Chapter 14
Public Records
By Wednesday the dining table had disappeared under paper.
He had cleared it on Monday night, in the cold sober calm that follows a long journey, and set up on it in a neat square, the way he would lay out the tools for a delicate cleaning: a legal pad, a box of index cards, three pens, a pot of coffee, and the laptop Isabel had used for her case notes, which he hadn't opened since November. He told himself he was only going to look. By Tuesday noon he had filled the pad. By Wednesday morning he'd started on the cards. When Priya let herself in with the spare key at eight, to ask if he meant to come to work, there were forty of them pinned along the picture rail above the table in a long uneven frieze. The room smelled of coffee and cold toast and the dry papery sweetness of an attic.
"I rang," said Priya. "Four times."
"I turned it off."
"You never turn it off." She stood in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder, her cheerful face gone wary, taking in the table, the pad, the cards, his shirt, which he had worn since Sunday. "Callum. Are you all right?"
"I'm quite well."
"You haven't shaved."
"I'm working."
"On what?"
He looked at her. He thought for several seconds, with a kind of tired care, about the possible answers. A woman in Carrow. My wife. A hole in the evidence. None of them would do. She was twenty-six and kind, and for six months she had stood between him and the full weight of other people's worry. He saw that she was frightened.
"An attribution," he said. "A difficult one. I'll be in on Friday."
"The Mackenzie's—"
"The Mackenzie can wait."
"It's been waiting since March." She hesitated. "Dev says you've had a bad weekend."
"Does he."
"He rang me. He said you'd had a turn." She went pink. "I said you hadn't. I said you were fine. I just—" Her voice wobbled. "It's all right, you know. If you're not. Nobody would mind."
"Thank you, Priya."
"I could stay. I could make you lunch."
"I'll see you on Friday," said Callum, and held the door.
What he had was this.
He set it out for himself that night at eleven, with the lamp pulled low over the table and the rain starting again on the window, in the plain numbered style of a condition report. It was a habit of mind. It steadied him. It gave the whole business the look of work, and work was a country whose customs he knew.
1. NORA ALBRIGHT. He had found her in forty minutes. It was amazing how little there was to find. She had left a small respectable footprint, the kind left by someone who has lived her whole life in one city and never done anything anyone needed to write down. Born in Carrow, 22 October 1989, at the Royal Infirmary. Father, Michael Albright, ship's engineer, drowned off the Orkneys when she was ten. Mother, Frances, owner of Albright's Books on Tallow Lane, died of cancer in 2016. One brother, Daniel, twenty-eight, for whom there was a short notice in a local paper about a charity quiz and then nothing. An entry in the actors' directory, with a photograph he had looked at for six minutes without blinking. A list of credits. A voice reel. A company registration for a one-woman business called Albright Voice, with accounts filed on time.
No arrests. No debts on the public record. No marriages. No children. A woman who paid her bills.
2. THE CONSERVATOIRE. The Halvern Conservatoire of Drama had a website of the self-conscious, mullioned kind, with a gallery of old students, and he trawled it for an hour before he found what he wanted. In a section called Our Alumni, under a banner of a stage curtain, there was a page for the intake of 2008. It listed forty-one names in alphabetical order, with a note beside some of them saying what had become of them. A film actor. A radio producer. Two directors. A woman who ran a theater in Montreal.
Albright, N. (withdrew 2010).
Marlow, I. (graduated 2011).
They stood twenty-three names apart. Between them were an Ashworth, a Bell, a Chaudhry, and a dozen others.
He stared at it for a long time.
It proved nothing. That was what he told himself, in the dry, reasonable, tired voice he used with donors. A drama school has forty students a year. They overlap for two years or three. They sit in the same lecture rooms and drink in the same pubs and are cast, by some director's whim, in plays together. It didn't mean they'd been friends. It didn't mean they knew each other's names. It meant only that on a gray afternoon in the autumn of 2008 two girls of nineteen, a banker's daughter from Rookhill and a bookseller's from Carrow, had walked in through the same oak door.
A girl I used to know.
He wrote it on a card and pinned it up.
3. THE VOICE REEL. He had left it for last. It was on her own website, a plain gray page with a photograph and a list of services (audiobooks, commercials, dialect coaching, "character work") and a button that said LISTEN. He sat looking at the button for a quarter of an hour. Then he put on headphones, which he never wore because they flattened what was left of his hearing, and pressed it.
A voice came out of the earphones.
It was a warm, dry, calm voice, pitched a shade lower than he remembered, and it was reading, with perfect clearness, an advertisement for a building society. Then a Scottish nurse. Then an old Yorkshire farmer, a child of seven, a posh Edwardian woman in a bath. She was an astonishing mimic. She didn't do caricature. She slid into each voice the way a hand slides into a glove, wore it, slid out again, and left behind a faint trace of herself, so that under the farmer's gravel and the child's high voice you could hear the same quick, warm intelligence turning over, like a fish under ice.
He played it twice with his eyes shut.
On the third pass, forty-two seconds into the fourth clip, there was a pause.
It was a pause in a scene. The clip was an extract from a radio play, a woman finding a letter. There was a rustle of paper on the soundtrack and the woman's breathing, and then, quite softly, in the voice of a character who is surprised and not annoyed, she said: "Well. There's a thing."
He took the headphones off.
He sat with them in his hands on the table among the cards, the lamp throwing a small hard circle on the pad, and listened to the rain. The room went quiet around him, as if it had put its hand over its own mouth.
It's a phrase, said the careful voice. Everybody says it. It's in a thousand scripts.
It's not in a thousand scripts. It's hers.
You are listening for it. You would hear it in a doorbell.
He put the headphones back on and pressed Replay and listened once more. Well. There's a thing. The rise on the second word. The tiny, rueful breath at the end, like a person smiling in the dark. He listened to it eleven times. On the twelfth he found that his hands were shaking and the laptop screen had blurred, and he had to take off his glasses and press the heel of his hand into his eyes and wait.
He didn't sleep that night. At four in the morning, by the gray of the window, he stood in the middle of the room and saw it the way another person would see it.
The cards ran in a frieze along the picture rail. The table was a litter of paper. On the floor in the corner lay a crumpled shirt, two cups, a dinner plate with a dried yellow crust that had once been an omelette. The curtains had been drawn at midday. The bed in the next room was unmade, on the wrong side, and beside it on the floor stood a row of empty glasses, small, in a line. And on the sill by the jar of buttons, where he had put it two nights before and forgotten, a framed photograph of a woman at a harbor wall lay face down.
He hadn't put it there. He thought he hadn't. He stared at it with the faintly sick confusion of a man who finds a note in his own handwriting that he doesn't remember writing.
He turned it face up and set it carefully back in its place.
Then he went to the table, took down every card from the picture rail one by one, laid them out in front of him in the gray light, and sat looking at them.
Nora Albright, b. 22 October 1989.
Conservatoire, 2008. Left 2010.
"Well. There's a thing."
Three taps. Left shoelace. High-crossed t.
She looked at me as if she'd been expecting it.
Last call: Carrow. Six minutes. Line cancelled.
Helen's committee.
It was a case. It was a good one. He had never in his life been so sure of anything, and he was equally sure that anyone who saw it would think him mad.
He laid his hand flat over the cards as if to keep them from blowing away. And he saw, with sudden terrible clearness, the way a man sees the shape of his own hand in a dark room, what it looked like from outside. A widower. A table. A wall of paper. A woman he'd grabbed in a hotel, who had asked him to go home. A shoelace.
Obsessive, Dr. Sorel would say. She would say it very kindly.
Pattern-seeking, said the careful voice.
You are doing exactly what they said you would do.
He closed his eyes.
Or, said the other voice, small, stubborn, very steady, from the place where he kept the things that were true, someone wants you to think so.