Chapter 37
The Noon Ferry
The ferry terminal at Dunmere Quay was a long, low, glass-fronted shed on the river wall, with a café at one end and a waiting room at the other. At eleven forty on a hot Wednesday morning it smelled of coffee, diesel and sun on salt.
Callum stood behind the glass of the car park shelter with his hands in his pockets and watched the door.
Kovac had put him there. She'd said he could come as long as he stood where she told him and didn't move, and she'd put a constable in plain clothes beside him, a large placid young man with a newspaper, who chewed gum and looked at him with faint curiosity. Four others were in the terminal. Two were at the café counter buying tea. One sat in the waiting room with a child's coloring book. One, a woman in a cycling jacket, was apparently reading a timetable on the wall for the eleventh time. Beyond the shed the river lay broad and green and wrinkled in the sun, and at the end of the jetty the Maid of Dunmere sat low in the water with her funnel smoking and her stern ramp down, taking on cars.
He didn't know whether he wanted him to come.
It was a curious feeling, standing there with his shirt sticking to his back and the gulls screaming overhead. For nine months he hadn't known the name of what had been done to him. He knew it now. It had a long gray face and a pair of thin black gloves. And what he felt, watching the door of the terminal in the glare, wasn't rage or fear but a dull tired wish to be somewhere else, as at the end of a long play.
At eleven fifty-two, a gray man in a gray coat walked in from the quay side, carrying a suitcase.
He didn't hurry.
That was what Callum would remember. He came in out of the sun through the sliding doors in his long coat with the collar turned up despite the heat, and set the suitcase down on the floor beside the ticket desk. For a moment he stood looking about him with the mild, polite, measuring air of a man in a church. He was perfectly calm. He had shaved. His hair, close-cropped and iron-colored, was damp with some tonic. He wore the gloves.
"A single," he said to the girl at the desk. "Foot passenger. To Helmsley."
"That's the twelve o'clock, sir. It's about to board."
"I know." He laid down a note. "I have excellent timing."
She gave him the ticket. He took it with a small nod of the head and turned, and the woman in the cycling jacket, who was passing behind him at that moment with her hands in her pockets, said in a clear dry voice, "Tobias Quist."
He stopped.
He didn't look round. He stood quite still with the ticket between two fingers, and the girl at the desk behind him slowly put her hands to her mouth. In the long bright shed, where fifteen people were drinking tea and sorting luggage, the noise went out of the air like a candle going out in a draft.
"I am Detective Constable Ferris of Halvern CID," said the woman. "I have a warrant for your arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, of the unlawful acquisition of telecommunications data, of fraud by abuse of position, and of the theft of a personal item belonging to the late Isabel Wray." She stepped to one side. "Two of my colleagues are at your elbow. I'd be grateful if you would put down the case."
"May I finish my tea first?" said Quist.
His voice was dry and level. There was no mockery in it. It was the voice of a man asking a reasonable question of the staff.
"No."
"A pity." He bent. He laid the suitcase gently on its side on the tiled floor. "It was a very good tea."
He straightened, and for the first time turned his head, and the pale eyes passed over the faces in the room like a hand along a shelf. They found the constable with the newspaper. They found the woman with the coloring book. They came to the glass of the car park shelter at the far end and stopped.
He looked at Callum.
The look lasted perhaps three seconds. It had no heat in it. It had no hatred, no fear, no appeal. It was only a look of long, patient, detached interest, the way a gardener looks at a plant that has come up where he didn't expect it. Then, quite slowly, Tobias Quist inclined his gray head, as to an opponent who has played a decent game.
Callum didn't move.
"Mr. Quist." Kovac's voice had come up behind him from the shadow of the shelter, as calm as ever. She walked past him into the light, small and square in her shabby navy suit with her hands in her pockets, and went across the tiles to the gray man and stopped in front of him. "I've waited fourteen years to say this."
"Inspector Kovac." He seemed pleased. "Detective Sergeant, when we last met. A pleasure. You were wasted on that desk."
"You're under arrest."
"I understand." He looked at the case. "May I ask that you handle that with a little care? It isn't mine. It has been entrusted to me."
"By whom?"
"By the family." The thin mouth moved. "In my experience, Inspector, nothing is so well kept as what is given to be kept. I have never lost an object in my life. You will find the contents in the most excellent order."
When they opened it on the tiled floor of the waiting room, under the eyes of a hundred curious strangers and a boy with a camera, they found a number of things.
There were clothes: three shirts, a razor, a toothbrush, packed with military neatness. There was a sheaf of papers in a rubber band, bank statements, share certificates, a deed to a villa on a Greek island registered in the name of a company in Jersey. There was a small black recorder the size of a cigarette case, with a cassette in it. There was a bundle of letters tied with an old shoelace. And there was, wrapped in tissue in the exact center of the case, set apart from the rest like a relic in its box, a plastic carrier bag from a shop on Corn Street.
Kovac put on a pair of white gloves.
She took the bag out the way you take a sleeping bird from a nest. She laid it on the table. Slowly, with two fingers, she folded back the thin plastic, which had gone brittle and yellow and cracked along the folds, and drew from inside it a soft, damp-colored mass of wool.
It unrolled across the table in a long, limp, faded yellow ribbon.
It was ruined. The river had had it, and the weather, and six months of sealed air. It was no longer yellow; it was the color of old bone, stained brown at one end where the water had dried. It had been a good scarf. It was long and thick and soft, hand-knitted in a plain rib, with a fringe, and one end of it, the end that had been through the rail, wasn't a fringe at all. It was torn. It ran out into long ragged threads, frayed and tangled, as if something had gripped it and pulled.
Nobody in the room spoke.
Callum had come in without being told. He stood just inside the door with the plain-clothes constable at his elbow, and a few feet away on the tiled floor lay the scarf, spread across a trestle table under a strip light like a body on a slab. A gull cried. Out on the river, a long way off, the ferry's horn sounded: a low, flat, patient note, like a boy blowing across a bottle.
"I took it from the car," said Quist.
He sat in a plastic chair, in handcuffs, between two officers, hands in his lap and legs crossed at the ankle. He spoke to the table. "On the Monday. Through the fob, which Mr. Wray had left in the ignition. The lock-up has no camera." He paused. "I put it in the case I carry for the lady's things. It seemed the safest course."
"Safest for whom?" said Kovac.
"For Mrs. Marlow." The pale eyes lifted. "I was her servant for fourteen years. In that time she gave me a great many things to keep. This was the last." The mouth twitched. "I kept it."
"You kept it for yourself."
"I kept it as one keeps a thing that may someday be needed."
"By you."
"By anyone who wished to arrange matters." He shrugged, the smallest of movements, a lift of the gray shoulders. "I am a careful man. I have never done a thing without considering how it might be undone. The lady would have called it loyalty. A policeman would call it insurance." He looked at Callum. "I think Mr. Wray would call it a copy."
Callum said nothing.
"You will find that the strip Miss Albright has been so kind as to keep," said Quist, "fits the torn end exactly. I tested it. I knew where she lived. I was curious." He sighed. "I did not take it, in the end. I thought: it is hers. She has earned it. There is a certain justice in a woman holding the last thing."
"You broke into her flat on Sunday."
"Not I. My successors." A dry little gesture. "I have been retired, you understand, for some time. My interests were no longer being served." He let his eyes close briefly, with an air of immense weariness. "The Trust had been running at a loss. The late Mr. Marlow's affairs were, to put it kindly, loose. I made arrangements. Mrs. Marlow knew nothing. And your wife, Mr. Wray, had come into possession of a set of papers that would have shown precisely how loose."
"The cheques."
"Among other things."
"So the bridge," said Callum.
He heard his own voice, quite steady, from the other side of the room.
"The bridge was a misfortune." Quist opened his eyes. "I had nothing to do with the bridge. I want that understood. I did not push your wife. I did not know she would be there. I was told, at six o'clock, by Mrs. Marlow, to bring the car round. I did as I was told." His voice didn't change. "And on the bridge, when it was over, I made a decision. I made it in about four seconds. I have made it a number of times in my life. It was the right one."
"The right one."
"It was the one that kept everything standing."
"She was alive in the water."
"She was not."
"You don't know that."
"I know a great deal about water, Mr. Wray." The gray head turned slowly. "I was a policeman for twenty-four years. I have seen what a flood does to a woman in a coat. Had I called, she would have been found three hours sooner and been no less dead. And I would have lost the one thing I had spent my life gathering, which was a position from which to act." A pause. "Do you think I enjoyed it?"
"I think you did it very well."
"Thank you." It was said with perfect seriousness. "I have always taken pride in my work."
He rose. The two officers rose with him, and the chair scraped. He stood with his hands in front of him in the steel bracelets, in his long gray coat, and looked down at the scarf on the table, the brown and bone-colored length of it, the ragged end. And for the first time something moved in his face. It wasn't remorse. It wasn't even regret. It was a small rueful flicker of professional acknowledgment, like a craftsman looking at a flaw.
"I never meant you to go mad," he said. "I want you to know that. I wanted you tired. A tired man stops. He goes to bed. He has a little holiday, and he takes up a hobby." The thin mouth twisted. "I did not expect you to be so very stubborn."
"My wife was stubborn."
"Yes." The ghost of a smile. "I disliked her for it."
"Take him out," said Kovac quietly.
They took him out. He walked between them without resistance, across the tiled floor, past the café and the ticket desk and the staring faces, back straight, into the glare of the open doors. At the threshold he paused. The sun struck him full in the face, and for an instant he looked old and gray and rather small, like a man stepping out of a theater.
Behind him the ferry's horn sounded again.
The Maid of Dunmere left without him at twelve o'clock exactly, on the tide, trailing a white thread of wake across the green and wrinkled water, and was a smudge on the horizon before anyone in the waiting room thought to look.