Chapter 10
Sixteen Floors of Silver
Meridian House rose out of the middle of Dunmarrow like a blade somebody had forgotten to put away.
It was sixteen floors of silver glass, the tallest thing in the city that was not a crane, and on a bright cold Monday morning it caught the light off the harbor and threw it back across the roofs in a long dazzling bar. Amara stood on the pavement of Meridian Street with her handbag held against her ribs and her head tipped back, and felt, for the first time since she had stepped off the train, something very like fear. It was not the shining tower itself. It was the gleam of it, the clean cold arrogance of all that glass, the way a hundred small windows reflected a hundred small clouds and gave nothing back of what lay behind.
Northern Provincial Bank, said the brass plate by the revolving door. Commercial Banking. Floors 9 to 14.
She had told them she was going to the archive. It was only a small lie, and it had come out of her smoothly, at the kitchen table, over a boiled egg, the way a thing comes out of a mouth that has practiced. Dera had gone back to the hospital on Sunday night with a promise to ring every evening. Her mother had gone home to Enugu Road, where there was a church committee that could not be left. For the first time in sixteen days the house on Marsh Lane belonged to her alone, and she had locked it, and put the spare key under the blue pot, and caught the seven-ten to the coast with a brown envelope in her bag containing the death certificate, her marriage lines, and her husband's gray stone.
The revolving door took her in like a throat.
"Mrs. Hale. I am so very sorry."
Gerald Pym did not rise from his desk at once. It was an odd thing. He half rose, in a series of small uncertain jerks, like a man trying to remember how it was done, and then sat down again, and then stood. He was fifty-five or so, round-shouldered, with a pink scalp showing through a few strands of carefully combed hair and a gray suit so new that it still held the creases of the shop. His office was on the fourteenth floor. Behind him, through a wall of glass that ran from floor to ceiling, the whole of Dunmarrow lay spread like a map: the old town climbing its hill, the harbor, the long gray crescent of the docks with its cranes and its stacked containers, and out beyond them the open sea, flat and bright and enormous as a sheet of tin.
"Please. Sit. Can I offer you tea? Coffee? Miss Rees, would you, no, we'll manage." He sat. He moved a paperweight an inch to the left. "I'm so sorry. We were all so very shocked. Mr. Hale was a long-standing client. A valued client."
"Thank you."
"Anything the bank can do. Anything at all."
"I need to see my husband's accounts," said Amara.
There was a small silence. In it she watched a tiny muscle jump at the corner of the manager's left eye.
"Of course. Yes. Naturally. The personal account, you're a joint holder, there's no difficulty, I can have it printed in a moment." He pressed a button. "Hale Marine Freight is, that is a rather different matter. The company account is, I'm afraid, subject to the mandate. Strictly speaking, I can only discuss it with the signatories."
"Who are?"
"Mr. Hale. And, ah, Mr. Ashby."
"Not me."
"No, Mrs. Hale. You are, forgive me, you are listed as company secretary, but I'm afraid that is a nominal appointment. It carries no, it gives you no, it does not entitle you to sign."
Company secretary. She had been, for eleven years. She had signed a form once, at the kitchen table, with a hand that felt nothing, in the spring of 1995, because Martin had said it was a formality and Daniel had been out. She had never been to a meeting. She had never seen an account. It had been, like most things in her marriage, a small kindness: a name on a letterhead, to make her feel included.
"Then I'll talk about the one I can see," she said.
It was a ordinary account.
Miss Rees brought it in on four sheets of continuous paper, perforated at the edges, the little holes marching down either side like a row of stitches, and laid it in front of her. Amara read it as she read all things, from the top, with her finger under each line. Daniel's salary from the company, on the twenty-eighth of every month: £2,640.00. The mortgage, £611.10, on the first. The gas, the electric, the water, the council tax; the weekly supermarket; the small cheerful dribble of cash from the machine on the quay, twenty pounds, forty pounds, ten. She could have written most of it herself. It was a map of a life she knew by heart, and she felt, as she turned the sheets, a stupid lump rise in her throat for the modest sum of it, the unspectacular thrift.
Then on the second page she saw the first of the stranger things.
28 Sep. SO. LYLE K. £400.00.
She stopped. She put her finger on it. It was a standing order, on the first of every month, going out of the same account: not on the twenty-eighth, when Daniel was paid, but on the first, a day or two after, a quiet regular little tithe. SO LYLE K. She turned back through the sheets and found it again, and again, in every month she had, all four pages, like a thread of different color in a weave.
"Who's K. Lyle?" she said.
"I'm sorry?"
"The standing order. Four hundred pounds a month. I've never seen it. It isn't the mortgage, it isn't anything I know."
Pym had gone a curious color. "A personal arrangement, I imagine. We don't, as a bank, ask."
"How long?"
"I'd have to look."
"Please do."
He looked. He took what seemed to her a very long time, tapping at a keyboard with two fingers, frowning, with his lower lip thrust forward. At last he said, in a small stiff voice, "It was set up in the March of 1999. As an order in favor of R. Lyle. Initial R. In the, in the March of two thousand and four, the payee was changed. To K."
March 2004. The month of the deed. The month of her aunt, and Enugu, and the long pink dawn when she had stood at the edge of a dry red grave. She felt something small and cold turn over at the bottom of her stomach.
"Seven years to R," she said. "Two to K. That's about forty-eight thousand pounds."
"Forty-eight thousand, six hundred."
"Where does it go?"
"I couldn't say. It would be a different bank." He did not meet her eye. "Mrs. Hale. There is nothing improper. Many men support a, a family member. An elderly parent, a godchild. It's not unusual."
"No," said Amara. "It isn't."
She turned another page, and a third, and her finger came to a place where the clean neat column of figures was interrupted. It was a short line. It was set apart from its neighbors, the amount printed in a different typeface, with a little asterisk. 2 Oct. TRANSFER IN. HALE MARINE FREIGHT. £40,000.00 .*
"What's this?"
"An internal transfer. From the company account, to the joint." Pym coughed. "The asterisk, I think, is merely a flag. It's, I believe it was, that was queried at the time."
"By whom?"
"By, well, by me."
"Why?"
"It was a large sum. And it was, it was drawn in cash the next day." The little muscle was dancing again. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't, I'm sorry, Mrs. Hale. I didn't expect to be, it's been a very difficult month. I'll have the entire file brought up."
"Drawn in cash by whom?"
"Mr. Hale. In person. At the counter on the third." He swallowed. "He asked for it in used notes."
"Forty thousand pounds. On the third of October. Two days before he died."
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"He said it was for a lorry." Pym wet his lips. "I didn't, I didn't believe him. I'm sorry. He didn't, he was not well. I thought, he was a man I'd known for eight years, and he had the face of someone, of someone going to a funeral. His own, perhaps. And he looked at me and he said, Gerald, I'd like you to remember that I came in and asked for it myself. As if he wanted a witness. And then he went out and I sat here for half an hour with my hands shaking. I don't know why."
He stopped. His mouth was trembling. It struck her, with a strange tenderness, that the man had been waiting for three weeks for someone to ask.
"Mr. Pym," she said gently. "Who else has been asking about my husband's accounts?"
He told her in a rush, as people do who have been holding their breath. It was a story in three parts.
The first part was Martin. He had come in on the tenth of October, five days after the death and four before the funeral, in a dark suit and a black tie, and he had been so kind, so very kind, and had brought a letter. It was typed on the company's paper and signed with what seemed to be her own signature. It said that Mrs. Amara Hale, as the surviving spouse and company secretary, authorized Mr. Martin Ashby to collect all statements, and to be told of all transactions, on any account bearing her husband's name. Pym had read it twice. It was irregular. But Mr. Ashby had been Daniel's friend for seventeen years and had wept in the chair where she was now sitting, and the manager had been moved. He had made a photocopy of everything.
"I didn't sign any letter," said Amara.
"No. I didn't think, I mean I, in view of what, I thought perhaps you'd forgotten. In your grief."
"I didn't forget."
"No."
The second part was a tall quiet man in a black overcoat, who had come on the sixteenth. He had given no name. He had not sat. He had stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking at the harbor, and asked in a soft voice how matters stood on the charge over a house in Wexcombe, and when the manager had said that he was not at liberty to discuss it, he had smiled, and said it did not matter, he knew, and had asked after the manager's daughter. By her name. Her school. The hockey club she went to on Thursdays.
"I've not slept," said Pym.
"What did he want?"
"I don't know. Nothing. To be seen, I think." He looked at his hands. "I've been in banking thirty-one years, Mrs. Hale. I've seen men come in here who were not what they seemed. I know the type. And I know a man who has, who is accustomed to being obeyed. I have never been so frightened of anyone in my life."
The third part was shorter. It was a telephone call, on the day after the funeral. A man's voice, courteous, mature, with the faint roll of the docks in it, who had said only: Mr. Pym, I hope that you've been reflecting on the position of the bank in this matter. A great many people would be sorry to see it become public. He had said he was a friend of Mr. Hale's. He had said it was a pity about the thirty days.
"Thirty days," Amara repeated.
"I don't know what it meant."
"No," she said. "I think I do."
She walked down to the quay with the printout folded small in her bag.
She did not know where she was going. She walked the way a person walks in a dream, with her head up and her eyes unfocused, and the wind came off the water with its smell of diesel and rope and fish and tore at her scarf. Gulls hung in the bright air above the roofs. Behind her, up the hill, Meridian House stood against the sky like a thing with no feelings.
Forty thousand pounds in used notes.
It was the sort of sum that had a shape. She could see it. She could see the bank counter, and the polite clerk counting it out in tens and twenties, and the plastic bag, and her husband carrying it down the steps of the bank in his gray overcoat like a man with a live bird under his coat. And she could see where it went. It went to a tall quiet man who had stood at a grave. It went to a thin-lipped old creditor with a stick. It went, like the whole of her life for the past eight years, into a bag with no bottom, in the dark.
I'd like you to remember that I came in and asked for it myself.
He had wanted a witness. She understood that now. He had been a man who knew he was about to disappear, and had gone to the one honest place he knew and stood at a counter in the sun and made himself seen. Not to be saved. Only to be remembered, in one real place, doing one real thing. Remember. It was the word on the back of the note.
She stopped at the harbor wall. Below her the tide had gone out, and a half dozen small boats lay tilted on the mud, their masts all leaning the same way, like a field of ruined wheat. Far off along the quay a low brick building bore a sign in blue letters that she could not read at this distance. She shaded her eyes.
HARBOURSIDE SELF STORAGE.
She looked at it a long time. It was not, after all, far.
Go there alone, said the note. Tell no one.
She put her hand into her coat pocket, where her fingers closed round a small, cold, notched shape tied to a luggage tag, and held it there as one holds a hand in the dark. Then she looked over her shoulder, which was a thing she had not done in her life until the day before, and which she was beginning, with a faint sick astonishment, to do quite naturally.
Nobody was behind her. There was only the long gray wall, the flat tin sea, and a single figure on the far side of the road in a long black coat, quite motionless, looking at a shop window as if there were something very interesting in it.
She walked on. She did not hurry. She felt his eyes on her back, steady and mild as a lamp, all the way along the quay.
And she did not go to the storage yard. Not that day. She went instead, with her heart thudding in her throat, into the doorway of a closed chemist's across the road, and dialled the number from the back of the note on her mobile, with a hand that would not keep still.