Chapter 33
What Nora Saw
She wouldn't sit at the table.
He had put her in the kitchen, in the circle of light, and made tea and laid a blanket over the back of a chair. She stood at the window with her arms round her ribs, looking out at the black roofs of the Candlewick and the river-glow beyond them, while the kettle boiled. Now the mug stood at her elbow, untouched, with a thread of steam going up. She had taken off her coat. Under it she wore a gray jersey with a hole in the cuff, and she held the hole with her other hand, pressing the wool together over her wrist, as if to keep something from getting out.
He didn't hurry her. He sat on the far side of the table with his hands round his own mug and let the kitchen do what it did, give her small movements back to her a moment late from the high ceiling. At last she turned, with a helpless jerk, and said, "It does that."
"The echo?"
"It did it to her. She told me. She said she bought the flat because it answered." A cracked smile. "I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard."
"Sit down, Nora."
"In a minute."
"You needn't tell it in order."
"I've got to. I've never told it. If I don't do it in order, I'll get to the middle and not get out." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "You like things in order. She said so. She said, Cal will want the timetable."
He smiled. It was very faint.
She sat.
"She rang me at two minutes to eight."
Her voice had gone flat and level. It was the voice of a person reading from a page. He recognized it, with a small cold lift of the heart, as the voice she'd used on the shell path. It wasn't an actress's voice. It was the voice of someone who has said something in the dark a thousand times and found, with horror, that it never changes.
"I was in Halvern. I'd come down that afternoon on the 3.15. She'd asked me to. We'd planned it for weeks. Sunday, the three of us, in your kitchen. She was going to tell you. I was going to be there, in case." She swallowed. "In case you wanted to know why. I was going to say it. What I'd let her do."
"You were in Halvern."
"In a room at the Station Hotel. I'd been sitting on the bed since five with my coat on." A dry laugh. "I couldn't eat. I couldn't read. I kept thinking, I'm going to meet him. I'm going to stand in his kitchen and be the girl who looks like his wife."
"And she rang."
"From the car. I could hear the indicator." A breath. "She said, Nonie. It's changed. Mother knows."
The kitchen clock ticked.
"Verity had rung her," said Nora. "At twelve past five. We know that. And at some point after, I think, Verity rang Rookhill and said, She's going to do it. She's going to tell Callum, and the child. And Helen, being Helen, didn't telephone. She sent a text." She closed her eyes. "I've seen it. Izzy read it to me. Darling, I understand you are unhappy. Please do nothing before we talk. I shall be at the Greaves Bridge at 8.30. Come alone. M."
"M."
"She signed it Mother."
"Why the bridge?"
"It was halfway. Between Rookhill and the town. And it was shut, because of the storm." Nora opened her eyes. "Nobody would be on it. It was the one place in Halvern where two women could stand in the dark and say whatever they liked." Her mouth moved. "Izzy said, I'm going to go. I want to tell her myself. I want to see her face. I said, don't. I said, wait for Sunday, wait for Callum. She said, No. I've been waiting twelve years. And then she said, Come. Please. Come to the north end and wait. If I need you I'll wave."
"And you went."
"I walked from the station. In the rain. It's twenty minutes." She looked at her hands. "I'd never seen the bridge. I stood on the north approach and saw her car in the middle with its hazards going, and her, by the door, in the scarf. Her hair was all over her face. She was waving. Not to me. At the wind."
She told the rest in short, even sentences, with long gaps between, and he didn't interrupt.
She had walked out to the car. She was so cold her teeth were chattering. She said, Izzy? and the figure in the scarf turned, and she saw her friend's face in the lamplight, wet, white, bright-eyed, with a kind of wild calm on it, such as a face has on the morning of a journey. Nonie, Isabel said. You came. And they stood a yard apart under the lamp, two women with the same face, and Nora cried.
"We didn't say anything. There wasn't time. I saw the headlights. A long black car, coming up the south lane, very slow. It stopped across the road behind Izzy's. The engine kept running." Her voice shook. "A man at the wheel. In gloves. He didn't get out."
"Quist."
"I didn't know his name. Not then." She closed her hands. "And a door opened, and a woman got out."
Callum shut his eyes.
"She was in a pale coat. She had a stick, or an umbrella, I couldn't see. She walked up to us very upright, with the rain coming off her hat, and she stopped about ten feet away and looked at Izzy." Nora drew in a long breath. "And then she looked at me."
He waited.
"I'd never seen her in my life," said Nora. "Not to know. I knew the face from photographs, and a woman in pearls at a school, a long time ago. But she'd never seen me, not properly, not in the light, next to my, next to Izzy." She turned her head. The wide gray eyes looked straight at him, full of tears. "And I watched her see it. I watched her whole face change. It went white and then gray, like paper catching fire. She put out a hand. She said, quite softly, Good God. And she said, There are two of you."
"She hadn't known?"
"She'd paid me. In 2012. Through a lawyer. She'd never looked." She almost laughed. "She'd sent a man to a bookshop with a cheque, and never once come to see what she was buying."
"What did Isabel say?"
"She said, Hello, Mother. Very nicely. And then she said, This is Nonie. You remember. The girl you paid to leave." A tremor. "And Helen said, Isabel. Get in the car."
"They quarreled."
Her voice dropped.
"I don't remember it all. The wind was so loud. Helen said she'd given her everything. She said she'd given her a life, and a name, and a husband, and the whole of her father's money, and that she would not stand on a bridge in a storm and be told by a child that she was a monster. She said, You have no idea what I have done for you. And Izzy said, Yes I do. I have the cheques." She stopped. "That was when I saw Helen's face. At the word cheques. Something went out of it."
"Isabel had the cheques."
"Her father's. She'd found them. She said, I know about Esme. I know about the school. I know about Nonie's mother. I'm going to tell Callum on Sunday, and Esme after, and I'm going to write to the principal, and the Fund, and the police if I have to." Nora's voice broke. "And Helen said, You will do no such thing. And she reached out. She took Izzy's arm."
"Which?"
"The right." Nora's fingers tightened round the mug. "She grabbed it above the wrist, with her left hand, and she pulled. She meant to take her to the car. She wasn't violent. She had the face of a woman moving a child out of the road. And Izzy said, Let go. And Helen said, Come with me. And Izzy wrenched her arm once, hard, and stepped back."
The refrigerator shuddered. The kitchen was entirely silent.
"There was a rail," said Nora. "At that place, behind her. With orange tape. I saw it. I'd seen it as I walked up. I thought, that looks wrong. And she stepped back and her shoulders touched it, and I heard," and her voice cracked and went on, "I heard it go. It made the sound a green branch makes."
"Nora."
"Helen still had her wrist. She was pulled forward. She cried out. I think she wrenched her own, I think that was what the cry was. And Izzy was going back, over, with the rail, and her arm slid out of Helen's hand. And I ran." Her eyes were open and fixed on nothing. "I ran at her. I got there. I got a hand on her scarf. I had it. I swear, I had it for a second, I felt the whole weight of her on it, and I pulled."
"And it tore."
"It was wool. It was old." She was shaking now, in long deep shudders. "It was an old yellow scarf she'd bought in a market, and it tore in my hand like paper, and she, and she looked at me." A sob. "She looked at me. Callum. She was looking straight up at me as she went. And she wasn't frightened. She was surprised. She said, quite quietly, in the voice she used for a parking ticket, Well. There's a thing."
Afterward he found he had come round the table without knowing it.
He knelt on the kitchen floor beside her chair. He took both her hands in his. They were icy and rigid and clenched round something, and he saw that between the palms, with the knuckles white, they held a thin strip of folded cloth. It was the width of two fingers and about a foot long, a frayed, gray-yellow, tattered thing, stained dark. She'd had it in her fist in the rain. She'd had it on the train. She'd had it, he understood, in the pocket of that coat, for six months, in the dark of a bookshop in Carrow.
She uncurled her fingers.
"I couldn't let go," she whispered. "I tried. I put it in a drawer, and took it out. I put it in my mother's Bible. I tried to burn it. I couldn't." She was weeping quietly, without a sound. "It's the last bit of her. It's all I took."
He didn't touch it.
He held her hands, and the strip of cloth lay between them, small and ragged, in the warm cup of her palm. There was a smell from it. Wool, and rain, and river, and under them, faint and sweet and clear, the clean dry smell of a shampoo he'd bought a hundred times from the chemist on Kemp Street.
"Tell me the rest," he said gently.
"The man got out of the car." Her voice was a thread. "He walked up very slowly. He looked at the gap in the rail. He didn't look over. He looked at Helen, who was standing quite still holding her wrist in her other hand, and said, Madam, get in the car. And she said, Call an ambulance. She said it twice. Call an ambulance, Tobias. And he said, She's gone, madam. And he looked at me."
"What did he say to you?"
"That my hair was on her coat. That my hand had been on her scarf. That there'd be fibers under my nails." The strip of cloth shook. "He said I'd been the last to touch her. That Mrs. Marlow and he were in the car. That a keeper had seen two women, and if anyone was asked, it would be the one who'd run." She looked up. "He said it so kindly, Callum. He wasn't threatening. He said, If I were you, Miss Albright, I'd go home. And I went."
"You ran."
"I ran to the station. I locked myself in the ladies'. I stayed there three hours." The tears ran down. "I never called. I never told anyone. I let her lie in the river for eleven days. I read it in the paper in a café in Carrow, on the Tuesday, and I was sick in the sink."
"Nora."
"And in December," said Nora Albright, "a man in a gray coat sat in my kitchen and said Mrs. Marlow wished to help me. And he put forty-two thousand pounds on my table." She drew a ragged breath. "And he told me about you."
He sat back on his heels.
"That you were a controlling man," she said. "That you counted her phone calls. That she'd been terrified of you for years, and had gone to the bridge because she couldn't face coming home. That it was you who had driven her to it." She wiped her face. "I wanted to believe it. God forgive me. If it was you, then it wasn't me. If it was you, then I'd only been a girl on a bridge who tried to save someone and couldn't." Her mouth shook. "I held on to it for six months. Then I saw you at the dinner, and you looked at me like a man seeing a dead woman, and I knew he'd been lying."
"Why didn't you say?"
"Because of Danny."
She lifted her face.
"Because of Danny," she said again, quite simply. "And because I was so very, very tired."
In the high kitchen the clock struck midnight, a thin silver chime. The echo came back off the ceiling a moment late, in a voice like a sister's. And the two of them sat, one on the floor and one in the chair, with a ragged yellow strip between their hands, and neither could speak.