Chapter 21
The Rowan
Number forty-one Corn Street was a long narrow shop with a flickering green sign and a window crowded with posters for lager. At nine o'clock on Saturday morning its owner was up on a stepladder, dusting a shelf of Christmas liqueurs in the middle of May.
"We're not open," he called, without turning.
"I know. I'm sorry." Callum stood inside the door with the bell still shivering above his head and his hands held a little out from his sides, like a man who doesn't want to be taken for a customer. The shop smelled of cardboard and cold smoke and old cheese. A refrigerator hummed along the back wall. "I wondered if I might speak to you. It's about a purchase. Last November."
"Last November." The man came down, with enormous dignity, one rung at a time. He was sixty, short, upright and bald, in a brown cardigan and gold-rimmed spectacles, with a neat gray mustache and the air of someone who has run a shop for thirty years by never forgetting a face. "That is a long time ago. We have six hundred customers a week."
"I'd have been wet."
"Ah." The spectacles gleamed. "Then it was a Friday."
Callum stared at him.
"There was a storm, I think. The fourteenth. The river came up as far as the Corn Exchange." The little man folded his duster. "I remember because we lost the power at ten, and I had to stand in the dark with a torch and sell three people cigarettes. You are the tall gentleman." He peered. "The one who did not take his coat."
His name was Haroon Qureshi. He took Callum into the back room, which was a cupboard with a kettle, a stool and a calendar from a Lahore carpet merchant, and sat him on the stool. Then he stood by the kettle with his arms folded and told it.
"It was after nine. I know because the news had begun. I keep the small radio on." He tilted his head. "You came in as the door was banging. It was the wind. You had no coat, only a jacket, black, and it was dark with water. Your hair was flat on your head. I thought, this man has been standing in the sea."
"Did I say anything?"
"You said good evening." Mr. Qureshi allowed himself a small dry smile. "You were very polite. You said, forgive me, I am looking for someone. A woman. She would be wearing a yellow scarf."
The shop's refrigerator shuddered and went quiet.
"A yellow scarf," said Callum.
"That is what you said. I thought, what a thing, in such weather. I said no, I haven't seen anyone, I have seen no one for an hour, the street is empty. You said thank you. You stood quite still. I thought, you are not well." He studied him. "Then you asked for a bottle. You did not ask for a brand. You said, whatever is on the shelf. I gave you the Bell's. It was what I had. It is for cooking, really."
"I paid in cash."
"You paid with a twenty and did not wait for the change." Mr. Qureshi reached under the counter that was also, plainly, his desk, and took out a small ruled notebook. "I keep a note when it is strange. A habit of the trade. It was strange."
"What did you write?"
"Fri 14th. Tall gent, 9ish. Soaked. Asked after a lady in yellow. Left 20 on the counter. Came back."
"Came back?"
"Yes." The old man closed the book. "Ten minutes after. I had begun to lock the till. The door opened again and you were there in the doorway with the rain behind you. You said, I am so sorry to trouble you. Have you a bag?"
Callum didn't move.
"A bag," he said.
"A carrier bag. A plastic one. Just a small one." Mr. Qureshi held his hands about eight inches apart. "I said of course. I gave you a bag. You thanked me. And then you did something I remember. You turned your back to me at the counter, so that I wouldn't see, and you held out your other hand, which I hadn't noticed was shut, and you opened it."
"What was in it?"
"Something yellow."
The room tilted slightly and righted itself.
"It was wet," said Mr. Qureshi. "It was long and wet and made of wool, a woman's thing, and it hung from your hand almost to the floor and dripped on my tiles. I thought it was a scarf. And you put it in the bag." He stopped. He looked at the floor. "You did it so gently, sir. That is what I recall. The way one puts a bird in a box. You folded it twice and laid it in and smoothed the plastic over it with your thumb. And I thought, someone has lost this, and he is going to take it to her, and she will be glad."
"Did I say anything?"
"You said, 'It was on the rail.'"
He sat on the stool for some time after that.
Mr. Qureshi made tea. He did it without a word, in the cupboard, in a thick white cup with a chip on the rim, and put it into Callum's hand and stood beside him with his own cup and said nothing at all. In the front of the shop the refrigerator hummed. A customer came to the door, rattled it, and went away. And somewhere in the middle of his chest, in a place where for six months there had been a solid, unmoving weight, something slowly shifted, like a stone turning over in wet sand.
It was on the rail.
He heard his own voice say it. He heard it quite clearly from the other side of a pane of glass: a low, flat, reasonable voice, the voice of a man making an observation. It was on the rail. He had found it. He had walked out onto a bridge in a storm, in the dark, in his shirtsleeves, and found his wife's scarf on a broken railing, and picked it up and put it in a plastic bag and said so to a stranger. He hadn't said, where is she. He hadn't said, call the police. He had said, in a tone of faint apology, it was on the rail.
He closed his eyes.
"Did I seem frightened?" he said.
"Not frightened." Mr. Qureshi considered. "Absent. Like a man who has got up too early. I thought, shock. I have seen it after a car accident. The people are very calm, very polite, and they ask you to hold the door." He sipped. "I wanted to telephone someone. I did say, are you all right, sir, can I call a taxi. You said, no, thank you, my car is outside."
"I was driving?"
"You had been drinking, I think. Before. I could smell it." The old man's face was grave. "I said, you should not drive. You said, 'I'm only going home.' So I let you go. I have thought about that." He paused. "I read about the lady afterward. In the newspaper. A woman from the bridge. A yellow scarf, it said, was a detail the police were asking about." A silence. "I thought, no. It cannot be. Such a thing could not be."
"You didn't tell the police."
"I did." Mr. Qureshi looked at him with sudden steady seriousness. "I telephoned on the Monday. I spoke to a sergeant. He took my name and said thank you very much. He said it was not necessary to come in."
"Which sergeant?"
"I did not write it down."
"Cairns?"
"It may have been. A pleasant voice. Careful." He shook his head. "And then, the following week, another gentleman came."
Callum looked up.
"An older man. Gray. Very still. He wore gloves, I remember, thin black ones. He bought a packet of mints, which he did not need, and he asked whether I remembered a tall man on the night of the storm." The old eyes rested on his face. "I said I did not, sir. I have a bad memory, I said. I said it so politely that he laughed. And he gave me fifty pounds in an envelope. A very discreet gentleman. He said it was for the inconvenience."
"And you took it."
"I took it." The mustache twitched. "I am not a brave man, Mr. Wray. I have a wife and a mortgage. And he had a way of standing." He set down the cup. "But I wrote it in the book. I always write it in the book."
He drove to the lock-up at ten, through streets steaming in a thin pale sun.
He opened the Volvo's rear door. He lifted the cover on the load space with fingers that didn't feel like his own, and looked in. A tartan blanket. A tool roll. A spare wheel in its well, with a jack and a tin of tire sealant. A dried cake of mud on the carpet. He took everything out, one object at a time, and laid it on the concrete beside the bay in a neat row, the way you lay out the contents of a robbed tomb. He ran his hand along the felt. He lifted the wheel. He took the carpet out and shook it, and a fine dry silt of grit and leaves fell on the floor and drifted in the light.
There was no bag. There was no scarf.
He stood in the strip light with his hands hanging.
You are looking for something that was never there, said the careful voice. You've built the whole thing out of a shopkeeper's memory. An old man with a notebook. He's lonely. He likes a story.
He wrote it down the same night.
He wrote it after the newspaper.
He wrote it before.
He knelt. It was a ridiculous thing to do. He put his cheek to the carpet, on the filthy concrete, and looked along the floor of the load space at a low angle, with the light raking across it, the way he looked at a canvas for the smallest lift in the paint. Raking light shows what is on a surface and has no business being there. It shows a thread. It shows a hair, a flake, a finger's trace. He moved along it an inch at a time, from the hinge to the lip, in the cold, and had gone the whole length of the felt before he saw it.
It was caught in the seam, between the carpet and the metal. A single strand, an inch and a half long. It was kinked and soft and the color of a lemon.
He didn't touch it.
He knelt there with his cheek against the rim of the load space and looked at it for a long time. A pale yellow thread of wool in a gray car. Nothing. A scrap of wool in a lock-up, in a cold concrete cellar, where a stranger could have dropped it. It proved nothing at all.
But it had been in there once, with something. And somebody had taken the something away.
A very discreet gentleman.
Thin black gloves.
He stood up. His knees cracked. In the dim cellar among the pillars his own breath rose in a small white cloud and hung in front of him. And he understood, with a calm that frightened him more than any fear, that he was no longer quite inside the story he'd been telling. It had been a story about a man who couldn't let go. Now it was a different one. It was a story about a man who had held something in his hand, and been robbed of it, and hadn't known.
He took out his phone. His thumb found the number. He listened to it ring.
"Kovac," said a dry voice.
"It's Callum Wray." He heard his own voice, clear, level, remote. "I've remembered something. I'd like to make a statement."