Chapter 3
Cutler Row
For the first twenty minutes he walked, and it felt stupid.
Nobody was running. Nobody was chasing him. He went down a long, wet street of row houses with his hands in his jacket pockets and the new boots going clop, clop on the sidewalk, and he felt like a man who had turned up to a party on the wrong night. The houses were all the same. Two stories, brick, with the front doors boarded and the windows boarded and the gutters hanging off like loose teeth. Someone had spray-painted a large pink circle on a wall. Someone else had added a face to it. A cat sat on a gatepost and watched him pass with no interest at all.
This is it? he thought. This is the game?
He almost laughed.
Then he saw the camera.
It was fixed to the top of a lamp post at the end of the row, a small gray box about the size of a loaf of bread, pointing down the street. He would have walked right past it. But the pole under it had been painted with a thin blue stripe, a hand's width, at about the height of his chest, and someone had wrapped a bit of blue tape round the box itself, neatly, in two turns, the way you'd put a bandage on a finger.
He stood and looked at it.
The lens turned.
It was a tiny movement, no more than a quarter inch, a smooth quiet swing from the middle of the road to the sidewalk where he stood. It stopped. He heard it. Not a click, but a very faint electric hum, the sound of a small motor deciding something. Then it hung there, pointing at his face.
"Hello," said Ethan.
He felt like an idiot.
He lifted a hand and gave it a little wave, the way you'd wave at a baby in a stroller, and then, because that made him feel worse, he turned and walked on. After thirty yards he looked over his shoulder. The camera had not moved. After sixty, there was another one, on the next post, with another blue bandage. And another. They went all the way down the row, one every thirty yards, like beads on a string.
They can see everything.
No, he thought. They can see the street.
It was a small difference, but he held onto it. A camera on a street could not see into a passage. It could not see into a yard, or through a wall, or up a flight of stairs. It could see you walk past a door. It could not see you go through it.
He stopped.
Don't hide in the first place you find.
He had passed seven houses. He counted. The eighth had a broken board on the ground-floor window, and a smear on the sill where someone had climbed in, years ago, with muddy knees. It was the sort of window a person in a hurry would choose. He kept walking. The ninth had no boards at all, only a hole where the door had been, and a mattress lying in the hall like a tongue.
He turned down the passage between the eleventh and twelfth.
It was narrow, with a wall on either side and nettles growing out of the cracks. At the end was a rotten wooden gate with a bolt on the outside, rusted red. The bolt was stiff. He had to lean on it. It came across with a long shriek, and he froze, with his teeth together, and listened.
Nothing.
He slid through, and pulled the gate to behind him, not shut, but nearly, the way you leave a door when you want a person to think you were careless.
The yard was full of junk.
An old washing machine lay on its side by the back door, with its drum hanging out like a tongue. Ethan looked at it with a professional pang. It was a twin-tub, forty years old at least, the kind they used to sell with a wringer on top. He could have fixed it. He could have fixed it in an hour. He found that the thought was a comfort, a stupid, small, warm one, and he held it a second before he went on.
The back door was boarded. But the boards had been up a long time, and when he pushed his thumb into the wood by the lock, it went in like cheese. He took out the multi-tool, and opened the screwdriver, and went to work. It took four minutes. He did it with his whole body bent, and his breath held, and his eyes going up to the top of the wall every few seconds, as though somebody might lean over it.
The board came away in his hands. He put it down against the wall, face in, so that the clean side showed to the yard. Then he opened the door.
The kitchen smelled of mice and old wet plaster. There was a sink with a green stain under the tap. In the middle of the floor lay a flat pile of someone's bedding, and a saucepan beside it, and a fork. A can of beans stood on the draining board with the label gone yellow. It was empty. A long time empty.
Somebody lived here.
He wasn't sure why that made him feel better.
He went through the house the way he would have gone through a customer's: slowly, looking at what was wrong. The front door was boarded from inside with a sheet of ply and four heavy bolts. That was good. It meant nobody could come in by the front without making a noise. There was a narrow staircase with a gap where the third stair had gone. He stepped over it. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a toilet with a broken seat, and in the ceiling of the landing, a square hatch with a ring in it.
It was the worst possible place. He knew that. Everyone hid in the loft. It was what you did in films. But the hatch had a plate over it, and the plate had a lock, and the lock was rusted, and nobody had been up there in thirty years.
So nobody will look at it.
Or they'll look at it because nobody's been.
He thought about it for exactly as long as it took to hear his own pulse. Then he opened the file on the multi-tool and set to work on the lock.
He had been in the loft for twenty-five minutes when he heard the whistling.
It was a thin sound, low and slow, a man whistling through his teeth. It came from a long way off, up the street, and it didn't hurry. It had a tune in it. He tried to place it, lying on his stomach on a plank between two joists with his cheek against a roll of itchy pink insulation and his bag wedged under his chest. It was something he had heard at his grandmother's funeral. Something slow, with a lot of long notes. A church tune.
Abide with me.
He held his breath.
The whistling came down the row. It came to the passage between the eleventh and twelfth houses, and stopped. Then, quite close, in the quiet, the dry scratch of a boot on stone.
There was a gap in the roof tiles, a gap the width of a finger, about eight inches from his face. He turned his head one inch. Through the crack he could see a slice of the yard, gray, with the shape of the old washing machine in it, and the top of the gate.
A man was standing at the gate.
He was in a green rain jacket, a good one, the kind people wear for walking in hills. He was tall and lean, in his forties, with a plain brown face and short gray hair and a long straight nose. He carried no gun that Ethan could see. In one hand he held a flashlight, switched off, and in the other, held up to his mouth, a small black recorder, of the kind that journalists use. He was chewing something. A little stub of cinnamon stick stuck out of the corner of his mouth like a pencil.
"Bolt's been moved," he said into the recorder.
His voice was calm, flat, and pleasant, with a trace of somewhere up north. He talked the way a man talks when he's reading out a shopping list.
"Fresh rust at the head. Fresh scrape on the post. Right hand, I'd say, because of the angle. One set of prints. Size nine and a half. New boots, because there's no wear on the heel. Loaded bag, because he's bearing on the outsides." He pushed the gate with one finger. It swung inward with the same long shriek. "The gate's been left a little open. That's either a mistake, or it's a man who wants me to think it's a mistake. He's not stupid, then. Or he's very tired."
He came into the yard.
He did not hurry. He walked the length of it with his flashlight off, looking at the ground, at the walls, at the washing machine. He bent and looked at the board Ethan had left against the wall, face in. He ran a thumb along the edge of it.
"Screws are new," he said. "Whoever it was brought a driver."
He went in through the back door.
Ethan heard every step. A boot on the lino of the kitchen. The faint scrape of the saucepan being picked up, and set down. Then the slow tread through the three rooms, and the bolts of the front door, which the man tested one by one. Then the stairs. The footsteps stopped just short of the gap.
"Third stair's missing," said the man, very softly. "He'd have stepped over that."
He stepped over it.
Ethan lay in the dust, and listened to a man come up a flight of stairs, one tread at a time, and he thought, I can't breathe. I can hear myself. His heart was banging so hard against the board that he felt sure the timber must be humming with it, like a drum. The footsteps reached the landing.
They stopped.
Ethan counted. He counted to ten, and then to twenty, and then he gave up and lay there with his eyes shut, listening to a man stand underneath a trapdoor and say nothing at all. It was the stillness of an animal. He could hear a very small dry sound, which he realized after a time was the man's teeth working on the stub of cinnamon.
"Hatch plate's got a lock," said the voice. "Rusted. Hasn't been opened in years."
A pause.
"File marks."
Ethan's eyes opened.
No. I wiped it. I wiped it with my sleeve.
"Bright metal on the hasp. Someone's cut it and put it back together." The voice was quite gentle. It did not sound like a man who had found something. It sounded like a man who had been told the answer to a riddle he already knew. "That's a very neat bit of work. I'd say he's a mechanic."
A long breath.
"I could go up," said the man in the green jacket. "It'd take about a minute."
He did not move.
"But I'm not going to. I'll tell you why." It was not speaking to the recorder anymore. It was speaking, quite calmly, to the ceiling. "It's not time. I've got till ten o'clock tomorrow, and you've got a long night in front of you, and I'd like you to use it. A man who's been found in the first hour is no use to anyone. He's a short evening." A creak: the man was leaning on the wall. "I'd like to see how you get on."
He waited.
"Mr. Cole," he said.
He pronounced it correctly, the o round and slow.
"I'm going to go downstairs now. I'm going to walk to the end of the row, and turn left, and whistle. That's the way I'm going. You'll hear me. If you want to go the other way, that's up to you. I don't mean it as a threat. I'm only telling you what I'll do. I think it's fairer."
The footsteps went away. The back door closed. The gate shrieked. And from the end of the row, a thin low tune came drifting over the roofs, and went up and down, and went away.
Abide with me. Fast falls the eventide.
Ethan lay still for a very long time.
When he finally lifted his head, there were red marks on both his palms, where his nails had gone in. A great dull weariness came over him, the kind he had felt as a boy after a fight, when it's over and nobody has won and everything has started to hurt.
He knew the whole time.
And he had let him lie there, on a plank, in the dust, and then he had said I'd like to see how you get on, and gone away like a man who has left a tip.
At midnight the phone woke in the bag.
It buzzed against his hip, a short hard shiver, and he nearly rolled off the beam. He dug it out. The screen was lit, and a number was running on it, in white. 00:00. CHECK-IN. 01:29. He had been lying in the dust for an hour with a man's footsteps in his ears and had forgotten, completely, about the phone.
He pressed and held the button.
POSITION RECEIVED, it said. And under that, The House wishes you luck. It counted down to nothing, quietly, and went dark. He lay in the rafters with the heavy thing in his hand, and thought that it was a very polite sort of machine.
He gave it ten minutes more. Then he went down.
He left the house by the coal hole. It was a square iron door in the wall of the yard, with a chute behind it that went down into a cellar, and he'd found it by accident, looking for another way out. It was a tight, black, greasy slide, and he went down it on his back with his bag held over his chest. From the cellar there was a second hatch, which gave onto the next house. He went up through that one, slowly, with the flashlight off, one hand on the wall, and out through a broken front window into the street.
He crouched in the hedge of an overgrown garden and listened. A far-off train. The dripping of a gutter. And, much farther off, so faint that he could have imagined it, a man whistling a slow tune.
He said he'd go left. I'm going right.
It was the kind of thing a child would think. But he did it anyway, because he could not think of anything else. He kept to the shadow of the hedges. He went through two gardens and over a wall, and the canal appeared before him all at once, black and flat and shining, with a towpath, and a footbridge, and a low brick building on the far bank.
There was a smell here. It was green and cold and slightly sweet, like the inside of a well. The water lay flat as glass. It held the lamp on the bridge in a long yellow bar, and in the middle of the bar a clump of weed turned slowly, round and round, like a drowned hand.
He crouched behind a stack of pallets at the edge of the towpath, ten yards from the bridge, and put his back against the wood.
I'll wait here five minutes. Then I'll cross.
It was twelve minutes past midnight by the cheap watch on his wrist. He had been watching the second hand for about forty seconds when somebody came running onto the bridge.
It was a heavy running. It had the thump of a big man who has not run in years, and is doing it now out of pure terror. It came from the far side, from the low brick building, and it was loud, wet, wheezing, with a grunt on every step.
He was a big man, fifty or so, in a dark security jacket and a cap, with a red face and a belly that bounced. A flashlight swung in his hand. A badge on his chest caught the lamp: CALDER SITE SECURITY. G. WISE. He had a look on his face that Ethan would remember for a long time: wide, stunned, and a little embarrassed, like a man who has walked into the wrong toilet.
"Hey," the man gasped. "Hey. You. Over there."
He had seen Ethan.
He came running down the length of the bridge with one hand out, and the cap falling off the back of his head. "Son, you can't be in here," he said. "It's shut. It's a, there's a, there's a bunch of nutters in the yard, some training thing, one of them pointed a gun at me. I'm calling the, I've got to get to my radio. You've got to get out of. Do you know which way's the gate?"
"Get down," said Ethan.
It came out as a whisper. His throat had said it on its own.
"What?"
"Get down."
The man looked at him. He did not seem to understand. His face was wet, and his chest was heaving, and behind him, at the far end of the bridge, in the light of the lamp, somebody had stepped out of the shadow.
It was an old man.
At least, that was what Ethan thought. A man of sixty, white-haired, in a beige waxed jacket and soft corduroy pants, with a kind pink face, and wire glasses. He looked like a retired schoolteacher on a country walk. He had a steel flask in his left hand, a big dented one, the kind you take on a fishing trip. His right hand hung loose at his side. He was strolling, not running. He had the easy gait of a man who is in no hurry to get home.
"Hello," he called.
The guard turned.
"Hello, there," said the old man, in a mild warm voice. "Terribly sorry. I think you've dropped your cap."
He raised his right hand. There was a short thing in it, black and blunt, with a thick fat tube on the front like a baby's bottle.
"Whoopsie," he said.
There were two sounds. They were not loud. They were two dry quick coughs, like someone clearing his throat in a library. The guard stopped. He stood in the middle of the bridge, with his flashlight still in his hand, and a look of enormous, childlike surprise spread slowly across his face.
"Oh," he said.
He looked down.
Then his knees went, quite politely, and he sat down on the planks, and fell sideways against the rail. The rail was low. He hit it with his hip, and it tipped him, and he went over, in a slow soft turn, and hit the canal with a flat wet smack.
The water closed over him.
For a second there was a ring on the surface, a wide pale circle, spreading. Then there were bubbles. Then a big dark shape rolled up, face down, and floated, with its jacket spread out like a flower. Then, quite slowly, it began to sink.
Ethan did not scream.
He found out afterward that his hand was over his mouth. It was pressed there so hard that he had cut his lip on his own teeth, and there was blood on his fingers. He crouched behind the pallets with his eyes open as wide as they would go. His whole body had gone numb, from the scalp down, like a limb that has been slept on.
On the bridge, the old man was putting the black thing away. He tucked it into a holster under his jacket. He unscrewed the cap of his flask, and poured a little of something into the lid, and sipped it. He stood for a moment looking at the canal, with the faint, pleased, tired look of a man who has finished a crossword.
"Poor fellow," he said, to nobody. "He saw my face. They always do."
He screwed the cap back on the flask.
Then he turned his head, slowly, and looked straight along the towpath, toward the pallets, and the shadow behind them, and the crouching shape.
Ethan did not breathe.
The old man smiled. It was a nice smile. It crinkled the whole of his face. He lifted his free hand and gave a small, friendly wave, like a man seeing a neighbor over a fence.
"Don't worry," he called, in a clear light voice. "He didn't feel a thing. And it wasn't you I was after. Not yet."
He turned and walked away, back over the bridge and into the shadow of the brick building, whistling nothing in particular, with his flask swinging in his hand. The street lamp hummed. The weed turned in the water.
Ethan was sick behind the pallets.
It was not a graceful business. He went down on his hands and knees on the wet stones, and everything he had eaten since Thursday came up in a hot, hard rush, and then there was nothing but a dry heaving, which went on and on. When it was over he stayed where he was, on all fours, with his head hanging, and spat, and shook.
It's real.
He said it in his head, quite slowly, to see how it felt.
They shot a man. A man in a security jacket, with a badge. He wasn't even playing. He was just on the wrong bridge.
He had not known. That was the thing. Not be caught, the sheet had said, and he had turned it over for two days, and all that time the word had been a small soft one, a word out of a children's game. Caught. He had pictured a hand on his shoulder. A man in a vest saying, Okay, you're out, good effort. It had never once crossed his mind that there might be a word for what was done to a man who was caught, and that nobody had said it because nobody had needed to.
Now it had a weight.
In the water, a few feet out, a thing was floating. It was a flashlight. It had landed upright and was still burning, a small yellow eye, sinking and turning, throwing a wobbling light across the weed. It went out as he watched.
He wanted very much to be in his own kitchen.
He wanted it so badly that his whole body ached with it. He wanted to be standing at the bench with a screwdriver in his hand and the radio on. He wanted Bill's cold coffee and the click of the till. He wanted Maya's horse. He wanted, with a stupidity that frightened him, to ring Claire and say, Come and get me, and for it all to be a thing that could be fixed.
The phone was in the bag. He took it out. It was dark, as it had been since midnight, a heavy gray thing in a rubber case, with a button on the side and nothing else. He could not have called anybody if he'd tried.
How did the old man know where to find me?
He sat very still with that.
Nobody had followed him. He'd come over two gardens and a wall. And the old man had looked straight along the towpath, to the exact stack of pallets, as if somebody had told him.
As if somebody had told him.
He thought of ten minutes past midnight, and a rafter, and the screen lighting up under his hand. 00:00. CHECK-IN. And, as the last of the ninety seconds ran out, two small words, white on black, that he had read without reading, the way you read a receipt.
POSITION RECEIVED.
He took out the multi-tool and found the two small screws at the back of the case, under the rubber, and took them out one at a time, by the light of the water. The back came off. Under it was the battery, a fat gray block, and beside the battery, glued down with a smear of black, something that did not belong.
It was a small flat module, about the size of a book of matches, with a thread of aerial coiled round the edge. It had a single tiny green light on it. The light blinked, once, twice, three times, and was still.
Oh, he thought. There you are.
He felt a very odd calm come over him. It was the calm of a man who has found the cause of a noise.
It's not so they know I'm alive. It's so they know where.
And if he switched it off, he was out. He did not know what out meant. He knew, now, what caught meant. A man on a bridge with a flashlight in his hand.
Keep it on, and they find me. Switch it off, and I'm out. Which is worse?
He could have pried the whole module out and thrown it in the canal. But he did not know what it fed. He was a man who fixed things, and the first thing you learned, about a machine you did not understand, was not to cut any wire until you knew what it was for.
He was about to close the case when he saw the paper.
It was folded very small, flat against the back panel, held under a strip of tape the same color as the plastic. Whoever had put it there had known exactly where to put it. He peeled the tape off with a thumbnail. It came away with a dry little rip, and the paper unfolded in his palm.
He couldn't read it by the light of the canal. He put it in his pocket. He put the module back, and pressed the case shut, and screwed it, and wiped the screws with his thumb. The next check-in was at two. He had until then to decide what to do with a thing that told on him.
It was not much of a plan. But it was the first thing he'd decided since the car, and it was his own, and it made the stones feel firmer under his feet.
It was a few minutes before one when he reached the brick building.
It stood at the end of a short cobbled lane, with a flat roof and a tall chimney and a heavy iron door standing a little ajar. Over the door, in white letters, half washed away, was a sign. CALDER WATER BOARD. PUMPING STATION NO. 2. NO ADMITTANCE. The windows were bricked up. Somewhere inside, a low steady hum was going, which made no sense in a building that had been shut for thirty years, until he put his hand to the door and felt it shaking, very faintly, under his palm.
It was a generator. Somewhere in the building, in some back room, an old diesel was still turning over, running a pump nobody had needed in decades.
It's a place with a hum.
He didn't know why that made him want to go in. It was just the way he was made. A machine that was still running, when everything else was dead, was a thing you went toward.
He pushed the door.
It swung inward without a sound. There was a long high hall, with a floor of iron grating and a ceiling lost in the dark, and the air was warm and thick with the smell of oil and rust. In the middle of the hall stood a huge engine, green, with a flywheel the height of a man, going round and round in the gloom with a slow terrible patience. The floor shook. A single bulb in a cage hung over it, yellow and swaying.
Nobody was there.
He stood in the doorway and let the long slow thump of the engine go through his chest. It was like standing inside a very large animal. His knees began to shake. He sat down on the iron floor with his back against the wall of a small side room, where the bulb did not reach, and put his head on his arms.
Out in the dark, a long way off, a slow tune began again, thin and unhurried, like a man walking through a wood.