Chapter 15
Unit 114
Harbourside Self Storage stood at the end of a long straight service road behind the container docks, a mile and a half from the nearest bus stop, and Amara walked every yard of it in the rain.
She had refused the taxi at the station. She could not have said why. It was a kind of superstition, a conviction left over from childhood that a thing done on foot is a thing owed. So she had stood at the rank with her bandaged hands in her pockets while the drivers watched her, and then set off down the Quayside Road with her collar turned up and the great rust-red cranes of the port standing in the mist above her like tethered monsters. Lorries thundered past. They threw up long fans of oily water that soaked her to the knee. Gulls wheeled and screamed over the stacked steel boxes, blue and red and ocher, and the wind off the estuary came cold and wet and smelling of diesel and rotting weed, and under it, faintly, always, the iron smell of the sea.
It was Saturday, the twenty-eighth. She had told her mother that she was going to see Jo. She was becoming, she noticed, quite good at it.
The compound came up on her left through the haze: a flat gray huddle of corrugated sheds, low and ugly and windowless, behind a high chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. Over the gate hung a painted sign with a cartoon of a smiling cardboard box. HARBOURSIDE SELF STORAGE. SECURE. DRY. YOURS. A barrier arm. A concrete hut with a window. And behind the glass, under a flickering strip light, a man in a gray fleece eating a bacon roll.
She rapped on the pane.
His name was Dodd. He was perhaps fifty, with a long loose lugubrious face like a bloodhound's and a stained moustache, and he looked at her through the window for a long moment, with his roll halfway to his mouth, before he slid the glass open.
"Help you, love?"
"I'd like to visit a unit. One-one-four."
He put down the roll. A flicker went across the long sad face, as quick and light as a moth across a lamp. "Hang on." He swiveled his chair to a ledger on the desk, a real one, with a cardboard cover, and ran a thick finger down a column. "One-one-four. Upper level, east corridor. That's an old account. Seven years. Rented to a Mr. D. Hale, paid yearly, in cash, in an envelope through the door." He squinted at her. "You Mrs. Hale?"
"Yes. My husband rented it. He died on the fifth of October. I have the key."
"Ah." The long face fell into lines of sympathy. "Oh, love. I'm very sorry. We'd not been told."
"No."
"I'll need to see some, you know. Paperwork."
She had brought it all. She laid it out on the steel ledge in a row, the coroner's certificate and the undertaker's invoice and her passport and the key, with its buff paper tag, and watched him read. When he reached the tag he stopped. He put out a finger and touched it, very lightly, as one touches a thing that may still be hot.
"You're the second," he said.
"The second what?"
"The second to come about this unit this week." He did not look at her. "On the Tuesday there was a gentleman. Big fellow. Glasses. Gray hair going thin. Said he was the deceased's executor, and a dear friend, and he'd got a letter." Dodd sucked his moustache. "Only he hadn't a key. And I said I couldn't let anyone in without the key and the paper, it's more than my job's worth. He said, Of course, of course, quite right. Very nice about it. Gave me twenty quid. And then he asked me a funny thing."
"What?"
"He asked if the unit had a window."
"Did it?"
"They don't, love. They're sheds." Dodd lifted his eyes. They were small and brown and rather sad, and they held hers with a sort of embarrassed shrewdness. "And there was another. Thursday, this one. Tall chap, long black coat. Never said a word. Stood by the gate and looked at the fence for twenty minutes. I thought, I don't like you. I told him we were closed. He said, I know, and went away." He pushed the papers back across the ledge. "I thought I'd better say. I've got a daughter. You never know."
"Thank you," said Amara. She meant it. "Did the first man give his name?"
"Ashby," said Dodd. "Mr. Ashby. Said he'd be back."
The east corridor was a long concrete passage lit by caged bulbs, with a steel door on either side every ten feet, each painted the same dull gray and each bearing a number in white stencil. The air was cold and stale and tasted of dust and old cardboard. Their feet rang on the floor. Somewhere above, water dripped steadily into a bucket, and somewhere far off a lorry reversed with a long insistent bleat, and between the two sounds she could hear, quite distinctly, her own pulse.
113. 114.
The door looked like all the others. It had a hasp, and a padlock the size of a fist, and a little brass plate screwed to the steel at head height, engraved in an old-fashioned copperplate hand, with only two letters. D.H.
Dodd had stayed at the end of the corridor. He stood with his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels. "I'll be just here," he said. "If you want me."
She put the key into the padlock.
It turned with a smooth oiled click. That, more than anything, undid her. It had been kept up. Somebody had put oil on that lock, once a year, in the dark, and she saw him do it, her tall grave husband in a gray overcoat with a drop of oil on his forefinger, saying nothing to anyone, in a gray corridor full of other people's secrets. She stood with her hand on the cold steel. Then she lifted the hasp and rolled the door up on its track with a rumble like thunder, and the smell of the unit came out at her, warm and dry and sweet, with a trace of lemon, and she stepped inside.
It was not a vault. It was a room.
She stood in the door and understood that, with the first slow turn of her head, as one understands in the first sentence of a letter that it is a love letter. It was ten feet by twelve. The walls were bare breeze-block, painted white. Somebody had laid a square of green carpet over the concrete, and on it, under a bare bulb with a paper shade, stood an old armchair with a cushion, a small wooden table, and a lamp. A rug lay across the arm of the chair. On the table there was a flask. A mug. An open packet of digestive biscuits, folded shut again with a clothes peg.
He had come here. He had sat in this chair. He had sat for hours in a gray shed behind the docks, with a flask of tea and a plain biscuit, in the one place in the world where he was neither a husband nor a debtor, and had been, as far as she could see, entirely and quietly himself.
She put out her hand and touched the arm of the chair. The fabric was worn pale. It was the exact color of the armrest of the green leather chair in the hall at Marsh Lane, rubbed to the same shine by the same forearm. She did not sit. She could not.
On the shelves that ran along the left wall, she saw his life.
There were archive boxes, a dozen or more, labeled in his small cramped print. HALE MARINE. CUSTOMS ENTRIES 1998–2000. HALE MARINE. MANIFESTS 2001–03. HALE MARINE. BANK 2004–05. She lifted a lid. Invoices, delivery notes, neat crisp copies in carbon, entirely ordinary. She lifted another. The same. It took her five minutes to see it, and then it was clear: they were the lie. They were the managed books, the beautiful false record of a decent small business, ironed and filed and ready to be handed to any inspector with a warrant. He had kept them here, in the dark, for the day somebody would come.
One set of books is lies, he had said to a lawyer in a stuffy room. The other is true.
Beneath the shelf, on the floor, was a shoebox.
It was a plain brown one, with a lid. She knelt to open it. Inside were cards. They were birthday cards, the cheap kind from a chemist's, with a cartoon dog or a football or a number, and they had been stacked in order, with their envelopes, tied with a piece of green string. She turned the first one over. It was dated in black ink on the back, in his careful hand. 14 June 1994. There was a picture of a train on the front, and a printed 7 TODAY! Inside, he had written only: For Kit. With love from a friend. D.
It had never been posted. It had no stamp. She looked at the next, and the next. 1995, 1996, 1997. A pirate. A race car. A dragon. Each one signed in the same careful manner, and each one, she saw, with a mounting stillness, a little different from the last: not the signature, but the tone. With love from a friend. Then, in 1999: With love from a friend who is sorry. In 2001: From a friend who thinks of you every day. In 2003, in a smaller hand, as if the pen had been pressed down hard: I would give anything.
And the last, 2006, with a printed 19 TODAY! and a picture of a lighthouse. It was blank. He had bought the card. He had written the date. He had not been able to find the words.
She put the lid on the box. She put her forehead against the cold edge of the shelf and stayed there for a time.
There was one more thing, and it was not what she expected.
It lay on the table beside the flask, with a stone on it to keep the pages from turning. It was a book. It was a green cloth-bound notebook, A5, of the kind that every stationer on every high street in the country had sold for two pounds since 1950, with a red spine and a black elastic band. It had been used hard. The corners were frayed to gray. It was fat with use, swollen with damp, and as she took it up and slid off the band, it fell open in her hand with the easy slackness of a thing that has been opened a thousand times at the same place.
It was full of numbers.
They went down every page in short regular lines, in blue ink, in the small cramped print he used for labels. At the head of each line was a date. After the date, a column of figures, in groups of three, separated by dashes. 04-03-2. 09-11-5. 17-02-1. 06-26-3. There were hundreds. They went on for forty pages. They were not accounts: she looked for the shape of an account, the tell-tale column of pounds and pence, and did not find one. They looked like a telephone directory in a language she did not read. Here and there a letter stood by itself in a circle. A C. A P. A circled R. Once, at the foot of a page, a small neat capital in a box: M.
She turned the pages with the care she gave to the oldest vellum.
Code, she thought. He's written it in code.
It was not a good one. It had the look of a code made by a man who has read about codes and not used them, an arrangement of numbers with a key in his head. But it was a system. She could feel it, as one feels the grain of a board under the hand. There was a logic in those triples, a repeating shape, three digits, three digits, one. A formula that was somehow familiar and would not come. It teased her like a name on the tip of the tongue.
She went to the back. The last written page. There was only one line on it, set apart, written in the center of an otherwise blank sheet. It had been done in a different pen, a black one, pressed so hard that the paper had cockled around it.
13-44-7.
Beneath it, underlined twice, in ordinary words, a single sentence.
Mara will know where this goes.
She stared at it. The unit was silent. She heard Dodd, a long way off, cough in the corridor. She read the line again, with her heart going slowly, hard, in her throat, and felt nothing. Mara will know. She did not. She turned the book over and shook it, and looked at the binding, and the end papers, and the inside covers. She read the figures aloud, in a whisper. Thirteen. Forty-four. Seven.
It was a lovely, dreadful sensation. It was the sensation she had known on a thousand cold afternoons at the archive, in the first minute with a bundle of unsorted papers, with the whole world waiting in the dark just beyond the edge of the page. A thing known. A thing she had known for twenty years, and could not place.
Mara will know.
"I don't," she said aloud, into the white room. "Daniel. I don't. Tell me."
The bulb buzzed. The dripping went on. She sat down at last in his armchair, in the small circle of light, with the notebook open on her knee and the mug of cold tea at her elbow, and wept for the first time that day, quietly, as a person does in a church.
It was getting dark when she locked the unit.
She had taken the notebook, and the photograph of the boy with the fish, and the shoebox of cards. She had left the rest, because she could not carry it, and because she had a sudden unreasoning conviction that it should stay where it was, in the orderly white room, like a life that was not yet finished. She locked the padlock. She put the key in her pocket, with the tag. She walked down the long corridor, and the bulbs hummed, and every steel door seemed to be listening.
Dodd was not in the hut.
The strip light was on. The bacon roll lay on its paper. The ledger was open on the desk. But the chair was empty, and the glass was slid open, and a cold draft was coming in through the gap and stirring the corner of a calendar on the wall. She stood in the doorway.
"Mr. Dodd?"
There was nothing. Beyond the glass, the barrier arm hung down across the road. Beyond the barrier the service lane ran away between its wire fences into the dusk, and the gulls were silent, and the cranes had begun to light up, one after another, red at the summit, on the black sky.
On the sill of the little window lay a stone.
She did not touch it. She looked at it as she might have looked at a coiled thing. It was flat, and gray, with a white seam, and a notch cut cleanly into its edge. A square of paper was folded beneath it, white as a tooth in the failing light.
She unfolded it. Block capitals, black ink. Seven words.
DON'T GO HOME. THEY'VE BEEN IN.
She read it twice.
They've been in. It could mean anything. It could mean the house on Marsh Lane, its red door, its worn stair, the kitchen where her mother had stirred the soup. It could mean the studio of an old man with a cane. It could mean a unit in a gray shed that smelled of lemon.
She did not look at the road. She looked, instead, at the notebook in her hands, and the dark pressing numbers, and the line at the end of them. And she remembered a thing Ruth Anselm had said in a small cluttered room with a whiteboard. He said, my wife would find it in a minute.
And standing there under the cold lamps, with the wind off the estuary lifting the hair from her face, she knew for the first time with perfect clarity that she would. She did not know how. She did not know when. But she would. Somewhere inside her, in a drawer she had forgotten to open, was the answer to a question that several dangerous people were willing to kill to have answered.
She put the stone in her pocket. She went out into the dusk.
Behind her, in the hut, the strip light flickered once, and went out.