Chapter 25
The Keeper
The hut at the north end of the Greaves Bridge had a green door with a padlock, a window with a crack in it, and a hand-lettered sign that said CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC. NO TOILET. NO TEA. NO EXCEPTIONS. Under it, in a different pen, someone had added: Except for Isaac.
Callum stood on the wet pavement at nine on Tuesday morning with the river beside him and the bridge rising behind, and for the first time since November he looked at it.
It was smaller than he'd thought. In his mind it had been a vast black thing, a cathedral of iron going out into the weather. What stood in front of him in the thin gray light was a plain Victorian bridge of three arches, painted green, a little rusty at the joints, with a pavement on either side and a lane of cones down the middle. The traffic had been diverted. A single workman in a yellow vest sat on an upturned bucket at the far end, smoking. Pigeons walked along the parapet. Halfway across, on the downstream side, a section of railing was missing, and in its place stood a stretch of orange plastic mesh fence tied to the uprights with cable ties, and behind that, a gap of air.
He looked at it for as long as he could. It wasn't long.
The door of the hut opened.
"You'll be the husband," said a voice.
He was a big, slow, stooped old man of sixty-six, in a donkey jacket and a flat cap, with a seamed brown face, a nose broken in several places, and the biggest hands Callum had ever seen on a human being. He stood in the doorway holding an enamel mug. His eyes under the cap were pale and watery and extremely sharp.
"Isaac Moyo," he said. "I've been waiting for you since December."
"I'm sorry?"
"I said to the missus, he'll come. The husband. They always do in the end. Some come in a week. Some come in a year." He looked Callum up and down. "You took your time."
"How did you know who I was?"
"You look like a man who's been told it didn't happen." Isaac Moyo turned and went back into the hut, leaving the door open. "Tea. Come on. The sign's a joke. Nobody reads it but the council."
The hut was a cube of warped wood the size of a garden shed, with a stove, a table, a calendar from a firm of scaffolders, and an old cream-colored wall telephone with a stretched cord. There was one chair. Isaac gave it to Callum. He perched on an upturned crate by the window with the mug between his knees, and for a minute they sat in silence, listening to the stove tick and the pigeons shuffle on the roof.
"I called it in," said Isaac.
"I know."
"Eight thirty-nine. I looked at the clock. I'm a man who looks at the clock." He nodded at the wall. "I said to the girl on the line, there's a woman gone over the north rail, send everything. She said, stay on the phone. I did. I stood there with the cord stretched, and I watched the car go." He drank. "Then I ran for the south end to flag the boys. I'm not as quick as I was. By the time I was back on the deck they'd come with the blue lights, and the young lad was asking me what I'd seen."
"And you told him."
"I told him." He set the mug on the sill. "I told him there were three, and a fella in the car. Two girls, and an old woman, and a driver. That's what I saw. I've been telling it to anyone who'll listen for six months. I told the council. I told the Courier. I told my priest." A short dry laugh. "He said I should pray."
"What did you see?"
"You won't believe me."
"I might."
"You'll think I'm wrong in the head."
"I've been told that myself," said Callum. "Quite often. By people who love me."
The old man looked at him for some time.
Then he got up stiffly and went to a shelf above the stove, where a row of ledgers stood, large and dog-eared and stained with tea. He took one down. It was a green cloth-bound book with a cracked spine. He laid it on the table and opened it, and Callum saw page after page of cramped, neat, pencilled entries in a hand like a railway timetable. Mon 3rd. Wind NW. Expansion plate 4 loose. Reported. Tue 4th. Lamp 11 out. Reported. He turned to the fourteenth of November. He laid a finger like a sausage on the page.
20.31. Silver Honda, hazard. Stopped mid-span N lane. Driver out. Female. Yellow scarf. (Odile. Gusts 60.)
20.33. 2nd female arr. on foot from N end. Dk coat. SAME. Both same.
20.35. Black car, long. Bentley? Man at wheel. Elder lady out. Pale coat. Went to rail.
20.38. Rail went. Female (yel scarf) over. 2nd female caught scarf, tore. Elder lady stood. Black car left 20.41. 2nd female ran N.
20.39. 999 called.
He read it twice.
"The same," he said.
"That's what I wrote. At the time. I wrote it in the dark with a torch in my teeth." Isaac's voice shook slightly. "I looked at them under that lamp. The one in the scarf and the one in the coat. They stood that far apart." He held his hands six feet from each other. "And I thought, the glass is playing me up. I thought, it's my eyes. I went to the optician in January, and she said I've got the start of a cataract in the left, but nothing that would make me see double." He shook his head. "They were the same. Same height. Same walk. Same face. I'd put my life on it."
"Which of them fell?"
"The one in the scarf."
"And the other?"
"Ran. Up the north approach, past this window. Quick as a hare. She'd lost her hat. She was crying." He swallowed. "I never saw her face. But when she passed under the lamp over there, by the shelter, I saw her hair come down. And I thought: that's her. That's the one who went over. She's got out."
Callum didn't move.
"I thought I'd gone mad," said Isaac Moyo, "for about a week. I thought, how can she be both. I thought, I'm seeing a ghost. And then I thought, no. There's two of them. There's two girls with one face, and one of them's gone in the river, and the other's still alive somewhere, and nobody's looking."
Nobody spoke.
The stove ticked. Outside the window on the bridge the workman had stubbed out his cigarette and was sweeping the pavement with long slow strokes of a broom.
"There's another," said Isaac.
"Another?"
"Another entry." He turned a page. The old finger moved down it. "I put it down, and then I rubbed it out, because the sergeant said it didn't matter. It wasn't part of it." He looked up. "I'll tell you now. I'd have sworn it in court."
20.52. Gray estate, N approach. Stopped. Male driver out. No coat. Went to rail. Stood. Hand on tape. Picked up something. Back to car. Left 20.58.
(Husband?)
The question mark was pencilled small. It had been rubbed at, but not out, and the faint gray ghost of the word still lay in the paper like a watermark.
Callum looked at it.
He sat in the single chair in the hut, in the rising warmth of the stove, with the book open under his hand, and the room didn't spin, or tilt, or darken. It stood quite steady around him. The pigeons moved on the roof. And he found, with a curious detachment, as though it were happening to a man in a picture, that he wasn't surprised.
"I saw you," said Isaac. "I was down the other end. I'd gone to meet the lads. I looked back and there was a man at the rail in his shirtsleeves in a gale, holding on to the tape. I could see him from sixty yards. A big, thin, gray sort of man." The mug was in his hands again; he was turning it round and round. "He didn't look over. That's what stuck. All the others would, you know. They'd go to the edge and lean. He stood with his hand on the tape and looked at the road. Then he bent and took a thing off the rail, and stood a minute holding it, and went."
"What did I look like?"
"Like a man who'd come to the wrong house."
Callum laughed. It surprised him. It came out of his chest in a short dry bark, and the old man looked at him with a flicker of alarm, and then, slowly, with a dawning grave delight, laughed too. They sat in the hut with their shoulders shaking, two grown men, the one with his hands over his face, the other wiping his eyes with the back of a vast brown fist. When it had passed, there was a silence that was not unfriendly.
"I should have gone over," said Callum. "To the edge."
"Aye."
"I might have seen."
"No, you wouldn't." The old man's voice was quite kind. "She was gone, son. She'd been in the water ten minutes. It was a flood. The current took her round the pier before you ever got your car out of the garage." He put down the mug. "If you'd leaned over you'd have seen black water. That's all."
"You don't know that."
"I've been standing at this window for thirty years," said Isaac Moyo, "watching that river take things. I know what it does."
A long breath went out of Callum, slowly, like air out of a tire.
"You told the police there were two women," he said.
"I did."
"And they wrote down one."
"I watched him do it."
"Why?"
"Because he was young, and tired, and it was a bad night. And because his sergeant told him to." The old man's eyes were steady. "I rang the station again on the Monday. I said to the lady on the desk, can I talk to the man in charge. And a gentleman came on, polite, and he said, Mr. Moyo, we have your statement, and I'm told you've been under strain. He said, would you like us to send someone round? A doctor?" His mouth twisted. "I said no. I said I'd like someone to look at the rail."
"That was Cairns."
"Could be. He had a soft voice." Isaac closed the ledger. "I'll tell you what, though. A fortnight after, a man came here, in the evening, when I was locking up. Tall. Gray. Very quiet, in a long coat. Gloves." He held up his hands to show. "He said he was from the family's solicitors. He wanted to know if I'd seen a thing on the night that might distress a grieving relative. I said I'd seen two women. He said, 'I think you must be mistaken.' Not as a question. And then he gave me this."
He opened a drawer in the table. He took out an envelope, sealed, white, and laid it on the ledger.
"I've never opened it. It's fat. I put it in the drawer and I've left it there since December." The big face was dark red. "I don't want his money. I'm not that sort. But I thought, if somebody ever came, if somebody ever said, Mr. Moyo, I believe you, then I'd give it to him and say, there. That's what it cost." He pushed it across the table. "Take it. Take it to the woman at Corder Street. I'd not be surprised if she wanted it."
Callum picked it up.
It was heavy and soft, like a small cushion. He turned it over once in his hands, and on the back flap, pressed into the paper in the faint blind impression of a ring, he saw a mark. A tiny raised crest. Two letters, intertwined, in a circle. H.M.
He stood.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me."
"I'm going to see she gets it."
"Good." Isaac Moyo held out his enormous hand, and Callum took it, and the grip was like being held by a gate. "And Mr. Wray."
"Yes?"
"The other one. The one in the coat." The pale old eyes were extremely steady. "She was holding the scarf when she ran. I didn't tell the young lad. It was only a rag. But I saw it in her fist." He let go. "I thought you'd want to know. That she took a piece of her with her."
He walked out onto the bridge.
He didn't go to the gap. He stopped at the first lamp-post, forty yards from the hut, and stood with his hand on the wet green iron, looking along the rail toward the orange mesh and the open air. Then, quite on purpose, he turned his back to it, took out his phone, and found a number that a woman in a navy suit had written on a piece of paper and pushed across a table.