Chapter 32
Chain of Custody
"You opened it yourself," said Kovac.
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
"Without a witness. Without a camera. In a room where, if I understand you, there were eleven other people's fingerprints on every surface, a hundred years of dust, a courier's label and a pigeon on the roof." She looked at the blotting paper, the cheques, the gray envelope, the plastic stick in its bag, laid out in a row on her desk like the contents of a pocket after a drowning. "Mr. Wray. I've known barristers weep for less."
"I photographed everything. Before I touched it. And after."
"Did you." A long dry sigh. "That's something." She picked up the first cheque by the corner, between thumb and forefinger, and held it to the window. "Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. To the governors. In March 2010, a week after Lantern Night." She laid it down. "It's a very pretty thing. It will not, by itself, bring down a woman who has chaired the Police Kind Fund since 2004."
"I'm not asking you to bring her down."
"No. You're asking me to do something much harder. You're asking me to act against a person of standing on the strength of a dead girl's letter, a dead man's letter, a keeper's ledger, a shopkeeper's notebook, a thread, and a recording of a telephone call that went to a dead woman's voicemail." She looked up at last, and the tired black eyes had a gleam in them that was almost cheerful. "I love it. I haven't had a case like this in nine years."
He stared at her.
"It's the paper," said Kovac. "People don't write things down because they're innocent. They write them down because they expect to be believed." She tapped the cheque stub. "Mr. Marlow kept a file. Mrs. Marlow kept a ledger. Your wife kept a button jar. It's a family of record-keepers, whether they know it or not. And what I've learned in thirty years is that a record-keeper always leaves a trail, because the point of keeping a record is to be found."
She stood. She went to the window.
"Here is what I can do," she said, with her back to him. "I can apply this afternoon for a production order on the mobile account. The one that was supposed to be cancelled in December. I can ask the provider who's been paying for it, and from which bank, and who has been logging in to the voicemail, and from where. I don't need Sergeant Cairns for that. I need a district judge with a good lunch." She turned. "I can take the cheques to a forensic accountant I trust. I can put Mr. Moyo's ledger in a bag, and Mr. Qureshi's, and ask them both for formal statements, with a solicitor present. I can have the envelope with the crest tested for a fingerprint that isn't yours." A short breath. "I can do all of that by Friday."
"And Quist?"
"Quist is a different kind of problem." She came back to the desk. "I'd need him to do something. And at the moment he's far too intelligent to do anything at all. He has a very good understanding of what can be proved against a man in his position, which is nothing, and of what can be proved against the lady he drives for, which is rather more." She sat. "That's what puzzles me."
"What does?"
"Why he'd take the risk. For a woman who is, forgive me, an employer." She picked up the cheque again. "I've looked at his record. I've looked at his bank. He's not a devoted servant. He's a hard, quiet, solitary person who is paid exactly what he's worth, and who has stayed with one family for fourteen years. In my experience that means one of two things. Either he loves her." Her mouth twisted. "Or he has something on her."
"The scarf."
Kovac looked at him.
"It was in my car," said Callum. "In a bag. It's gone. The only person who could have taken it is somebody with a key to the lock-up. A man who knew the fob code. A man who knew where I live."
"That's three things you've said that I can't use."
"I know."
"But they happen to be the three I believe." She laid the cheque down. "Find me Miss Albright, Mr. Wray. If she was on that bridge, she's the one living witness who can put Mrs. Marlow there. She's also the one living person who is more afraid of that than you are. I don't mind telling you I think she's the key to the whole thing."
"She says she wasn't there."
"I'm sure she does."
"I believed her."
"Did you?" The dark eyes were steady. "Think."
He thought.
He sat in the hard chair in the bare room with the file of cheques in front of him and remembered a woman on a shell path in the early morning, chin lifted, eyes enormous, saying No. He saw it again. He saw the gloved hands tighten on the cap; the drop of water falling on the knuckle; the long dark rising shape in her eyes, and how it turned and went down. He heard her voice, dry and exact and without a tremor.
I've never heard a lie so well made.
"No," he said slowly. "I didn't."
"Good," said Kovac. "Neither did she."
He went home by the river.
It was past seven when he came out of Corder Street, and the sun, low and gold, lay along the Dunmere in a long trembling road. The lamps hadn't come on yet. The air was warm and smelled of cut grass and diesel and the sweet rot of the river. In the gardens along the towpath people were out with hosepipes and wine glasses, calling to each other across the fences in the loud contented voices of a Sunday in early summer. He walked among them like a man inside a glass bell. He walked slowly, with the sun on his face and his hands in his pockets, and for the first time in months he didn't look at any woman's face.
He was thinking about a pigeon on the glass.
It had walked up and down for three hours above his head in the studio, tick, tick, tick, while he read his wife's death in photocopies. It had never once stopped. He thought, absurdly, how it had no idea what was beneath it; for the pigeon the roof was a floor, a warm one, in the sun; and all the weight of what lay under its feet was just glass.
That's what I've been, he thought. A bird on a roof.
It was nearly dark when he reached Lantern Row.
The lane was quiet. The baker's was shut, its blind down and its tin sign swinging, and the postman with the low shoulder had gone home. The warehouse door at number nine stood open on the stairs. He climbed them slowly, three flights, with his hand on the cold iron rail, and at the third landing, where the timer light had gone off, he stopped.
Someone was sitting on the top step.
She sat in the dark with her knees drawn up and her arms round them and her head bent forward onto her wrists, so still that for a moment he took her for a bundle left by a postman. A gray suitcase stood beside her. A wool cap lay upturned on the stair as if she had taken it off to ask for money. She wore a long dark coat, torn at the shoulder and soaked, though it hadn't rained in two days, and her hair hung over her face in wet dark strands.
He didn't move.
On the iron stair below him a drip fell from somewhere and rang.
"Callum," said Nora Albright.
She didn't lift her head. Her voice was thick and muffled against her arms, hoarse, the voice of someone who has been crying for a long time and is past knowing it. "I'm sorry. I didn't know where else. I took a taxi from the station and I walked up and I couldn't ring the bell." A shudder ran through her. "They were at Tallow Lane. This morning. Two of them. They broke in while I was at the Playhouse. They went through everything. They took my mother's books. They took the, they took the letters."
"Who?"
"Not Quist." She raised her head. In the dark her face was a white blur with two enormous eyes. "Men I didn't know. In gloves. And one of them had a clinic's lanyard." She swallowed. "The clinic rang an hour later. About Danny. They said the funding had been reviewed. They said he'd be discharged by the end of the week, to the care of his sister." A raw high laugh. "To my care. In a flat they've just torn the doors off."
"Nora."
"He's twenty-eight, Callum. He can't be alone. He can't even—" She broke off. She pressed her fist against her mouth. Then she said, in a small, flat, terrified voice, like a child confessing to a theft, "You asked me if I was on the bridge."
He went still.
"And I said no."
"Yes."
"That wasn't true."
The drip fell and rang. Down in the street a taxi went by, and its headlights slid across the ceiling of the stairwell in a long slow gold sweep and were gone.
"I know," said Callum gently. "Come in."