Chapter 10

Room 412

2,531 words · 12 min read · 14 pages

At one in the morning the trumpeter on the third floor gave up on scales and began, slowly, to play a lullaby.

Callum lay on the tall bed in his shirt and trousers with the lamp on and listened. It was a bad performance. The player had no breath control and no sense of the line, and the tune kept breaking in the middle of a phrase, as if a hand had been laid across the bell, and starting again from the top with a kind of dogged, sorry kindness. After the sixth time he began to wait for the place where it would break. He found that he knew where it would. He found that he was, in a small private way, rooting for it.

He hadn't undressed. He hadn't eaten. The brandy had gone down into his stomach like a stone into a well and lay there giving off a faint dull heat. On the desk, under the green-shaded lamp, the folder with the speech lay where he had left it, squared to the blotter. Beside it his watch ticked, its second hand making its small calm circuit. He watched it complete four circuits. He didn't hear the lullaby end.

Nora Albright.

I don't have a scar.

He took his phone from his pocket and looked at it. 1:07. The screen was cold and blue. He found Dev's number, pressed it, and held the phone to his good ear. It rang eight times in a room somewhere in Halvern, in the dark, a hundred and ninety miles away.

"Mm," said Dev. "Whozzat."

"It's me."

"Cal?" A rustle, a crash, a muffled curse. "Cal, what's, God. What time is it? Are you all right?"

"I saw her."

There was silence on the line.

It was a different silence from the one he'd heard at eleven the night before, the small catching one. This was complete. He could hear Dev's breath close to the receiver, and behind it the faint rumble of a refrigerator in a kitchen he knew, and then, a long way off, a car going by in the rain.

"Saw who?" said Dev, very quietly.

"Isabel."

"Cal."

"At the dinner. She was at table nine. She was sitting there in a green dress with a glass of water, and she laughed, Dev, she did the thing, the three taps, on the tablecloth, I saw her hand." He spoke fast and low and quite evenly. "Her face. It was her face. I'm not exaggerating. I've been looking at it for eleven years. I walked up and I said her name and she looked at me and said her name was Nora Albright."

"Right," said Dev.

"She said she'd never met me."

"Right. Okay. Right." A lamp clicked on. "Cal. Listen to me. I want you to sit down."

"I'm sitting."

"I want you to take a breath."

"I've taken a breath."

"I want you to tell me whether you've had anything to drink."

"A brandy. Sir Gilbert's wife gave it to me."

"One."

"One."

"And have you taken the tablets Sorel gave you?"

He said nothing.

"Callum."

"I don't need them."

"That's not what I asked." Dev's voice was thick and tender and frightened. It had dropped into the voice he used only for sick animals and old women. "Listen. This is the thing that happens. It's the thing she warned you about. You've gone to a strange city, in a hot room, you gave a speech, you've had no sleep, and you've seen somebody who looks a bit like her. That's what happens. It happened to me, for God's sake, after my mum. I followed a woman round Tesco for twenty minutes."

"This isn't that."

"It's exactly that."

"She knew me."

The words fell into the line with a dull, flat clearness. Afterward, in the long hours before dawn, he heard them again like a dish dropped in the next room.

"What do you mean, she knew you?"

"She looked at me." He was staring at the green-shaded lamp. "After I'd turned away. When she thought I wasn't watching. She looked at me like someone who'd been waiting for it."

"For what?"

"I don't know."

"Cal, love." Dev's voice cracked. "Please. I'm going to ask you to do one very small thing. Take one of the tablets and lie down, and in the morning, if you still want to, ring me, and I'll listen to every word, and I'll come up on the first train. I swear on my life. But not now. Not at one in the morning, not alone, not in a hotel." A silence. "Will you?"

He looked at the ceiling. A hairline crack ran across it in a long slow curve, ending in the corner by the window. He followed it with his eye.

"Yes," he said.

"Thank you."

"Dev."

"What?"

"Did you ever hear of a woman called Nora Albright?"

The pause was short. It was almost nothing. It was the length of a swallowed word, and it was filled, he thought afterward, with something that wasn't quite silence, a faint, dry, careful breath, like a man putting down something heavy with great care.

"No," said Dev. "I never did."

He didn't take the tablet.

He took it out of the pocket of his washbag and stood with it in his palm, a small white oval in the glare of the bathroom light, and looked at his face in the mirror over the basin. It looked back at him, gray, unshaven, hollow under the eyes. He turned the cold tap on and let it run. And he said to the man in the glass, in a low voice that rang in the tiled room like a bell:

"Either I am ill, or I am not."

The man in the glass didn't answer.

"If I am ill, then what I saw was a woman who looked like my wife, and I've made a spectacle of myself in front of a hundred people. And I'll go home, and Sorel will tell me it's the shape of loving someone, and I'll sleep, and it will pass."

He turned off the tap.

"If I am not ill."

He stopped. It was a big sentence. He stood at the basin with his hands braced on the cold porcelain and looked at it from several sides, like a man looking at a hole in a floor.

If I am not ill, then a woman who is not my wife has the same face, almost the same voice, the same laugh. She taps three times. She looked at me as though she knew who I was. And a number in Carrow, which belongs to nobody, was the last person my wife spoke to. He closed his eyes. And I walked past her name on a poster in the rain and read it twice and thought nothing.

That was what was keeping him upright. He hadn't thought of it until the corridor, in the gilt chair, with the empty glass: the sound of the name. Nora Albright. It had seemed familiar because he'd read it that afternoon. Third from the bottom of the bill, on a small black poster at the Carrow Playhouse, in a street of closed shops. THE TWO VIOLAS. He had read it down to the end and gone back to his hotel.

He opened his eyes.

A coincidence, said the voice of the careful man. A drama teacher who does voice work and is in a play at the local theater. Where else would she be?

Where else, said the other, quietly, would she be, to be found?

He put the tablet back in the washbag and zipped it shut. And because it was either that or lie down on the bed and listen to the ceiling, he put on his coat, took his key and went out into the corridor.

The Ardent Hotel at three in the morning was a different building.

It had shed its lamps and its uniformed staff and its air of padded competence. What was left was a vast, warm, dim, echoing shell, full of the soft working sounds of a big machine at rest: the far thump of the lift, the hush of ventilation, the murmur of a floor polisher turning somewhere below. The corridors ran away in long lines of dark red carpet. At every turning there was a mirror in a gilt frame, and in every mirror a tall man in a dark overcoat, walking, a second late.

He went down by the stairs.

The lobby was empty. A single lamp burned on the reception desk, shaded in green, and behind it, on a high stool, a young man in a dark jacket was reading a paperback with the absorbed, slightly guilty air of someone who isn't supposed to. He looked up as Callum crossed the marble. He had a long freckled face and a gap in his teeth and a badge that said JOEL.

"Can't sleep, sir?"

"No."

"It's the heat," said Joel kindly. "They put it on for the dinner and forget. I've told them. I could make you a tea."

"Thank you. I'm all right." He put his hands on the desk. "I wonder if you could help me with something. There was a woman at the dinner tonight. A Miss Albright. She was helping with the arrangements."

"Miss Albright?"

"Tall. Dark hair. A green dress."

"Oh, that'd be Nora." The boy's face cleared. "From Starling. She does a lot of our functions. Hosting, and the announcements and that. She's very good. She's got a lovely voice." He stopped. His eyes flicked over Callum's face, and something in them shifted from friendly to wary in half a breath. "You were the gentleman, weren't you? At table nine."

"Yes."

"Only Mr. Hobbs said we weren't to talk about it."

"Mr. Hobbs?"

"The manager. He said there'd been a bit of a misunderstanding and the gentleman was upset and it was none of our business." Joel closed the paperback on his thumb. "I don't mean to be rude, sir."

"You're not." Callum kept his voice level. "I only want to know whether she's still in the building."

"She went at ten. Straight after." The boy hesitated. "She was in a state, to tell the truth. I saw her go through the kitchens. She didn't take her coat." A pause. "I don't think she'll be back tomorrow, sir. She was supposed to do the brunch, only she left a message with the agency. Said she'd come over faint."

"Is there an address for her?"

"I can't give out addresses, sir." Joel looked miserable. "It's the rules. I'd lose my job."

"Of course." He took his hands off the desk. "Of course you would. I'm sorry."

"I could give you the agency's number, though," said Joel in a rush, and bit his lip. "That's public. It's in the book. Starling Events, on Hanover Street. They open at nine."

He went up to his room at half past three and didn't sleep.

He sat in the yellow chair by the window in his coat, with the curtain open, and watched the air shaft go from black to blue-gray to a slow pearl. He watched the day arrive on the windows opposite, one pane after another, as people switched on bathroom lights. A man in a vest brushed his teeth. A woman carried a baby to a cot. At ten past six, as the first gull cried over the roofs, he heard behind him, very faintly, a small dry sound.

It was a whisper of paper on carpet.

He turned his head. There was a white envelope on the floor inside the door. It had been pushed under, and lay at an angle with its corner turned up. He sat and looked at it for about a minute without moving, in the pale light, the way you look at a bird that has flown into a room.

Then he got up, crossed the carpet and picked it up.

It was an ordinary hotel envelope, cream, with the crest in the corner. There was nothing on the front. The flap was tucked in. Inside he found a single sheet of hotel notepaper, folded once, and on it, in blue ink, a few lines in a small, quick, forward-leaning hand.

Mr. Wray,

I am so sorry for your loss. I am sorry for what happened tonight. Please go home. Please do not look for me. I promise you there is nothing here for you to find, and I am afraid that if you try, one of us will be hurt.

N.

He read it three times. He stood in the pale light by the door with the sheet in his hand and read it, as he read all documents, slowly, with the part of him that studied surfaces, noting the pressure of the pen, the speed of the stroke, the small hesitation after afraid. Then, because something in the shape of it tugged at his attention like a thread in a hem, he read it a fourth time and looked at the letters.

The t's.

She had crossed them high. Every one. High and long, far up the stem, in a quick flat stroke that ran on past the upright into the air, so that the word that in the last line looked as if it were wearing a hat.

He went to the desk. He opened the leather folder. From the pocket at the back, where he had put it the day before, he took a postcard of the Halvern Infirmary, soft with handling, and laid it beside the note on the blotter.

Cal. Found this at the Pelham sale. Someone has been unkind to her. Start with the face. Slowly.

He stood looking down at the two pieces of paper side by side under the green lamp. The postcard and the note. Her hand and the stranger's. Both in blue ink, in a slanting, quick, forward-leaning script, both with a t that climbed high above the line.

They weren't the same hand. He could see that. He had been looking at handwriting for twenty years. The N was wrong, and the loops under the y, and the stranger's s was closed at the base where Isabel's always flew open. They were two different people.

But he had known his wife's writing for eleven years, and in all that time he had never met another hand that crossed its t's like that.

One of us will be hurt, the note said.

He sat down on the end of the bed with the note in his lap. Outside, the sun came up over the air shaft and lit the top windows, and the room filled with a thin cold gold. And the voice of the careful man, silent for several hours, said in his ear, quite gently: Callum. Go home.

No, he said.

He said it aloud. It was the first word he'd spoken since Joel, and it rang in the room like a struck glass. He realized he had already stood up, found his shoes, and was tying the laces.