Chapter 39
What It Cost
The Halvern Courier ran it on the front page for eleven days.
The first headline, on the Thursday, was plain fact. RETIRED DETECTIVE ARRESTED AT FERRY. The second, on the Friday, was longer and had a photograph, a small square portrait of a lady with silver hair and a string of pearls, in evening dress, handing a cheque to a child in a hospital bed. MARLOW TRUST CHAIR QUESTIONED OVER BRIDGE DEATH. By Saturday the national papers had it, and the headline had become a single word in black capitals across half a page, over a photograph of the Greaves Bridge at dawn with a strip of orange mesh across the gap.
DOUBLES.
He didn't read them. He took the paper in at the door, as he took in everything that autumn, in a spirit of grim obedience, and laid it on the hall table face down. Priya read them for him. She came in each morning at nine with a coffee in one hand and the Courier under her arm and sat on the stool by the easel without being asked and told him, in short level sentences, in the voice of a girl reading the minutes, what they said. It had become a ritual. It was, he supposed, her way of looking after him: she stood between him and the world and translated.
"They've found six hundred thousand pounds," she said, on the Tuesday of the second week.
"Where?"
"In the Trust's accounts. Missing. They say Mr. Quist moved it over nine years, in small amounts, through a company in Jersey." She turned the page. "There's a man from the Charity Commission. He says Mrs. Marlow signed the returns herself and never read them."
"She wouldn't."
"It says she may have been unaware." Priya looked up. "Do you think she was?"
"I think she knew what she wanted not to know."
She considered this seriously, with her head on one side. "That's a very odd kind of crime," she said.
"It's the commonest there is."
They charged Helen on the second Friday.
Kovac told him by telephone. She did it in her usual dry, flat, unhurried voice, over the clatter of a canteen, the way you report the weather: perverting the course of justice, on two counts; assisting an offender; and, subject to the opinion of the Director of Public Prosecutions, expected by Christmas, a charge of manslaughter by gross negligence. "I wouldn't hold your breath," she said. "The law is a clumsy beast about what a person owes to a woman in a river. They'll say she had a sprained wrist and a driver who told her it was hopeless. A good barrister will say she was in shock. But they'll try."
"And Quist?"
"Oh, Quist's done." There was a certain grim satisfaction in her voice. "He's pleaded to the fraud. He'll plead to the rest. He's a man who knows when he's been outplayed. He sat in the interview room for six hours and gave me the whole of it, in order, with dates." A pause. "He asked if you'd been told he thought you were stubborn."
"I was told."
"He means it as praise."
"I know."
"Sergeant Cairns," said Kovac, "has retired on grounds of ill health. He is, I'm told, deeply distressed. He says he did what he was asked, believing it was kindness." A dry sniff. "I have a feeling a number of people are going to discover, in the next few months, that they did what they were asked, believing it was kindness. It's a great age for it."
He laughed. It hurt.
"Mr. Wray."
"Yes?"
"I'd like to say something." Her voice dropped. The canteen noise fell away behind it, as though she had turned her back to a room. "I've been a police officer for thirty-two years. I've sat across a table from a great many people who were absolutely certain of something. And in thirty-two years I've met perhaps four who were right when everybody told them they were wrong." A breath. "You were one."
He didn't trust himself to answer.
"I don't say it to flatter you. I say it because you might not hear it from anyone else." The line crackled. "You'll hear it said that you were lucky. You weren't. You were stubborn, and observant, and you loved her, and none of those is luck." Another pause. "Go and look at the painting. I've a feeling you've left it too long."
Dev wrote his statement on a Sunday.
He brought it to the flat, folded in his pocket in a wrinkled brown envelope, and laid it on the kitchen table in front of Callum and sat down opposite with his hands between his knees. He'd lost weight. He'd cut his beard short, and his eyes in his thin face were enormous and shadowed. When he spoke it was in a dry, careful, scraped-out voice that Callum didn't at first recognize.
"It's four pages," said Dev. "I did it with the solicitor. He says it's not necessary, but I wanted to. It's what happened. The Friday. Quist on my stairs. The rent." He coughed. "It says I'm sorry."
"It doesn't have to."
"I know. I put it anyway." He rubbed his face. "I've been a coward for six months. I'd rather be a fool for the rest of my life. At least a fool's allowed to be forgiven."
"Dev."
"They'll want me in court, I suppose. They'll ask what I knew. I'll say I knew nothing, and that's the truth, that's the damn awful truth of it. I knew nothing, and I let it happen." His mouth worked. "She trusted me with one thing. One. And I kept it under a bed."
"You brought it."
"After half a year."
"You brought it," said Callum again, "in a biscuit tin."
Dev looked at him. And then, with an expression of such helpless, ridiculous, ravaged tenderness that Callum had to look away, he put both arms on the table and laid his head on them and shook.
They sat together for a good part of the afternoon with the envelope between them and the tea going cold. After a while Dev raised his head. "I've lost the Mill," he said. "The lease. The Trust is in receivership. I've got till Christmas."
"Where will you go?"
"I don't know. Leicester, maybe. Mum has a spare room." He gave a ghost of his old grin. "I could set up in her garage. Do model ships for pubs."
"You could come to the museum."
"What?"
"There's a vacancy," said Callum. "In the framing workshop. Priya says they've been advertising since March. It's not much. It's a salary. It's a bench." He spoke without looking up. "I've been thinking about it for a week."
"Cal."
"I need someone who can't tell a lie."
"I can tell a lie!" Dev protested, with sudden outrage. "I told one for six months!"
"Yes," said Callum. "And look at the state of you."
Nora gave her evidence in October, at a pre-trial hearing in the Crown Court at Halvern, from behind a screen.
He wasn't allowed to attend. He sat on a bench in the corridor outside, under a window of frosted glass, with a paper cup of tea going cold beside him, and watched the door. Verity sat at the other end. They didn't speak. She had come in a black coat with her hair pinned up, a tall, hard, handsome woman, and had taken the farthest seat with her briefcase on her knees. For three days the two of them had sat at either end of the same corridor, like the ends of a seesaw, without a word between them.
On the third afternoon the door opened and an usher said, "Mr. Wray? You may go in, sir. The witness has finished."
He went in.
The courtroom was high and brown and extraordinarily quiet. A great deal of dark wood. A coat of arms. At the front, behind a long desk, a judge in a scarlet robe sat with his chin on his hand, and behind a wooden screen at the side, in a gray coat, Nora stood with her hands on the rail, quite alone, like a woman at the prow of a ship. Her face was white. She was looking at nothing. She had given evidence for six hours, to a prosecutor, to Helen's barrister, to a judge; she had been asked, in the course of it, to describe the face of a woman falling off a bridge; she had done so in a low even voice, without a single tear. He had been told. He could believe it.
She turned her head.
Their eyes met across the full length of the court.
And Nora Albright, who had been a coward all her life, and had stood alone on a bridge in the rain, and had told the truth in front of the people who had made her a liar, lifted one hand from the rail, slowly, and held it up to him with the fingers spread, and tapped, once, on the wood.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The judge cleared his throat.
She was laughing, silently, with the tears running down her face.
He turned and went out into the corridor and sat down on the bench and put his head in his hands. The barrister for the Crown, a small gray man with a stoop, passing along the passage, glanced at him with a puzzled kindness and went on his way.
"It's something she does," said Verity, from the end of the bench.
He looked up.
She had moved. She sat beside him now with her bag in her lap, upright, in her black coat, and she wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the opposite wall, where a framed notice about fire exits hung in the gray light. "Before she laughs," she said. "Both of them did. I never noticed." She swallowed. "I've been watching that woman for three days from a corridor. And she's nothing like my sister at all. She's got a different mouth. A different voice. She's nothing like her, and I can't stop looking."
"No."
"I thought I'd hate her."
"I know."
"I don't." Verity's voice shook. "I'd like to. It would be so much easier." She turned abruptly and looked at him with Isabel's gray eyes, red and bright and steady. "Callum. I want to bring Esme to you. When it's done. I want to tell her. I don't know how." Her mouth twisted. "I thought you might know."
He took her hand.
"I don't," he said. "But I'll be there."