Chapter 6
The Number
He found the paper in the second drawer, under the letter from the Highways Department and the mortuary inventory, where he had put it in January and decided not to look at it.
It was a half-sheet of police notepaper torn from a pad, with the Halvern constabulary crest in the corner and three lines in Detective Sergeant Cairns's neat, hurried, backward-sloping hand. Last outgoing call, Fri 14 Nov, 19:58, duration 6 min 12 sec. Number: 07700 900316. Pre-paid, unregistered. Carrow area. Likely wrong number / no further action. Under that, in the same ink, a little smaller: Do try to get some rest.
He had read it so often in January that the sheet had gone soft along the folds. He smoothed it out on the kitchen table under the cooker light and sat looking at it with his chin in his hand. The numbers stood up from the paper in the harsh white light with a stubborn clarity, like the numbers on a gravestone. Eleven digits. Her last call. Six minutes and twelve seconds of her voice going out of the world into someone else's ear.
Likely wrong number.
He had never believed it. For a week he had tried to, the way you try on a coat that doesn't fit. A wrong number lasts four seconds. A wrong number is an apology. You don't stand in a kitchen with your scarf on and talk to a stranger for six minutes and then drive to a bridge. He had said as much to Cairns in January, in the drafty front office on Corder Street. The sergeant had looked at him with enormous, weary, professional politeness and said it was natural to look for a thread.
It doesn't have to be a thread, Mr. Wray. People ring people. She may have been calling a friend. She may have been calling the speaking clock.
She was on it for six minutes.
Then she was having a conversation, said Cairns, and I'm very sorry that we're never going to know what it was about.
That night he rang the number himself. It rang out, in some far distant room, eleven times, and then a flat mechanical voice said the person he was calling was not available. He rang again the next day. And again. On the fourth night, in a state he preferred not to examine, drunk and clear and sure that someone was about to pick up, he rang at two in the morning. It rang twice, and then stopped. A click. A breath. He said, Hello? Hello? into the silence, and the line went dead.
The next morning the number was no longer in service.
That was what he had never told anyone. It sat in his mind with a strange weight, like a stone made smooth by being carried. The line had been answered. Someone had lifted it and listened and said nothing, and within a day the number was cancelled. That was, he had told himself in February, in March, with great care, what happened to prepaid numbers. They lapsed. People threw the phones in canals. It was nothing.
Yet he kept the paper in the drawer.
At ten past eleven the telephone rang.
He let it go. Then, because he knew who it was, he picked it up on the fifth ring.
"I said I'd ring," said Dev.
"You did."
"I'm a man of my word. Are you in bed?"
"I'm in the kitchen."
"That's worse." There was a clink on the line, a glass being set down. Dev's voice was a little blurred and a good deal warmer than it had been that afternoon. "How was Rookhill? Did she do the lamb? She does that thing with the rosemary as if it were a religious position."
"It was fine."
"What did Verity say?"
He hesitated. "Why would she have said anything?"
"Because she always does." A pause, and then, in a different tone, "Cal. Look. She rang me. This afternoon. She said you'd been ringing some number."
The kitchen was quiet. A drop fell from the tap into the sink, and the high ceiling gave it back.
"Did she."
"She's frightened for you, that's all. They all are." Dev's voice dropped. "I told her I'd have a word. I don't want to have a word. I just want you to promise me one thing, and then I'll go to bed and be useless."
"What?"
"That you won't go looking for something in Carrow."
"I'm going to a dinner."
"I know you are. And you're going to eat a lot of salmon and say a few nice things about the sky and come home. That's all." The glass clinked again. "Because I know you. I know the face you make. You'll sit across the room from some perfectly innocent waitress and think, that's her, and you'll be on the next train to nowhere. And I'll have to come and get you."
"I won't."
"Promise."
"I promise," said Callum. He heard the thing he had said at Rookhill an hour before, to a woman in pearls. I'll leave it in the safe. He had said both with complete sincerity. He noticed that with a dry, distant interest, the way you notice a draft in a room. He had made two promises in one evening, and neither had gone down into the place where promises are kept.
"Good man," said Dev. "Sleep. I love you. That's all."
"Dev."
"Yes?"
"On the Friday." He was looking at the paper. He didn't know why he said it. "The fourteenth. Did you see her? In the afternoon?"
The line made a soft sound. It wasn't a pause. It was less than that, a small quick catch, like a thread pulling.
"I told you," said Dev lightly. "I told the police. I was in the Mill all day with the Doyle models. I never saw her."
"Right."
"Why?"
"No reason."
"You're tired. Go to bed." The easy voice came back, wide and warm and cheerful. "I'll see you in a week, with a tan. Don't marry anyone."
He went to the bedroom at midnight and sat on the edge of the bed with the telephone in his hand.
There were three messages he had never deleted. He told himself it was a matter of memory, the phone's limited space. In January he bought a second phone and put the old one in a shoebox, charged and switched off, like a patient in a coma. He took it out of the shoebox now. He held down the button, and the little screen woke, bluish, in the dark.
Three saved.
He pressed the first. It was from the thirtieth of October, a Thursday, at ten past five. Cal. It's me. I'm at the shop and they've no oat milk and the woman in front of me is buying seventeen tins of sardines, I'm not joking, I think she's a witch. A pause. A soft quick breath, almost a laugh. Anyway. Do you want anything? Text me. Love you. Bye.
The second was from the Monday after. Hi, it's me. Just checking you got home. Oh, you're in the bath, you can't hear. Well. There's a thing. A rustle. I'll see you at six.
He sat with his eyes closed.
The third was the last. It had been left at 5:40 on the afternoon of the fourteenth, the final Friday, the afternoon, he now saw, when he had walked home through the rain with the Gerard in his head and not picked up. It was short. Fourteen seconds. He had listened to it, he supposed, three hundred times.
Cal. A breath. The faint hiss of a street, a bus passing behind her. I'll be home at six. I need to talk to you about something. Don't be cross. I'm not leaving you. It's the opposite. A pause, in which she seemed to be searching for the next word and finding it just out of reach. I love you. I'm sorry I've been so odd. See you in a bit.
It's the opposite.
He had never understood that line. For six months he had turned it over like a coin from another country, looking for a face. I'm not leaving you. It's the opposite. She was going to tell him something that was the opposite of leaving. A baby. A secret. A debt. He had gone through them all, one by one, in the long gray hours, and couldn't decide which would have made him happier, or which was most likely to be said on a Friday to a man who wasn't going to listen.
He played it again.
Cal.
He stopped it halfway. He put the phone on the bedside table. He lay back slowly in his clothes on top of the covers, hands folded on his chest, and looked up at the ceiling, where the streetlight fell across the plaster in a long gray bar.
She had been on the street when she rang, outside the Infirmary, he thought, from the sound of the buses. She rang at 5:40. She was quite calm then. She said I'll be home at six. And at ten past six he came into the kitchen and found her with the scarf on.
Between 5:40 and 6:10 something had changed.
He turned his head on the pillow. He looked at the empty half of the bed, with its long smooth unmarked sheet. It was a thing he didn't allow himself to do, but he was tired, and the night was long, and the rain had started again, softly, against the window.
What happened to you in half an hour? he said, without sound.
The streetlight lay across the plaster. The pipes ticked. And in the bedroom of the high, echoing flat, the question went up and came back, a moment late, from the ceiling, in a voice very like his own.