Chapter 22
The Matching Pair
Inspector Kovac took the statement on Saturday afternoon in the same square room with the same dead red light, and for forty minutes she never once looked at her watch.
She wrote it herself. She didn't trust the machine, she said; it put its own spin on a man's pauses. She sat across from him with a block of lined paper and a cheap black pen and took down his words in a fast, plain, upright hand, underlining any she meant to come back to. When he had finished she read it back to him aloud in her flat dry voice, sentence by sentence, as you read a will. The bag. The scarf. The words "it was on the rail." The thread. At the end she laid the pen down.
"It isn't proof," she said.
"I know."
"A shopkeeper's notebook. A thread you can't swear to. A receipt." She turned the sheet to face him, to sign. "A good barrister would have you for breakfast. A good barrister would say, he picked up his wife's scarf off a railing, put it in a bag, and went home. Which is what it sounds like."
"Is that what you think?"
"I think you picked up the scarf and didn't look over the rail." She said it quietly. "I think that's what you're afraid of. That's what you've been asking me since you came in. Not whether you killed her. Whether you stood there and didn't see." Her black eyes met his. "I can't tell you. I'd like to. I'll tell you what I can: she wasn't in the water when you got there, or you'd have heard the rescue launch. The keeper rang at 8:39. Your car crossed at 8:52. Whatever was done was done before you came."
"Done?"
"Happened," said Kovac, after a moment. "I misspoke."
He signed.
"There's a name I'd like you to know," she said at the door, as she handed back his pen. She didn't look at him. "I'm saying it as a matter of general interest. Tobias Quist. He was a detective inspector in this building until 2011, when there was an inquiry. Nothing proved. A number of exhibits went missing from a number of lockers, and a number of the men they would have convicted went home." She looked down the corridor. "He went to work for a family on a hill. I'd be careful who you tell that you've been to see me."
It was Priya who found him the name.
She did it without knowing, on Monday morning at the studio, over the Mackenzie, with her sleeves rolled up and a swab behind her ear. He had asked her, with a careless air that wouldn't have fooled a child, whether she knew anyone who had trained at the Conservatoire. My cousin Anjali did a year, said Priya, not looking up. She hated it. She said it was like being in a very expensive convent. She still has a thing about Miss Fenwick.
Who is Miss Fenwick?
She taught movement. Voice. Whatever. She was there forty years. Anjali said she could tell what you'd had for breakfast by how you stood. Priya lifted her visor. Why?
A picture, Callum said. A provenance. Someone who was there.
She believed him. He saw her believe him, and the small faint relieved lift of her shoulders, and was ashamed.
By noon he had a telephone number.
Miss Hester Fenwick lived in a bungalow on Willow Road in Alder Weir, where the footbridge had come down in the storm, at the end of a lane of identical beige houses with identical garden gnomes. It was a small neat low place with a lace curtain in every window and a tin plaque on the gate that said BEWARE OF THE DOG, and no dog. She opened the door herself. She was eighty, thin and very upright, with a mass of snow-white hair piled on her head and fastened with a tortoiseshell comb, and a face like a carved bird's, all beak and eye. She wore a long gray cardigan and bright red carpet slippers. In her left hand she held a walking stick, and the stick was pointed at his stomach.
"You're the restorer," she said.
"Yes. Callum Wray."
"You rang. You said it was about a provenance." The stick didn't waver. "I taught at the Halvern Conservatoire for forty-one years, Mr. Wray, and I know when a man is lying. Your trousers are the wrong color for a man who wants a painting looked at. You've the feet of a man who has been walking for a week." The old eyes narrowed. "It's about a girl."
"Yes."
"I thought it might be. Come in. Don't touch the dahlias."
The sitting room was bright and chilly and crowded. There were photographs on every surface, in silver frames, hundreds of them, in rows: faces in greasepaint and tights, in doublets, in white ruffs; a girl in a Greek chiton; a boy with an enormous false nose; groups in front of a curtain with their arms round each other, laughing. A grand piano with its lid down. A gramophone. On the mantelpiece, in a place of honor, a small bronze bust of a woman with her head thrown back.
"Sit," said Miss Fenwick. "There. No, not that, it's Lazarus's." A huge orange cat regarded him with disdain from the chair in question and declined to move. "Then stand. It doesn't matter. I'll tell you what I know and then you'll go."
He stood. She lowered herself, with a good deal of ceremony, into a high-backed armchair under the window and laid the stick across her knees.
"Which girl?" she said.
"Isabel Marlow."
"Ah." There was no surprise. Her face simply settled, the way a face does that has waited a long time for a particular door to open. "Isabel. Yes. And the other."
His mouth was dry.
"Nora," said Miss Fenwick. "You've met her."
She told it with her eyes on the garden.
It was the autumn of 2008, she said, and the intake was a strong one. Forty-one of them. There was an Irish boy with a voice like warm treacle, and a Manchester girl who'd been in a soap, and in the middle of it all two girls from different corners of the country who came into the first-year Movement class on the same morning and stopped dead in the doorway, looking at each other.
"They didn't say anything. Not at first. They stood there with their bags." The old woman's hands moved on the stick. "One was tall and thin and dark, in a coat from a good shop. One was tall and thin and dark, in a coat from a charity shop. And I thought, God in heaven. It's the same child twice."
"They looked alike."
"Alike!" She gave a cracked laugh. "Mr. Wray. I've taught for forty-one years. I've seen brothers and sisters. I've seen twins, once, in 1987, who couldn't be told apart by their own mother. I've never seen anything like those two. It wasn't a likeness. You could put one in the other's costume and her own father wouldn't know. Same bones. Same eyes. Same walk. By the end of the first week they were doing each other's laughs."
"Three taps," said Callum.
"I beg your pardon?"
"On the table. Before she laughed."
The old eyes turned to him, bright and sharp.
"Who did that?" said Miss Fenwick. "Which of them?"
"Isabel."
"Hm." She held his gaze a moment longer, then looked away. "It wasn't Isabel who started it. That was the other. She used to do it in the canteen, the first month, with her fork. Tap, tap, tap, and off she'd go. I thought it was charming. And then one morning I noticed the Marlow girl was doing it too. She'd picked it up in a week, like a cold." She shook her head. "They did that. They passed things between them. A phrase. A gesture. How they held a cup. I thought it was the sweetest thing. They were a double act. They did one scene for the end-of-year, the Viola and Sebastian from Twelfth Night, and they took turns. Thursday, one played the girl and one the brother. Friday, they swapped. And the audience couldn't tell. We had a bet on it in the staff room. Nobody won."
"They were friends."
"Friends!" The word came out somewhere between scorn and kindness. "They were something there isn't a word for. I used to see them in the corridor with their arms round each other's waists, whispering, like two halves of one sentence. They called each other by the same name. A joke. They called each other Me. 'Where's Me?' 'Me's in the loo.'" She stopped. A muscle moved in her thin throat. "It was funny. Then."
"And then?"
She was silent.
Outside in the garden a blackbird was singing. The cat on the chair yawned and stretched one paw out, toes spread, and curled it back.
"Then there was Lantern Night," said Miss Fenwick.
It was March of their second year, she said. Nineteen and a half. A showcase, the big one, with agents in the front row. It was The Cherry Orchard, in the main theater, with a full lighting plot, and the students ran the desk and the fly floor themselves; that was the rule. Isabel Marlow was playing Varya. Nora Albright had been put on the lighting desk.
"And on the Wednesday night, in the third act, a bar came down."
She said it flatly.
"A lighting bar. Forty feet of steel with twelve lanterns on it. It was hung from the grid on a cable that had been, I'm sorry to say, checked by a man who was short of time. It fell. It fell on the stage-left wing, where a boy of twenty-two named Tomasz Kral was waiting with a prop, and it took him across the face." Her eyes didn't leave the window. "He lost the sight of one eye. He was a technician. He was going to be a designer. He went home to Gdansk."
Callum heard himself breathe.
"The inquiry was quick. These things are." The cracked voice went on. "The fall was put down to human error at the lighting desk. A cable had been left unlocked, they said, on the safety rail. The student operator on duty was Nora Albright." She paused. "But Nora said she hadn't been on duty. She said she'd swapped. Half an hour before the house opened, she said, Isabel had come to her in tears with a migraine and said she couldn't go on if she had to do a first-act scene and then run to the wings in the second. They'd changed places. Isabel at the desk, in the half-light, in her costume, for the first two acts; Nora on the stage as an extra." She lifted a finger. "That is what Nora said."
"And Isabel?"
"Said it wasn't so."
The words fell into the cold bright room like a stone into a pool.
"She said she'd never left the green room. She said she'd been in her dressing room being made up all evening. There were three witnesses, girls, who'd say so. They said so." The old woman's hands closed on the stick. "And she cried. She wept in front of the whole board. She said she couldn't believe Nora would lie about a thing like that. She said she loved her. She said, 'I don't know why she's doing this.'"
"And they believed her."
"They believed a Marlow." The thin lips thinned further. "There was a new wing to be built, Mr. Wray. A very large cheque. A woman in a gray dress came to see the principal on the Thursday, a mother, with pearls. I never knew what was said." She looked at him at last, and her sharp bright eyes were wet. "But on the Friday the Albright girl was gone. Withdrew, they put. A family matter. Her mother was ill. And Isabel Marlow went on to finish her year and her degree, and play Viola at the end, to a standing ovation. I went. I sat in the front row. She was marvelous."
He didn't speak. He couldn't have.
"She played the brother too, you know," said Miss Fenwick quietly. "At the end. A kind of tribute. She came on in the cloak and the doublet and played the scene where the twin comes home. And she did it exactly as the other had. The way she held her head. The little turn of the wrist." She drew a long unsteady breath. "I thought: she has stolen her. She's taken the whole girl, gesture by gesture, and put her on. And I thought, God forgive me, I never wanted to see that face again."
"Isabel."
"No, no." The old lady shook her head. "The act. I never wanted to see it. It was too good."
The cat jumped down from the chair. It crossed the carpet with its tail in the air and rubbed against her slippers, purring, and she bent down with a creak and put a hand on its head, and for some moments neither of them spoke.
He walked home along the river.
He didn't take the tram. He went on foot down the long flat length of the Dunmere towpath, past the allotments and the boat clubs and the sagging chain-link of the gasworks, with his hands in his pockets and the water running dark and fast beside him under its fringe of willows. It was a warm evening. A man was fishing from a stone jetty with a thermos and a transistor radio. Two children on bicycles, with fierce faces, tore past him the other way, ringing their bells. The light on the water was the color of tea.
She said it wasn't so.
He saw her in the kitchen in her yellow scarf with her face gone quiet. It's something I have to put right first. He saw her at twenty-one in a green room, in greasepaint, weeping in front of the board. I don't know why she's doing this. He saw a boy with a bandage over one eye, getting on a plane.
And he saw her laugh. Tap, tap, tap, and the unwrapping, the helpless joyous bloom of it. He had loved that laugh for eleven years. He'd thought it was hers. He thought now, with a cold, vast, tender wonder, that it had been a gift, taken from the one person to whom she could never give it back.
I thought I knew who she was.
I thought I knew the whole face.
He stopped on the towpath at a bend where the river turned toward the town, and leaned both hands on the rail of an old iron footbridge. Below him the water slid by, sleek and quick and brown. A scrap of white drifted on it, a feather, a leaf, and turned, and turned, and vanished under the arch.
And a voice in his mind said, without any malice, very plainly: You were married to a woman who could lie to a board of governors with tears on her face.
And she told you on the telephone that it was the opposite of leaving.