Chapter 34
Forty Lines
"There's something I have to ask you," said Callum, "and it won't be kind."
It was nearly one. They had moved into the living room, because the kitchen had begun to feel like a confessional. She sat on the sofa with the blanket round her shoulders and her feet drawn up under her, and the strip of yellow cloth lay on the cushion beside her like a sleeping animal. He had lit one lamp. The jar of buttons stood on the sill with the photograph beside it, and the rain, which had come on again at midnight, tapped at the window in a thin, calm, friendly way.
"I haven't been kind to you," said Nora. "I don't see why you should start."
"On the fourteenth of May, at the dinner. You said you'd wanted to look at me. To see if I was a man who counted calls."
"Yes."
"And before that." He chose his words. "Before December. Before Quist came to your kitchen. Did you ever speak to him? Or to anyone from Rookhill? About her?"
She was quiet.
"I'm asking," he said, "because of a telephone call."
He told her. He told it the way he'd told it to himself in the dead hour of the night, standing in the road with water running down his neck: the screen lighting up, the Verdi, the voice. Cal. It's me. I'm at the rail. Bring the coat. The yellow one. I want to be warm. He told her the phrases. He watched her face while he did it, as he'd watched the faces of ten thousand sitters, for the place where the paint thinned. And he saw it come.
It began at the mouth. Her lips parted a little and stayed that way. Her eyes, which had been resting on his face in tired attention, slowly widened. The pupils spread, black and enormous, until the gray was a thin ring, and the color went out of her cheeks the way water runs out of a basin, from the top to the bottom, leaving her skin the color of paper.
"Say that again," she whispered. "The last one."
"Bring the coat. The yellow one. I want to be warm."
"Oh, God."
"Nora."
"Oh, my God." She put both hands over her mouth. "It was me."
She told it with her hands over her face, in a muffled, shattered voice, rocking.
It had been in March. A Thursday. She remembered because it was the day the funding letter came from the clinic, the first one, the one that said the fees would be kept under discussion. She was in her kitchen in Tallow Lane with the letter on the table and no idea what she was going to do. And at eleven in the morning there was a knock at the door.
A man in a gray coat. Gloves. A polite manner. Miss Albright, I wonder if I might have a quarter of an hour. I come from Mrs. Marlow.
"I should have shut the door," said Nora. "I knew who he was by then. He'd come in December, with the money. He was the one who'd told me the, the story, about you. And I thought: it's over. They've paid me and it's over. And here he was. And he said, Mrs. Marlow is not at all well."
"Not well."
"He said she wasn't sleeping. That she'd taken to wandering the house at night. That she sat in Isabel's room, on the bed, in the dark, and talked to the walls." Her hands fell. Her eyes were red and hollow. "He said she kept asking for her voice. Just to hear it. A recording, a few minutes, just to sleep by. And that there was no such thing, because Isabel had never been the sort to leave messages." A wet little laugh. "And then he looked at me."
"He asked you to do her voice."
"He said it would be an act of mercy." She was whispering. "He said no one need know. That it would be for Helen alone, to play to herself, as a comfort. He said the Trust would be most grateful. He'd already spoken to the clinic." She swallowed. "Danny's place, Callum. They'd have turned him out by April. I was so tired. I thought: it's a recording. It's an old woman. What harm can it do?"
"Where?"
"At Rookhill. In a room at the back of the stables. He'd made it into a, a studio. He had a microphone, and a table, and a pair of headphones. A little glass box." Her voice was thin. "He had the lines on sheets. Forty of them. Typed. In order. He'd taken them from her messages, he said, so it would be her own words. 'I'll see you at six.' 'Don't forget the milk.' 'It's the opposite.'" Her mouth shook. "And some he'd written himself. I remember reading one and thinking, she wouldn't say that. And I said so. And he said, Mrs. Marlow imagines that she did."
"Bring the coat."
"It was the last. Number forty." She was crying freely now, without sound. "I did it nine times. I couldn't get the breath right. He kept saying, softer. As if it were cold. And I thought, what a sad thing, that she's lying in the water and wants the coat." Her eyes closed. "I thought it was for Helen. I swear I thought it was for Helen."
He sat still.
He thought of the voice in the dark. I'm so cold. I've been here such a long time. He thought of how it had sounded, how for eight seconds it had been the right voice played on the wrong instrument; how he'd stood in the road and listened for the difference, and heard it, and not understood. A violin made from a different shelf of the same wood. She had caught the hoarseness. She had caught the catch. She had caught everything. She had made it so exact that it went through his defenses like water through a net.
A copy is always more careful than the original.
It had been so careful. He saw that now. It had been too careful by half. There had been no hitch in it, no slip, no small unthinking fumble of the tongue. It had been spoken beat by beat by a woman who'd been told to do it softly and had done it perfectly. A real voice on a bridge at night would have stammered. It would have repeated itself. It would have said um.
"It was you," he said slowly. "But it wasn't."
"It was my voice."
"It was your craft. And his script."
"It was me." She struck her knee with a fist. "I did it. I stood in a box and cooed. And a man put it in a, in a telephone, and rang you at three o'clock in the morning from your dead wife's number, and you walked to the bridge in your shirt." The fist struck again. "I nearly killed you. I might have killed you. And I did it for forty-two thousand pounds and a place at a clinic."
"You didn't know."
"I should have."
"You didn't."
"I'm an actress," said Nora. "It's all I know how to do. I can do anybody. That's the only thing I'm good for." She was shaking wildly. "She said so once. In the café. She said, Nonie, you could do God. And I said, I can't do me. And she said, No one can."
He crossed the room.
He sat beside her on the sofa and took the blanket and drew it closer round her shoulders, the way you do with a child. She didn't resist. She turned her face into the wool of his jersey and wept in hard, dry, gasping sobs that shook her whole body. He sat with his arm round her and his chin on her hair, looking at the dark window, where the rain ran down in slow silver threads.
At two he telephoned Kovac.
She answered on the second ring. She didn't sound as though she'd been asleep. "Wray," she said. "Go on."
"I have Miss Albright here."
A pause.
"Is she well?"
"She's, no. She isn't. She was on the bridge." He kept his voice steady. "She was there when it happened. She saw the whole thing. She saw Helen Marlow take her daughter's arm. She saw the rail go."
"Does she know she's saying this to a policewoman?"
"She's asked me to ring you."
"Has she." The line crackled. "Don't let her leave. Don't let her out of your sight. I'll be there in twenty minutes with a constable and a solicitor. Does she need a doctor?"
"I think she needs a bed."
"I'll find her one." There was a sound of movement, a drawer, a coat. "Mr. Wray. Is there anything else I should know before I get there?"
He looked at the woman beside him, who had stopped weeping and lay with her cheek on his shoulder and her eyes shut, her breath coming in long slow shuddering draws.
"There's a recording studio," he said, "in the stables at Rookhill."
For a moment Kovac didn't speak.
"I see," she said. "Well. That's the pattern. Isn't it?" A dry sound that might have been laughter. "I'd wondered why a gentleman with such good taste in gloves should have such poor taste in evidence." The line clicked. "Twenty minutes. Put the kettle on."
He put down the phone.
"Callum?" said Nora, without opening her eyes.
"Yes."
"I'm so sorry about the coat."
"It's all right."
"It isn't. I made it sound so cold."
He didn't answer. He sat with his hand on the blanket and his eyes on the jar, and the lamplight touched the buttons one by one, brass and bone and pearl, until the whole sill shone like a small bright coast. And soon, because it was the only thing in the world he could think of, he said very quietly, "She would have said you did it well."
A long silence.
Then, under his arm, Nora Albright made a small, shaken, wondering sound. It was neither a laugh nor a sob. It was the sound of a person who has been handed something she'd stopped expecting.
"Well," she said. "There's a thing."
And neither of them could have said, for the length of a breath, whose voice it was.