Chapter 6
The Cold Room
At noon the market began to come down around him, and the protection went with it.
He checked in standing under a blue awning that sold cheap socks, with his back to the crowd, and walked away before the ninety seconds were up. Nothing happened. That was the worst of it. Nobody ran at him. Nobody shouted. All along Quay Street, stallholders were folding awnings and slinging trestles into vans, with a sound like a very large circus being packed into boxes, and the whole street was going quiet around him like a theater when the house lights dim.
I'm not going to the Fairway, he told himself.
He said where he'd be. So he'll be there. So I won't.
It was a thin kind of reasoning, and he knew it. But it was what he had. He had walked out of the corn exchange without a word to Linda, and she had watched him go, with her needles still, and a small kind smile, as a woman watches a child leave for school.
He needed a place.
He needed a place where there were people, and where the people were not going anywhere. He looked over the roofs of the stalls. A short gray spire stood against the sky. It had a weathercock on top, a little rusty iron bird, and a clock face with one hand missing. Below it, behind a low wall and a row of sooty yews, stood a church of dark stone, with a pointed door and a large notice board.
ST. JOHN'S. ALL WELCOME. EVENSONG 6 P.M. SUNDAY.
There was a light on in the hall behind it.
The flower ladies were four.
They sat at a long trestle table in the church hall with their coats off and their sleeves rolled, among buckets of white and yellow chrysanthemums, and rolls of floral foam, and a heap of green ribbon. They looked up as he came in the door with the faint, open, absolutely unalarmed curiosity of women who had seen everything and been shocked by none of it. The oldest was about eighty, tiny, in a hat. The youngest was sixty, big, brisk, in a flowered apron, with a pair of secateurs in her hand.
"Hello," said Ethan. "I'm so sorry. I was looking for somewhere to sit."
"Of course you were, dear," said the big one. "You look dead on your feet. Sit down. I'm Mrs. Adeyemi. This is Mrs. Pike, and Mrs. Hobbs, and that's Mrs. Pike's sister, who doesn't speak."
"Why not?"
"She chooses not to."
The sister, in a green cardigan, gave him a small, severe nod.
"My car broke down," he said. "I've been walking since last night. If I could just sit for an hour. I wouldn't get in the way."
"You are in the way," said Mrs. Adeyemi. "You're standing on the lilies. But sit down. There's a flask. There's a good deal of ginger cake." She clapped her hands. "Mrs. Hobbs, would you."
Mrs. Hobbs, who was seventy-five and shaped like a pear, rose with a little squeak and went to the hatch.
He sat at the end of the table, slowly, so as not to make a noise, and put his bag at his feet. A smell of damp flowers and cold stone filled his nose. High above, among the dark rafters, a pigeon cooed. A kettle began to sing in the kitchen. Through the narrow windows came an even, pale, wintry light, and the voices of the women flowed round him, easy, unhurried, rich with gossip and with the clack of scissors.
They don't know. They don't know anything.
And the strange thing was that he did not feel safe. He felt something much worse. He felt he was bringing in a disease.
"Excuse me," he said.
"Yes, dear?"
"Is there anything I can help with?"
"Help?"
"I'm good with my hands." He felt his ears go red. "I fix things. For a living. If you've got anything broken. A tap, or. Anything."
All four women looked at him.
"Oh," said Mrs. Hobbs, in the hatch, with a clatter of cups. "Oh, Jean. It's the answer to a prayer."
The fault was in the cold room.
It was at the back of the church kitchen, a big steel-walled box about the size of a small garage, with a thick white door and a shiny chrome handle. They used it for the harvest supper, and the Christmas fair, and the funeral teas, and it had been making a noise since Easter. "A sort of rattle," said Mrs. Adeyemi. "Like a man coughing." She had phoned the firm in March. They had said they'd send somebody. Nobody had come.
She turned the handle and pulled, and the door swung open with a long soft kiss of rubber. A breath of cold came out and curled round his ankles. "There. In you go. Mind the step."
It was larger inside than he had expected, and very bright. It was lined with white panels, and shelves of stainless steel, and it held the remains of a dozen church teas: six trays of sandwiches under cling film, a large iced cake, a tub of margarine the size of a bucket. A single strip light buzzed in the ceiling. At the back, over a drip tray, an evaporator unit hung from the wall like a gray metal bat, with a broad fan behind a grille, and as he came up to it he could hear the sound that had been tormenting the church for six months. It was a rattle. It had a rhythm, quick-quick-slow, quick-quick-slow, and every fourth beat it faltered, like a bad heart.
He stood with his head on one side and listened to it, and felt his whole body settle.
"Fan blade," he said. "Loose on the shaft. It's a nut. I can do it in ten minutes."
"Ten minutes?" The big woman put a hand to her chest. "The firm said it was a replacement unit. They said four hundred dollars."
"It's a nut."
"Oh, my dear boy."
She went to fetch a stool, and he stood alone in the white humming box and looked at the fan, and a thing happened to him that he could not have explained. He was happy. It was only for a moment. It was a very small, round, quiet happiness, the kind a man feels when he has been asked a question to which he knows the answer. For twelve hours he had been a rabbit in a field. Now he was a repairman in a cold room, and somebody had said please, and the whole shape of the world had shrunk to a nut and a shaft and a grille.
He took out the multi-tool and began to undo the screws.
It took him eleven minutes.
He lifted the grille off and set it against the wall. Behind it was a black rubber-bladed fan, caked with grease and frost, and as he'd thought, the hub had worked loose on the shaft, and one set screw had backed out and was hanging by a thread. He turned it back in. He gave the blade a spin with his thumb, and watched it run, and heard the rattle thin out, and smooth, and drop into a long round steady purr.
"There," he said, to nobody. "Good girl."
Behind him, quite softly, the door closed.
It was not a slam. It was the slow heavy swing of a well-hung door that someone has let go of. He heard the latch drop into its seat, outside, a small clean click.
He turned his head. "Mrs. Adeyemi?"
He crossed the floor. He put his hand on the inner knob, a plain white plastic one, and pushed. It turned. It turned a quarter inch, and went round and round on its spindle, loose, as if it had no connection to anything at all. The old safety release had gone. He had seen the shine on the spindle when he came in, and thought nothing of it.
Of course, he thought. Of course it has.
He stood and looked at the knob, and he began, very slowly, to be afraid.
It was not a blow. It was not a flash. It came slowly, like water climbing a stair. He stood in the white room under the buzzing strip light, with the fan humming behind him, and the temperature falling round him, a degree at a time, and he felt it rise through his knees.
He banged on the door with the flat of his hand. The sound was dead and small. The walls were four inches thick. It was a box built to keep the world out, and it was doing exactly what it was built for.
They'll come. Mrs. Hobbs will come. She went for the cups.
Through the thick wall, a very long way off, he heard voices. A bright, cheerful, fluting woman's voice. And under it a man's, warm and light and civilized, that said, with great politeness, "I do beg your pardon, ladies. Don't get up."
Ethan stopped breathing.
He did not move for a full second.
Then he did what he had always done, at the bench, when a machine went wrong and he could not get at it. He looked at how it was made.
It was already cold, properly cold, not the dry pleasant chill of a fridge but a heavy blue cold, which bit his ears and stiffened his fingers. The cake on the middle shelf had gone hard at the edges. A thin skin of frost had begun to form on the shelf rails. His breath hung in the air like smoke.
It's a box. It's a very well-made box.
He looked up.
And in the white ceiling, a foot above his head, he saw the thing he had been looking at for a quarter of an hour without really seeing it. It was a seam. A long straight line, between two of the big flat insulated panels, running from wall to wall. At the end of it, in the corner, was a small round hole, the size of a two-dollar coin, with a slot cut across it.
Cam lock.
He knew it the way a pianist knows a key.
Every cold room in the world was built from panels. Gray-core foam between two skins of steel, clipped edge to edge with cams, each one a little ring with a tongue, set into the panel and turned with a flat key or a screwdriver. It was the only way to build a thing so big and take it apart again. The cams were meant to be turned from outside. But they were also, if you looked, set into both faces, because nobody ever bothered to make a panel one-way.
He climbed onto the shelf.
It was a rickety steel one, and the shelf below it creaked under his boots. He got a hand on the ceiling. He felt for the slot. He found it, under a skin of cold grease, and set the tip of the multi-tool into it, and turned.
It did not move.
He took a breath. He put the heel of his hand against the handle of the tool, and bore down, and felt every muscle in his arm go tight. For a moment it held. Then there was a small dry rusty crack, and the cam went round a quarter turn, and a faint dark line appeared in the seam, as if a black thread had been drawn across the white.
He laughed.
He couldn't help it. It came out of him in a wheeze, a puff of white in the air, absurd, dazed. A cam lock. Five million dollars, a hundred guns, a man in a green jacket with a recorder, and what was going to save his life was a quarter turn on a thing the size of a button.
There are four.
The panels were wide. He had to climb to the very top shelf, with a tray of sandwiches sliding under his foot, and stretch across a gap of three feet with the tool held in both hands. His fingers had gone white and stiff and didn't feel like his. He turned the second cam. He turned the third. It stuck, and he swore, and went at it with the heel of his hand, and it gave.
He was halfway through the fourth when he heard them come into the kitchen.
"We just came in for a warm," said a woman's voice, plump and fluting. "It's such a bitter day."
"Of course, dear."
"And we were so hoping to see somebody. A friend of ours. A tall young man, rather tired. We thought he might have come this way."
"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Adeyemi. "He was here. He had ginger cake."
"Where is he now?"
"In the cold room. Fixing it."
"Ah," said Dave Pratt. "He's very good, then."
He turned the cam. It went round.
The whole ceiling panel, eight feet by four, dropped about an inch. It hung there, held only by its own weight, with a dark gap along every edge. Cold air and dust came down through it in a soft gray curtain. Ethan put his palm up flat and pushed, very gently, and the panel rose, and slid, and went over, and lay quiet. Above it was a black cavity full of cobwebs and beams. A smell of hot dust and mouse came down.
Now.
He climbed. He did it with his feet on the top shelf and his hands on the edge of the hole, hauling himself up by his elbows like a boy getting out of a pool. His boots scraped. The shelf shook, and the tray slid off, and went down with a crash, sandwiches and all, and for one wild second he hung there with half of himself in the roof and half still in the room, and his legs kicking.
"What was that?" said a man's voice.
"Oh, that'll be the cold room," said Mrs. Adeyemi. "It's been playing up."
Ethan got his stomach over the lip, and then his hips, and rolled into the dark. He lay on his back on a joist, with the beams a foot above his face, and listened to the small dry rustle of his own breath. He reached down through the hole, and found the panel, and drew it back over the gap, without sound, and laid it flat.
It fitted.
He could see the kitchen through a crack between two beams.
It was a bright, noisy, steam-filled place, with a long steel sink and a gas range and a rack of pots, and it was full of people. The flower ladies stood in a bunch by the hatch, with the secateurs and the ribbon still in their hands. Dave Pratt stood in the doorway with his sling and his tape and a bag of cakes. Behind him hung the boy in the tracksuit top, very pale, looking at his shoes. And Linda was bustling from tap to counter in her lilac coat, helping Mrs. Hobbs with the cups.
Dave looked down at the white door. It was shut. The chrome handle gleamed in the strip light. He put out his good hand and laid it flat on the steel, and tilted his head.
"He's very quiet."
"Perhaps he's concentrating," said Mrs. Adeyemi.
"Perhaps he is." The old man smiled. "I wonder if I might see."
He took hold of the handle.
Ethan lay on the joist with his cheek in the dust and his eye to the crack, and watched the pink fingers close on the chrome. There was a click. The latch rose. The door came open, with its long soft kiss of rubber, and a cloud of freezing air rolled out, white and slow, into the warm kitchen.
Nobody was inside.
There was a white box. A tray of ruined sandwiches on the floor. A fan, humming. A gray evaporator with its grille off, and a thin line of frost on every shelf.
"Oh," said Mrs. Adeyemi. "He was in there. I saw him."
"Of course." Dave stepped inside. He stood in the center of the little room, in a blaze of white, with a halo of cold round him, looking at the walls, the floor, the ceiling. His eyes were mild and puzzled behind the mended spectacles. They moved from the evaporator to the shelves. From the shelves to the wall. From the wall, very slowly, to a line in the ceiling, where a thin black thread ran from panel to panel.
They stopped.
Seven feet above Dave's head, in the dark, with a joist across his chest, Ethan felt a bead of sweat roll off his chin and fall into the dust. It fell very slowly. It made a soft small round mark, like a raindrop, in the gray.
"Chris," said Dave.
"Y-yes?"
"Be a good lad. Go and ask the ladies if they've got a stepladder."
"A stepladder?"
"I'd like to look at the ceiling."
"What's wrong with the ceiling?" said Mrs. Adeyemi.
"Nothing at all, I'm sure. I'm just inquisitive." Dave stroked his chin. "It's a very nice cold room. It's a pity about the lock."
"The lock?"
"It's on the wrong side."
He had one foot on the shelf. He was reaching up.
Ethan moved his hand.
He did not decide. He had been lying beside a gray plastic disc, about the size of a saucer, screwed to the underside of a beam, with a little red light on it that blinked every ten seconds. He had been looking at it for two minutes. He had known what it was from the moment he got up here, and had not let himself look straight at it.
Smoke alarm.
He put his thumb on the test button.
He held it there.
The sound was not the sound he had been afraid of.
It was worse. It was a high, flat, shrieking, endless note, with no tune in it and no mercy, and it went through the roof void like a drill, and filled his skull, and the beams, and the whole of the little kitchen below. He had meant to be ready. He had meant to hold the button and think, it's only a noise. But the first note went into him, and his whole body went somewhere else.
A cot in a break room. A phone on a blanket. A thin shrill voice in the wall that said, again and again, "Get up, get up, get up."
He lay in the dust with his thumb on the button and his eyes shut, and shook.
It's only a noise. It's not the same. It's a church. It's a different one.
He did not take his thumb away.
Below him, a woman's voice rose over the shriek, loud, clear, and quite unafraid.
"Fire drill! Ladies! Fire drill! Doris, get the register. Mrs. Pike, get your sister. Nobody stops for their coat. We've done this every term for thirty years and we're not going to be sloppy now."
"Madam," said Dave Pratt, "I really think."
"Mr. Pratt, that means you."
"I only wished to."
"Out," said Mrs. Adeyemi. "All of you. Everybody. That includes the nice young man with the sling. The assembly point is by the yew tree, and I am the fire marshal, and I'll have no argument."
There was a stampede. It was a slow, vast, determined stampede of aprons and handbags and one small, fierce, silent woman in a green cardigan, who snatched a red extinguisher off the wall and bore it before her like a standard. The kitchen emptied. Ethan heard Linda say, "Oh dear, oh dear," in a rising voice, and a great many shoes on the flagstones, and the boy's panting, and the old man's patient murmur, "Quite right. Quite right. One mustn't make a fuss." The door banged. The shriek went on and on, in an empty room.
He took his thumb off the button.
The silence rang.
He lay face down on the beam, in the dust, with his heart going like a fist on a door. His whole shirt was wet. His mouth tasted of metal. He lay there until he could feel his hands, and then he said, in a thin voice, "Right."
He pushed the panel up. He dropped through the hole into the cold room, and onto the shelf, and onto the floor, and stood for a moment with his hands on his thighs, panting, with frost in his eyelashes. Then he crossed the kitchen and went out of the back door into a yard full of wet leaves, and over a low wall, and away.
Behind him, in the churchyard, among the yews, a big woman in a flowered apron was calling the register. Mrs. Pike. Mrs. Hobbs. Mrs. Pike's sister. Mr. and Mrs. Pratt. And somebody, a long way off, was laughing.
It was a quarter past one when he stopped.
He had gone down an alley, and along a canal wall, and through a gap in a fence, and sat down at last on the step of a derelict garage with his back to a rusted door. The sky had gone low and white, and a thin spit of rain was falling. All along the road below, the market had gone. A cart went by with the last of the trestles. A boy swept up leaves and orange peel. The cobbles shone, and the long road down to the canal lay open and bare, as if the whole thing had been a dream and somebody had woken up.
He sat with his hands between his knees.
His fingers had begun to throb as the blood came back. He turned them over and looked at them. The tips were white and wrinkled, and there was a long gray smear of grease across one palm.
I did it again.
He was not sure what he meant. He sat in the rain and thought about a little white box with a broken knob, and a man's warm voice outside it saying, I do beg your pardon, ladies. He thought about four old women in a churchyard, shouting names. They had no idea. They would go home and say to their husbands, There was a fire drill. They'd had the best morning in years.
He thought: They were safe. They were the safest people in the whole Yard. And I walked in and made them a target.
It was not true. Dave Pratt had not so much as looked at them. But he turned it over, and over, and it would not go away.
I'm a man who brings the fire in.
He put his head against the rusty door.
After a while he took out the map and held it under his jacket out of the rain. The Fairway sat at the bottom of the page. Jack would be there, in the loading bay, in his blue coat, with his notebook and his cinnamon, as he had said. He was a man who did what he said.
He's the only one of them who tells me the truth.
I'd like to see his face.
It was a ridiculous thing to want. But it was the first thing he had wanted all day that wasn't to be somewhere else. He folded the map, and shouldered his bag, and stood up. His whole body ached.
"All right," said Ethan. "The roof."