Chapter 12
The Left Shoelace
The shop on Tallow Lane had a green awning. The awning had once said BOOKS in gold, and what was left of the gold was the pale ghost of an S.
He stood across the road under the dripping canopy of a florist's, collar up, hands in his pockets, and looked at the upper windows. There were two, tall and narrow, with the curtains drawn. A lamp burned behind the left one, a low yellow glow the color of weak tea. The ground floor was shuttered. A card was taped inside the glass of the door, curling at the edges. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THANK YOU FOR THIRTY YEARS. To the right of the shop front, down a passage no wider than a man's shoulders, he could see the foot of a flight of iron stairs going up into the shadow of an overhang. At the top was a door, and beside the door a bell.
It was five in the afternoon. He had been standing there for forty minutes.
He hadn't decided what to do. That was the plain fact, and he was a little ashamed of it. He had left the Playhouse in the interval and walked straight to the lane with an intention so clear that he hardly felt it as an intention at all. Then he had stopped, the way you stop at the end of a diving board. He could go across. He could climb the stairs and ring the bell. He could say, I'm sorry. I only want to ask you one thing. And the door would open or it wouldn't.
She asked you to go home, said the careful voice.
She asked it in a hand I know.
You have no right.
I know that.
He had known it for hours. He had known it the way you know the weight of a stone you're carrying, not as a thought but as a pressure in the arm. And still he stood in the rain with his eyes on the yellow window, as he had stood a hundred times in the past six months in the streets of Halvern, at the edge of a crossing, beside a bus stop, watching the faces go by.
He crossed the road.
He went down the passage. It smelled of wet brick and cat. The iron stairs rang faintly under his shoes. At the top was a small landing with a mat, a plant pot holding a dead geranium, and a dark green door with a brass number two. The bell was a button in a little plate. Under it, on a slip of card in a plastic sleeve, someone had written N. ALBRIGHT in small neat italics.
He put his finger on the button.
He didn't press it.
On the other side of the door he heard, quite distinctly, the creak of a board. A person shifting her weight. A person who had been standing still on the other side of an inch of wood for a long time, and had just reached the end of her ability to stand.
He closed his eyes.
"Miss Albright," he said, very quietly. "It's Callum Wray. I'm not going to knock. I only want you to know I'm here, and that I'm sorry, and that I won't come in."
Nothing.
"I read your note. I'm going to do what it says. But I need to ask you one thing, and you needn't answer. Only one. I need to know whether you ever spoke to a woman called Isabel Marlow on the fourteenth of November."
A silence.
It was a long one. It felt like a held breath. And in the middle of it, through the wood, so faintly that he might have imagined it, he heard a small sharp indrawn sound, the kind a person makes when a splinter goes in.
Then the board creaked again, softly, going away.
The lamp in the window went out.
He stood on the landing in the dark for another minute with his forehead almost touching the door. Then he took his hand from the bell and went down.
He didn't go back to the hotel.
He took a table in the window of a café at the end of the lane, a small steamy place called Dot's, with a menu chalked on a board and a heap of newspapers on the counter. He ordered a pot of tea and sat with his back to the wall and his eyes on the green awning. He told himself it was only for an hour. At eight he told himself it was only until the lane emptied. At eleven, when the woman behind the counter began putting chairs on tables, he said he was waiting for a friend. She looked at him without comment. She brought him a fresh pot he hadn't asked for.
Nobody went in or out of the passage by the bookshop all evening.
The lane went through its life. A man came and chained a bicycle. A boy delivered pizza to a flat above the hat shop. A couple stood in a doorway kissing, then fighting, then kissing. The rain thinned, and came on again, and thinned. Some time after midnight a street cleaner went through in a small yellow vehicle with revolving brushes, and the brushes made a long wet shushing sound on the cobbles like someone telling a child to sleep. He watched the yellow window. It stayed dark.
At two the café closed. He went out and walked, and came back, and found the passage empty and the stairs silent. He stood in the doorway of a closed bank across the way with the cold seeping through the soles of his shoes. It was absurd. It was how a man behaves who has lost his reason. He knew that, quite clearly, standing in the black wet street at three in the morning with his hair dripping, and he waited anyway.
Around four he noticed he wasn't thinking about her. He was thinking about the shoelace.
It was a small thing, and he hadn't thought of it for years.
She tied the left one twice. Isabel did. The right she tied once, like anyone, in an ordinary bow. But the left she always went over again, quickly, almost secretly, with a double tug and a little extra twist of the loop. He noticed it in the first month and thought it was a nervous habit, and asked her. Does it come undone?
No, she said. She looked down at her foot with a faint confusion, as if it belonged to someone else. It never does. I just feel it's not finished until I've done it twice.
Why the left?
I don't know. I've always done it. A pause, and a look he hadn't understood at the time, a slight, rueful, sideways glance. It's something I picked up.
From whom?
A girl I used to know. And she tapped the table, and laughed, and changed the subject.
He never gave it another thought. It was an oddity, one of a hundred small ones that make up a person, like the way she cut toast into soldiers, or hummed, off-key, in the shower, the same eight bars of a Verdi aria she'd never learned to the end. They belonged to her. They were what she was made of. He could no more have taken them out of her than the grain out of wood.
He leaned his head against the cold glass of the bank door.
A girl I used to know, he thought. A girl I picked it up from.
He closed his eyes. It was the sort of thing a mind does at four in the morning, when it has run out of facts and starts making them. It took a nickname from an old story about a goat and a stage in Verona and stitched it to a name on a poster. Nonie. Nora. Two sounds in common, and a hundred thousand other women with them. He dismissed it with a kind of tired shame, the way you brush off a stranger's hand, and thought instead about the cold in his feet.
He opened his eyes. A line of gray had come into the sky above the roofs. The first van was backing out of the delivery yard of the hat shop with a long warning beep, and a woman in a green apron was unlocking the café, and far off on the other side of the town a church clock struck six.
At ten past, the door at the top of the iron stairs opened.
She came down quickly.
She came out of the passage into the lane with a small gray suitcase in one hand and a handbag over her shoulder, in a long dark coat with the collar turned up and a wool cap pulled low over her hair. She didn't look about. She walked fast, head down, in a straight line, like someone who has rehearsed the route in the night and doesn't mean to be turned from it. He stepped out of the doorway without a sound and followed her.
He kept forty yards behind. It was easy. The lane was empty. She walked down the middle of it, in the light of the streetlamps, past the Playhouse, past the dark hat shop, past the empty tram stop. He watched the back of her head, the cap, the narrow shoulders, the way the coat swung from the hips. A slight figure carrying something small.
It's not her, he told himself. It can't be.
You know it can't.
She crossed the tramlines. She went under an archway and along a covered passage lit by a row of caged bulbs, and he lengthened his stride to keep her in sight. He came out into the hollow gray boom of Carrow Central, where an early train was breathing steam at platform six and a tannoy was announcing in a flat voice the departure of the six-forty for Glasgow Queen Street, calling at.
He saw her go through the barrier. He had no ticket. He went through behind a man with a bicycle, head down, and heard the barrier clank shut and a guard shout something after him, and didn't stop.
She was on the platform now. She had set her suitcase down beside a pillar, thirty feet from the end, in a pool of pale light under the station clock, and stood with her back to him, apparently waiting. She put a hand to her cap. She shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other. And then, as the train beside her moved, slowly, with a long groaning shudder of couplings, and the whole platform filled with steam, she did something.
She bent and retied her left shoe.
She did it quickly. She went down on one knee beside the pillar, the coat spreading around her on the wet concrete, and pulled the lace tight and tied it in a bow. Then, with a double tug and a small extra twist, quick and almost secret, she went over it again.
He stood in the middle of the platform with the steam breaking round him.
It was such a little thing. It was nothing. A thousand people did it. It lasted perhaps a second and a half, and then she was upright again and the train had gone, leaving the long platform bare in the gray light. In the sudden clear air she turned her head, as if she'd felt a draft, and looked straight down the length of it, and saw him.
He saw her face. The cap threw a shadow across her forehead, but he saw the mouth, the cheek, the gray eyes. He saw them widen. He saw her lips part. For half a second, across thirty feet of wet concrete, with the clock above her head ticking toward six forty-one, they looked at each other with the naked, helpless, shared recognition of two people who have each been expecting the other for a long time.
Then she snatched up the suitcase and ran.
He ran after her. He knew, even as his legs began to move, that it ended any chance of explanation, and it made no difference. His body had taken over. She was fast. She went through the passengers on the platform like a fish through reeds, ducking, swerving, the gray case banging at her knee. He saw her reach the end of the platform and turn toward the steps, and he shouted, in a voice he didn't know, "Isabel!"
She didn't look back.
She went down the stairs two at a time into the subway, and he followed, the iron treads ringing under his feet. At the bottom the tunnel opened into a long tiled passage, brightly lit, with archways on either side and a wind blowing through from somewhere. He saw her at the far end. He saw the cap. He saw the coat go round the corner. He ran, and at the corner, almost at the junction, with the cry still in his throat, he reached out and seized an arm.
The arm was in a dark coat. It belonged to a woman in a woolen cap. She spun round in his grip with a shriek, and he saw a thin brown face, forty years old, a stranger's, with a small gold ring through the nostril and eyes wide with terror.
"Get off me! Get off!"
"I'm sorry. I thought—"
"Help! Somebody help!"
He let go. He stood in the tiled passage with his hands open. The woman backed away clutching her bag, and behind him he heard the pounding of feet and a man's voice shouting, and a whistle. There was a hand on his shoulder. There was another on his arm. He found he was against the wall, and a tall young man in a high-visibility jacket was saying something to him, again and again, loudly, in the tone you use to a dog.
"Sir. Sir. Calm down. Calm down. Nobody's going to hurt you. Put your hands where I can see them."
"I'm not—"
"We've had a complaint, sir."
"I only wanted to speak to her."
"I know. I know. I'm sure." The young man's face, close to his, was damp and earnest and frightened. "You'll need to come with me."
He sat for an hour and a half in a small gray room behind the ticket office, on a plastic chair, under a poster about unattended luggage.
The transport police weren't unkind. A sergeant with a sandy mustache took his name. A constable brought him tea in a paper cup. They went politely through his wallet and rang the Halvern Museum of Art and spoke to someone for a long time in low voices. He listened to the murmur through the wall with one ear and understood he was being discussed. At eight the sergeant came in and sat on the edge of the desk with his arms folded.
"Mr. Wray," he said. "I don't think we need to take this further."
"Thank you."
"The lady in the subway doesn't want to press anything. She was frightened. That's all." He rubbed his mustache. "But there's another complaint on file, sir. From last night. A Miss Albright, through her agency, a Mr. Frey. About an incident at the Ardent. He says she's afraid of you."
"I wouldn't harm her."
"I'm sure you wouldn't."
"I only want to know who she is."
"And I'd say that's the part she's got a right to keep." The sergeant stood. He looked down at Callum with the careful, unwilling sympathy of a man who has seen a great many people do foolish things at stations. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to put you on the ten-fifteen to Halvern, with a ticket, and I'm going to ask you to be on it. And I'm going to make a note. Not a charge. A note. In case it comes up again."
"Again."
"It might." The sergeant's eyes were steady. "They do, sir. This kind of thing."
Callum didn't ask what kind of thing. He sat with the paper cup in his hands. He was thinking of a gray suitcase, a wool cap, a double tug on a lace. He was thinking of a face at the end of a platform in the steam, and what he had seen in it in the half second before she turned, that was neither fear nor anger nor surprise.
It had been something far more painful. It had been the look of a woman who has seen a ghost, and recognized it, and understood that it was the one that wouldn't go away.
Both parts, the old man in the stalls had said. You'd swear there were two of her. You'd swear it on your life.
He drank the tea. It was cold.