Chapter 13
The Slow Train Home
The ten-fifteen was a stopping service, and it stopped at everything.
It stopped at Knowle Junction, where a porter in a yellow tabard stood on the platform in the drizzle looking at nothing. It stopped at a halt called Brigg's Cross, which seemed to consist of a bench and a sign. It stopped for eleven minutes in the middle of an empty field, for reasons the guard wouldn't explain. The carriage ticked and settled around him, and Callum sat with his forehead against the cold glass, watching the rain run down the window in long slow drops. For the first time in a day and a night he let himself be tired.
He had the carriage to himself. He had taken the seat he'd had on the way up, facing the engine, by the window, with his bag at his feet. He could see the whole length of the corridor, the swaying luggage rack, and the framed map above the door showing the lines of the old northern railway in faded mustard. And he could see himself. In this light the window was a dark mirror, and in it, against the sky, a gaunt man in a gray coat looked out at the fields with an expression of baffled patience.
He looked at the man for some time.
The man looked back. It was a ordinary face. It would have made a poor portrait. It had a long jaw and a bad ear and a tired mouth, and it didn't look like the face of someone who was seeing things. It looked like a man who'd had a bad night. You look like you've been interrupted, she had said.
He thought: I followed a woman across a railway station. I grabbed a stranger by the arm. I was taken into a room and given tea.
He thought: I am forty-three years old and I have a police note.
He tried to hold both thoughts at once, side by side in the same hand, and found they wouldn't lie flat. One was a fact and one was a feeling, and they wouldn't go on the same scale. He had been trained to weigh evidence. In the studio, with an unknown painting under a raking light, he would have set it down as plainly as a condition report: Observation one. A woman of similar appearance was present at a dinner. Observation two. The woman reacted with apparent recognition. Observation three. The woman's handwriting shows one feature in common with the handwriting of the deceased. Observation four. The woman retied a shoe in a manner identical to a habit of the deceased.
Conclusion, he thought.
He couldn't write one. That was the thing. In twenty years of looking at surfaces he had never failed to reach one, even a provisional one, even a wrong one. Probably nineteenth century. Possibly Dutch. Later additions to the sky. He sat in the swaying carriage with the rain on the glass and felt for the word, and it wasn't there.
Then, in the dark window, beside his own reflection, there was another.
He didn't turn. He saw it the way you see the edge of a page: at the far right of the glass, in the seat beside his own, the pale oval of a face, a dark coat, a woolen cap, close enough to touch. It was quite still. It was looking at the fields.
Every muscle in his body went rigid.
It is the reflection of the seat, said the careful voice, steadily. There is nobody beside you. You are in an empty carriage. You looked at the seat when you got on, and it was empty.
Look and see.
You do not turn your head.
Look.
He turned his head.
The seat beside him was worn blue moquette, with a pale patch where a thousand shoulders had rubbed it, and on it lay a folded newspaper that someone had left. That was all. The carriage was empty. The door at the far end swayed on its hinges, the luggage rack above it gave back the gray light, and a lone crisp packet slid with a dry whisper from one end of the floor to the other as the train moved off.
He sat with his heart in his throat and looked at the newspaper for a long time.
Then, slowly, he turned back to the window. The reflection was gone. There was only the gray man with his hand against his mouth, and behind him the wet fields going backward.
He rang Detective Sergeant Cairns at half past twelve, from the buffet car, because it was somewhere to stand.
It was a narrow noisy space with a counter, a rack of crisps and a row of stools bolted to the floor, and a boy in a red waistcoat who looked up as he came in and then very politely looked down. He ordered coffee. He took it to the end of the car, to the window by the connecting door where the roar of the wheels covered everything. He held the phone to his good ear and dialed the number he knew by heart.
"Cairns."
"It's Callum Wray."
"Ah." A pause. The line was bad, hissing, with the faint cluck of a car engine in it. "Mr. Wray. I was about to ring you."
"Were you?"
"I've had a message. From the Carrow transport police." He sounded neither surprised nor annoyed, only careful. "A little matter at the station. They were very decent about it. Said you'd had a trying night."
"I want to talk about the telephone number."
"I thought you might."
"I've been told it's been disconnected."
"It was, in January. Yes. I told you at the time." The sergeant's voice was patient. "It's a prepaid, Mr. Wray. They die. People throw them in canals. I'd say there's nothing in it."
"A woman answered it."
"What?"
"On the fourth of January." He hadn't meant to say it. He heard himself say it with the strangest feeling, like putting down a weight he'd carried for months. "At two in the morning. I rang, and it rang twice, and someone picked it up and breathed, and I said hello, and they put it down. Next day the number was gone."
There was a short silence on the line.
"That's an odd thing to have kept to yourself," said Cairns.
"I thought you'd think it was nothing."
"I would think it was nothing." The voice hadn't changed. But there was a slight, tiny pause before the next sentence, like a man checking a note. "Mr. Wray. I want to say something to you as a friend. Not as a policeman. I've known the family, you understand. Mrs. Marlow and I are on the same committee. I've seen what this has done to her, and to you. So I'll say it plainly. There are things that happen to people after a death that look like clues and aren't. The mind needs them. It makes them up." A breath. "A woman at a dinner. A look. A telephone call at two in the morning. It's all one thing. It's a man trying to find a door."
"That's exactly what Helen said."
"Then she's a wise woman."
"Is she on your committee?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You said you were on the same committee."
"The Police Kind Fund." A dry little laugh. "She chairs it. It's not a conspiracy, Mr. Wray. It's a sherry reception."
Callum said nothing. The train plunged into a cutting; the window went black, and then came back gray in a roar of echoing wheels.
"One more thing," he said. "Isabel's phone."
"The mobile."
"You never found it."
"It wasn't on her. It wasn't in the car. We presumed it went in the river." The sergeant paused. "It was on Mrs. Marlow's family contract, as you know. Part of a bundle. We had the provider cancel the line in December, as a courtesy, to spare the family the bills."
"In December."
"Mm. Just after the inquest was opened."
"Who asked for that?"
"It was a routine matter. I'd have to check."
"Would you?"
"I'd be delighted," said Detective Sergeant Cairns, "to look into it. When I'm back at my desk." He had begun, very slightly, to move toward the end of the call; you could hear it in the rhythm, the settling of a man getting ready to hang up. "I'll tell you what, Mr. Wray. Go home. Sleep. If there's anything to the number, anything at all, I'll ring you myself. You have my word."
"Thank you."
"And Mr. Wray."
"Yes?"
"I'd keep away from Carrow." The line crackled. "It isn't my business. But if I were you, I'd stay clear of the north for a while. People get hurt on this sort of errand. Not by anyone in particular. By the sheer weight of wanting."
He rang off.
He didn't go back to his seat.
He stood in the buffet car with the telephone in his hand and the coffee going cold on the ledge, looking out at the fields, which had begun to give way to the edges of towns: gasholders, scrapyards, a ring of gray houses with their backs to the line. The boy in the waistcoat was wiping the counter. A man in a business suit sat reading a tablet and eating a sandwich in small neat bites.
Mrs. Marlow and I are on the same committee.
We had the provider cancel the line in December.
It was a routine matter.
He took out the paper. He hadn't meant to. He unfolded it against the glass, the jerk of the train making the figures dance, and looked at the number and the little line underneath in the sergeant's backward-sloping hand. Do try to get some rest.
Of course it was nothing. Of course there was a routine. A phone on a family contract, in the name of the woman who paid for it. A polite policeman, a favor done. A bill to be spared. It was the sort of kindness the very rich hand out without thinking, the way you hand a coat to a servant. He turned it over in his mind, looking for the flaw.
He found it in the end because he was a conservator. It wasn't in the story. It was in the date.
Just after the inquest was opened.
The inquest had been opened on the nineteenth of November, formally, to identify her, and adjourned. It wasn't closed until February. And no one cancels a dead woman's phone line in December while the coroner is still waiting on her belongings. Not a police officer. Not a family. It was what a person did if they had a reason to want the phone gone and wanted it to look like a kindness.
Who asked for that?
I'd have to check.
He lowered the paper. The train swung through a junction, the whole carriage leaned, and the coffee slid an inch along the ledge. And he knew, with a clearness that was almost physical, like the sudden sound of a door shutting in a house he thought was empty, that there were now two possibilities. Either he was mad, or he wasn't. Either the whole thing was a long, tender, patient hallucination, the work of a lonely mind, and the sergeant and the stage manager and the woman with the high-crossed t's were nothing but the furniture of a dream.
Or there was something in Halvern that didn't want a telephone to ring.
He put the paper in his wallet. He picked up his coffee. And he found, to his surprise, that he was no longer afraid of the first. It was the second that had begun to feel like solid ground.