Chapter 20
Eight Fifty-Two
The lock-up under the warehouse on Lantern Row was reached by a ramp that ran down from the back lane into a low concrete cellar a hundred feet long. It was lit by a single row of fluorescent tubes, one of which flickered with a small dry buzz, like an insect trapped in a lampshade.
He hadn't been down it since October. It was cold, and it smelled of old oil and damp and the sweetish stale breath of rubber. The sound of his shoes on the slab went away from him along the roof in a series of small clicks and came back. Twelve bays stood in a row down the right-hand wall, each with a number stenciled on the concrete in yellow. Most were empty. In the sixth stood a dust-sheeted shape that was probably a motorcycle. In the ninth, under a plastic cover gone gray and stiff as old canvas, sat a long low familiar bulk.
He stood with the fob in his hand and looked at it.
It was nine o'clock on Friday night. The rain had come on again after dark, heavy and steady, rattling on the corrugated cover of the ramp. He had walked out of Corder Street at four, gone to the studio, and sat in front of the Mackenzie for three hours without lifting a swab. Priya had gone home. The great skylit room had gone dark from edge to edge, and he'd sat in the dark among the easels and the ranked bottles with his hands between his knees, thinking, with the same flat, dull, circling persistence as the rain: I was on the bridge.
At eight he'd got up and walked home. At nine he came down the ramp.
He took off the cover.
It slid away with a long dry whisper and fell in a heap beside the wheel, and the Volvo sat there in the buzzing white light, gray and squat and dusty, with a skin of fine gray powder on its roof and a dead leaf pressed against the windshield. It was a sensible car. It was a car for a man who carried frames. He'd bought it eleven years before from a retired vicar, and Isabel had called it Gregory, after the vicar, because it smelled faintly of hymn books.
He opened the driver's door.
It was the smell that did it.
He'd been braced for something. He had come down in a mood of grim, careful calm, like a man going to look at a wound, and he'd expected an image, a sound, a picture arriving in his mind with the hard clean edges of a photograph. It wasn't like that. What came was the smell. A close, complicated, sour-sweet mixture of old leather and cold dust and something else underneath, a wet, mineral, faintly metallic odor, like rain on iron. It came up out of the seat as he leaned in and went through him like a hand through water.
He stopped with one knee on the sill.
Rain.
Rain on iron.
He didn't move. He stayed bent, hand on the wheel, breathing through his mouth, and let it come. It wasn't something to hurry. He knew that from his work. A fragile surface doesn't give up its secret to a scraper. You warm it. You wait. You lay on a pad of solvent and sit beside it with a book, and in forty minutes the old varnish softens at the edges and begins, by itself, to lift.
He got into the car and shut the door.
The sound of the lock-up fell away. In the close little cabin there was a stillness like the inside of a bell. The seat was too far back. That was the first thing he noticed. He had always sat close to the wheel, chin almost over it, for the sake of his bad ear. Now he found himself stretched out with his arms straight and his heels flat, the pedals at the very limit of his reach. He put his hand under the seat, found the bar, and moved it up three notches. Then he stopped.
Who put it back?
You did. You drive a car and you move the seat. You moved it back that night because you were drunk and your legs felt long.
Did I?
He put his hands at ten and two on the cold wheel and shut his eyes.
For some minutes there was nothing. He heard his own breathing in the little box, a drip somewhere on the ramp, the buzz of the failing tube. Then, from a long way off, the way a face comes up through varnish, he began to see his hands.
They were wet. They were on the wheel, in the glow of a dashboard, and the wheel was slippery with rain because he hadn't shut the window. There was a streetlamp ahead of him, a blur, a smear of gold on glass, and the wipers were going. He could hear them. He could hear every sweep, the long rubbery shudder of the blades, left to right and back, and between each sweep a small flat gap in which the world went completely white.
Sweep.
Gold.
Sweep.
A radio was on. It was talking about a storm. A presenter's voice, level and warm, was saying that the Environment Agency had issued a severe warning for the Dunmere, and he remembered thinking, in a thick vague way, she says Dunmere as if it were a person.
Sweep.
A car was ahead of him. A small silver one. Hazard lights.
His eyes flew open.
He sat bolt upright in the driver's seat with his heart slamming against his ribs, and the cab swung slowly back around him: the dashboard, the dusty wheel, the faint gleam of the clock. He was gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles hurt. He was sweating. His shirt was stuck to his back, his breath came in short, hard, noisy gasps that filled the small space, and on the windshield, in the buzzing light, a thin fog had formed from his mouth.
A small silver one.
It was a picture. It was the first. It had arrived whole, clear and sudden, with a startling physical brightness, like a slide dropped into a projector: the lights of the hatchback ahead, orange, blinking, on a wet black road. He hadn't imagined it. He hadn't been told it. The sergeant had said her car was found with the hazards going, and he'd read it in the report and heard it from the coroner, and could have built the picture himself out of a hundred sources. He knew that, and still the knowledge had no force against what he felt.
He had seen the car.
Not afterward. Not in a photograph. He had seen it in front of him in the rain, from the wheel of this car, with the wipers going. He had been there.
He wiped his mouth. His hand was shaking so badly he couldn't hold it steady in front of his face.
You've been telling yourself a story, said the careful voice, thinly, like a voice from the next room. You've been told the car was there, and you've built the memory out of the telling. It's a known thing. Dr. Sorel will say so. They call it reconstruction.
Yes, he thought. They do.
He leaned back against the headrest. He turned his head slowly to the right and looked at the passenger seat, where nobody sat. A gray blank seat with a scuffed place on the cloth and a map of the city folded in the door pocket. He'd been looking at that map for eleven years. Isabel had marked it with a green pen: the hospital, the museum, the cheap Greek place on Kemp Street, Rookhill, the bakery in the Candlewick where the bread was the same as the bread in Lisbon. She called it the Gospel according to Gregory. She folded it badly.
He took it out. He turned it over in his hands. It was a pleasure, and a small pain, to see her handwriting, and he almost put it back. Then, from between its folds, something slipped out and fell on his knee.
It was a slip of paper, narrow and white, the width of two fingers. A receipt.
He held it up to the light. It was printed in purple dot-matrix ink on cheap thermal paper, faded to a pale lilac, and the sum at the top said £14.99. ROWAN OFF-LICENCE. 41 CORN STREET, HALVERN. 1 x BELL'S 70CL. CASH. 14 NOV 2025. 21:07.
He read it three times.
He read it a fourth time, with his thumb under the date, as if the numbers might change.
21:07.
He had told Dr. Sorel he'd had a drink at home. He had told the sergeant, the coroner, the policewoman, the whole sad audience of his grief: he'd drunk a whisky, in the flat, from the bottle in the kitchen cupboard, which was a Highland Park, given to him on his fortieth birthday and kept for best. It had been a third gone in the morning. It had been a third gone when the police came. He had never bought a bottle of Bell's in his life.
At seven minutes past nine on the fourteenth of November, he thought, I was in a shop on Corn Street, buying whisky I don't like, in the rain.
Fifteen minutes after the bridge.
He sat quite still. Behind him in the lock-up the rain on the ramp rose to a roar and subsided. The fluorescent tube gave one last great sputtering buzz and went dark, and the whole long cellar sank by a degree into a dimness the color of dishwater, the next light only a pale oblong at the far end, and himself in the car, in a little glass box, sitting at the center of it like a figure in a bell jar.
He didn't feel fear. He'd expected fear. He felt a great, curious kindness, such as he'd felt as a child on finding that the house he'd grown up in had a room he'd never been told about: a sad, wide, exact sense that there was more of the world than he'd been allowed.
Who were you, he thought, that night?
Where did you put her?