Chapter 2
What the River Gave Back
There were things about the fourteenth of November that he could say in order, and things he couldn't. In six months he had learned to keep the two lists apart.
The first list was short, and he knew it by heart. It was a Friday. It had rained since morning, a flat steady rain, and by afternoon the radio was talking about a storm with a woman's name. He had worked late on the Gerard, a small seascape that had come up from the vault with a milky bloom across the water. At ten past six he came home to the flat on Lantern Row, shaking out his coat on the landing, and found Isabel standing in the kitchen with her phone in her hand and her yellow scarf already on.
That was the first thing on the list: the scarf. He noticed it because she was wearing it indoors.
Going out? he said.
I have to see someone, she said. Cal. Sit down a minute.
And here the list went soft at the edges, like paper held too close to a radiator. He remembered that he hadn't sat down. He remembered being tired and under pressure, because the Gerard was promised for the following Wednesday, and saying something about tonight of all nights in a voice he didn't like. He remembered her face. It went quiet, the way it did when she was deciding whether something was worth the effort of saying. She put her phone in her bag. She said, It's not for tonight. I have to put something right first, and then I'll tell you, and I want to tell you properly. Sunday. Can it be Sunday?
What is it?
Sunday, she said. I promise.
Then, he thought, she kissed him. On the cheek, quickly, the way you kiss a man you're about to hurt and would rather not look at. Or maybe he had imagined that part. He had gone over it so many times that he no longer trusted any of the details, the way a word turns into a noise if you say it often enough.
She went out. He remembered the door. He remembered the stairs, her heels on the iron, going down and out of hearing, because he had turned his bad ear to the sound without meaning to. He remembered pouring a whisky.
Then there was a gap.
That was the second list. It had nothing on it. It was a gray stretch of time, two hours, maybe three. On the far side of it was the telephone ringing in the dark at ten past two, and a woman's voice saying his name very gently, as if he were asleep and she didn't want to wake him all at once.
Mr. Wray? This is Detective Sergeant Cairns, Halvern CID. I'm so sorry to ring at this hour. Is your wife at home?
He had been in bed. He remembered that clearly, because he remembered thinking, with terrible sharpness, that her side was cold. He remembered saying no. Then the voice, kind and patient, laid the facts in front of him one piece at a time, like a man setting out the parts of a clock he didn't expect the owner to be able to put together.
Her car had been found on the Greaves Bridge a little after nine. It was in the middle of the bridge. The hazard lights were on. The driver's door was open and the engine was off. There was no sign of anyone. The bridge keeper had reported a woman at the rail. The railing at that point was broken. The river was in full flood. A search team had been on the water since nine.
I'm sure it's nothing, the voice said, but I have to ask. Has she been low at all? Recently?
He remembered that question very well.
She had been low once. It was true, and he said so, standing in the cold bedroom with the phone against his good ear. Nine years before, in the winter after her father died, she had what the doctors called an episode. Three weeks in the Hollin Wing, a prescription, a long careful spring. It never came back. He would have sworn to it. But the question lay on the line between them like a coin on a counter, and a voice he hardly knew as his own said, She was, once. Years ago. Not now.
Thank you, said Detective Sergeant Cairns.
He heard a pen move.
They didn't find her for eleven days.
He thought afterward that he should have counted them better. The storm ran for three nights. The Dunmere, usually a modest, sulky river, rose over its walls, spread across the water meadows and brought down a footbridge at Alder Weir. The search teams worked in rubber boats in the dark. Each morning he went to the police station on Corder Street and sat in a plastic chair under a poster about burglary and was told, in gentle stock phrases, that there was nothing yet.
Helen came on the third day. She came in black, with her silver hair pinned up and her face powdered pale and still, and she sat beside him on the plastic chair, which looked so wrong on her that he almost laughed. She took his hand in both of hers. Her left wrist was wrapped in a flesh-colored support, the sort a tennis player wears. I fell in the garden, she said, when she saw him look. The stone steps. How silly. It's nothing, dear boy. Nothing at all.
She didn't cry. She held his hand for an hour. At the end of it she said, quite calmly, Whatever they find, Callum, you will let me help you. He said yes, because there was nothing else to say, and because he had always been a little afraid of her and had never known why.
Verity came on the sixth day, in a black coat and no makeup, a tall, hard, handsome woman of forty-one with Isabel's mouth set differently. She didn't sit. She stood at the window with her arms folded and said to the glass, If you did anything.
What?
If you said something. If you were unkind to her. If that night. She didn't turn round. She wasn't strong, Callum. Whatever you thought. She looked strong. She wasn't.
I know that.
Do you?
He couldn't answer. What bothered him afterward, lying awake in the flat with the phone silent on the hall table, wasn't the accusation. It was how neatly it fitted into the space where his memory should have been. If you said something. He had. He knew he had. Tonight of all nights. He had gone through that sentence again and again, trying to make it bigger or smaller, trying to find its exact weight. And on the eleventh day, in the hour before dawn, the telephone rang again, and the kind voice said a body had been found at the weir.
He was asked to identify her.
The Dunmere Mortuary was a low flat building behind the Infirmary, with a car park that flooded and a corridor that smelled of floor polish and cold. A young woman in a gray cardigan walked him down it. She wore a lanyard and had a gentle, practiced way of talking. Before they went in she told him that the body had been in the water for some time. She wanted him to know that. He didn't have to look at the face. There were other ways: the clothes, the jewelry. It was quite all right.
He looked.
That was the thing he couldn't say on either list. He looked at what lay under the sheet, in the white room under the white light, and he felt nothing at all, only a clear, cold, flat lack of recognition. It wasn't her. It couldn't be. It was a swollen gray thing with a mouth, and dark matted hair that was the wrong length. He stood for what felt like a long time with his hands at his sides, studying it with the part of his mind that studied surfaces. He noted, in an odd distant way, that the damage to the face fitted a long time in water and contact with stone. This is not a person, his mind said. This is a painting that has been left out in the rain.
Mr. Wray?
I can't tell, he said.
That's quite normal.
I can't tell you if it's her.
We have other evidence, the young woman said. She laid a small clear bag on a metal tray beside the table. A narrow gold ring, worn thin on the inside. A wristwatch with a cracked face, stopped at twenty-two minutes to nine. A black wool coat. A silver chain with a tiny silver bird.
He knew them all. He had put the ring on her finger. The watch had been her father's. He had given her the bird on their first anniversary, from a stall in the Candlewick market, haggling for twenty minutes because she said it would be good for his character.
It's her, he said.
He heard himself say it. Afterward he couldn't remember saying anything else.
They asked him to bring something for the DNA test, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, anything that had been hers alone. He brought her hairbrush from the bathroom shelf, a tortoiseshell one with a few long dark hairs caught in the bristles, in a freezer bag. Two days later Detective Sergeant Cairns telephoned to say the match had been made. There's no doubt, Mr. Wray. I'm so very sorry. He remembered the relief. He remembered it clearly, and he remembered being ashamed of it: the awful lift in his chest, like a long breath let out. At least it was finished. At least it was known.
The coroner recorded an open conclusion in February, leaning, as such things do, toward misadventure. A fall from a damaged structure in extreme weather. There had been talk in corridors, politely murmured, of the other possibility. The council was ashamed about the railing. A man from the Highways Department came to the flat with a letter and an expression of regret.
He kept the letter in a drawer. It was the second thing in the drawer that he couldn't read.
The first was the inventory.
It came from the mortuary with the death certificate, a single typed page headed Property of the Deceased, and for months he left it in its envelope. In January, one night, drunk and sober at once, he took it out and read it by the light over the cooker. It was only a list. Ring, one, yellow metal, plain band. Watch, one, ladies', stopped. Coat, one, black wool, size 10. Chain, with pendant. Shoes, one pair, black, flat. It had a kind of dreadful kindness, as if someone had gone to the trouble of loving her, item by item, in the plainest language there was.
He read it through twice. Then he went back to the beginning and read it a third time, slowly, with his finger under each line, the way he read a condition report. And he understood that something was missing, and for a long minute he couldn't say what.
Coat. Chain. Shoes.
No scarf.
He stood at the kitchen counter with the page in his hand and the extractor fan humming. She had been wearing it when she left. He was as sure of that as of anything. It was the yellow one, the long wool one from the market in Dunmere Bay, wound twice round her neck and tied in a loose knot at the front. In a flood, on a body carried a mile and a half and taken over a weir, a scarf could easily have come loose. It would have been gone in the first hour.
It wasn't strange. It was the plainest thing in the world.
He put the page back in its envelope and the envelope in the drawer and didn't think about it again. Or he told himself so. But some part of him, the part that went on looking at surfaces while the rest of him slept, had put a small pencil mark beside it in the margin of his mind, the way a conservator marks a spot on a canvas where the paint isn't quite right.
No scarf.
Look for the carelessness, he thought now, in the dark of the flat, with the barge horn sounding on the river and the suitcase standing packed by the door. That's where the person is.
He lay awake for a long time. Somewhere in the early hours, in the gray time when the gutter had stopped dripping and the first van was backing down Lantern Row, he realized that for the first time in six months he hadn't gone through the whole list from the beginning. He had started at the end. He had started, for no reason he could name, at the missing thing.
It was a small change. It was nothing.
But after that he slept for almost four hours.