying on the back seat where she had left it. She had put the girl on a bus. She had done it in nine minutes, with nine dollars from her purse and a story about a violent boyfriend that she had made up on the way down the fire escape. She looked at him as he got in. She looked at the blood on his cuff, and the revolver, and his face.
"They're alive," said Damen.
"I heard four shots."
"I was careful."
She put the car in gear. She drove two blocks before she spoke again, and when she did it was in a very small, flat voice, without turning her head.
"Is that what it's like?" she said. "When you do it?"
"What?"
"Being calm."
He did not answer.
"I was calm," said Sofi. "At the ramp. After. I hated that most."
"I know."
"Does it go away?"
"No," said Damen. "But you learn to carry it."
"That's a terrible answer."
"I know."
"Thank you for it anyway." She wiped her eyes on her wrist. "Which way?"
"Back to Marta's," said Damen.