Chapter 16
Someone Had Let Themselves In
It was dusk when she came down Marsh Lane.
The six-fifteen had put her down at Wexcombe station with the notebook buttoned inside her coat against her ribs, and she had walked home through the dark, taking the long way, by the river, looking behind her at every lamp. The rain had eased to a thin steady mizzle. The lamps along the lane were lit, and every window held its yellow square of kitchen light, and a smell of frying onions hung on the wet air from one end of the street to the other. It was Saturday night. It was the world going on as usual. She walked among it like a ghost, with a note in her pocket that said don't go home, and nowhere else in the world to go.
The house was dark.
She stopped at the gate. She stood with her hand on the cold wet iron, looking at it. It was only that. There was nothing in it. A narrow Victorian terrace, red brick, black at the foot, with a wine-colored door and a brass letterbox that nobody had polished since the funeral. Her mother had said she would be at the vigil at St. Aldhelm's until nine. Dera was on a late shift at the hospital. There was nobody home. It was natural that there should be no lights.
But the hall lamp was out.
For fifteen years that lamp had been left burning. Every night, without fail, whoever was last to bed had crossed the hall on bare feet and left it on, a small warm yellow glow in the fanlight, so that a man coming in from the dark would see it from the end of the street. On Tuesday her mother had said leave it. On Thursday Dera had said leave it. She had put her own hand on the switch on Friday night, with her whole body cold, and left it burning for him.
It was out. And the fanlight above the door, which she could see quite plainly from the gate, was a small black empty arch.
She went up the path. Her feet made no sound on the wet flags. At the door she put out her hand, and the brass handle was cold under her bandaged fingers, and when she turned it, very gently, with her breath held, the door swung inward without a sound.
It was not locked. It had not been forced. It had been simply, quietly, opened, and left a hand's breadth ajar.
"Hello?" said Amara.
The word fell into the dark hall and was swallowed.
She did not turn on the light. She could not have said why. She stood on the mat in the cold, in her dripping coat, and let her eyes learn the dark, and gradually the hall came up around her in shades of gray and black. The coat hooks. The umbrella stand. The green leather chair beside the telephone table. The gray plastic shape of the answering machine, dead and dark, with its red eye gone out.
She went forward.
She went down the passage past the stairs, with her shoulder against the wall, and she did not stop until she reached the study door. It stood open. And in the pallid light from the garden, through the old stone sink and the dripping glass, she saw what had been done.
She had never seen a room that had been searched. She had imagined it, as everyone has, from films: the toppled bookcases, the slashed cushions, the drawers upended on the floor in a drift of paper. This was not like that. This was something worse. It was neat. Every drawer in the filing cabinet had been pulled out to its stops, evenly, systematically, one above the other, like the teeth of a mouth. Every file had been lifted out, opened, and laid back in its place. The books on the pine shelves had been taken down one by one, leafed through, and put back, with their spines not quite in line. The desk stood bare. The lamp had been moved two inches to the left.
The computer was gone. They had cut its cables with a clean pair of snips and carried the whole beige tower away, and where it had stood there was a pale square in the dust and a tangle of severed wire. So were the bank statements, every folder she had stacked and highlighted and added up in pencil. The shelf by the window, where his river stones stood in their wooden tray with their little paper tags, was bare. Somebody had taken the tray, and the stones, and the tags. She could see the pale oblong on the paint where it had been.
Somebody had known exactly what they were looking for. And somebody had taken their time.
Amara stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth. She was aware that her teeth were chattering. She was aware that she wanted to be sick, and was not, and that she was standing in the dark in the ruin of her husband's study with every nerve in her body singing like a wire, and listening. The house was silent. Rain ticked on the glass. And from somewhere above her, from the top of the stairs, with a creak she would have known anywhere, came the sound of a weight shifting on the third stair.
The third stair. It creaked in G.
She did not breathe. She backed out of the study with her eyes on the dark landing and her heart hammering in her ears, one step, two steps, along the wall, and her hand found, behind her, the cold smooth neck of the umbrella stand, and closed on a heavy ash walking stick that had been her father's.
"Who's there?" she said.
Nothing moved. The house held its breath.
She went up the stairs. She went up them one at a time, like a woman wading into a river, with the stick raised over her shoulder in both bleeding hands, and her bare terrified pulse thudding in her wrists. The third stair gave its small, soft, familiar groan. The landing opened above her, long and gray and still, with the bathroom door ajar and the airing cupboard standing open, and a thin bar of streetlamp coming through the gap in the curtains at the end.
At the top she stopped.
There was a cat on the landing. It was Mrs. Gethin's tabby. It crouched on the floorboards in the gray light with its ears flat and its great round luminous eyes fixed on her, and as she stared, it gathered itself and bolted, down the stairs and along the hall and out through the open front door in a long gray streak of terror.
She leaned against the wall. She laughed. It was a terrible little croaking sound that turned in the middle into a sob. The stick clattered to the carpet. She slid down the wall, and sat on the floor of her own landing with her knees drawn up and her face in her hands.
They had been into every room.
She went through them all, after, with the lights on, and the front door locked and bolted and the chain across. Nothing was broken. Nothing was missing, apart from the box, and the computer, and the stones, and the paper. But every cupboard had been opened, and shut. Every wardrobe had been sorted through with a careful, unhurried, practiced hand, and the clothes put back on their hangers in the wrong order. In the bedroom, the mattress had been lifted and laid down again a half-inch askew, and behind her wedding dress, in the back of the wardrobe, the place where the gray metal box had stood was a clean square on the floor. In the spare room her mother's rosary lay coiled neatly on the pillow where it had always lain, beside a small framed picture of the Virgin, and the Virgin's glass was clean of fingerprints. They had worn gloves.
She went down to the kitchen last. She stood in the doorway and looked at the table, where she had spread out the statements, and the yellow pad, and the pages she had printed off the study computer.
The yellow pad was gone. The pages were gone. And in their place, in the middle of the clean scrubbed pine, with its edges squared and its handle turned toward the door, stood one blue enamel mug, chipped, with a white rim.
She had put it on the high shelf. She had put it there on the night she opened the box, between the biscuit tin and the flour. It had been at the back. She had not touched it since.
They wanted me to know.
She walked to the table. She did not touch the mug. She stood looking at it, with her arms clasped round her ribs, as one looks at a child's coffin. And a long cold shudder went through her from her scalp to her heels, and she closed her eyes and said, in a small steady voice, aloud, to nobody:
"You won't find it."
She had not left the real ones on the table. That, at least, she had done. She had printed two copies of every message, in the cold hours of Wednesday morning, on the old inkjet in the corner, and left one on the table for anyone to find, and carried the other to the freezer. She had pulled out the bottom drawer, and put it in a plastic bag between a packet of peas and a half-eaten tub of ice cream, and pushed the drawer shut. It was there now. It would be there. She did not even have to look.
She did look. She stood at the open door of the freezer in a cold white cloud with her bandaged hand on the drawer. It was in the bag, in the ice, where she had put it, forty sheets stiff with frost. And she put both arms round it and held it against her chest, and wept, with her cheek on the cold plastic.
She rang Martin at nine.
She had not meant to. She had meant to ring Quill. She had stood in the hall with the telephone in her hand, and the card in the other, a small white card with a mobile number written on it in a cramped upright hand, and for six minutes she had looked from one to the other, with her thumb on the keys. But she had thought of what Quill would do. Plastic bags. Fingerprint dust. Questions, a great many questions, in a calm level voice, in an interview room. Where were you today, Mrs. Hale? And in her coat, buttoned against her ribs, a photograph, a shoebox of unsent cards, and a notebook of impossible numbers.
Tell no one.
So she rang Martin. It was not a decision. It was a reflex, the thing that her hand did, the way a drowning woman's hand finds the nearest rope. She said, "Martin, someone's been in the house," and heard her own voice crack on it, and it was as though she had pulled a plug. She said it all in a rush, the door and the lamp and the study and the mug. She did not say Dunmarrow. She did not say the storage unit. She said, I was at Jo's, I mean, and then, I mean I went for a walk, and could hear herself failing.
He was there in six minutes.
He came in at a run, with the rain on his shoulders and no hat, and he took her face between his gloved hands and looked into it, hard, with his own face gray and his eyes huge behind the thick lenses. "Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Did you see anyone?"
"No. They'd gone."
"Is anyone upstairs?"
"No. I checked."
"You checked?" He said it half in anger and half in terror. "Amara. You went up those stairs alone? In the dark? With, with whoever might have been, God. God almighty." He pulled her to his chest. She felt his heart going under the damp wool, hard and fast and ragged. "Don't ever. Don't ever do that. Promise me."
"Martin, I'm all right."
"You're not all right! You're shaking like a leaf!" He drew back. "Stay here. Don't move. I'm going to look."
He went through the house. She watched him do it from the foot of the stairs: the big awkward figure in the black coat, moving from room to room with every light blazing behind him, opening cupboards, pulling back curtains, calling her name in a low hoarse voice as if she might be lost. He did it thoroughly. She noticed that. He went down into the cellar with a torch, and up into the loft through the hatch on the landing, and she heard him moving about overhead, a slow heavy tread on the joists, and a pause, a long pause, as if he were standing still. Then the ladder rattled, and he came down, covered in dust.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all. Whoever it was, they've gone."
"The study."
"I've seen." He rubbed his forehead with the back of his glove. "God. They've taken the lot. The computer. The statements." He frowned. "How did they get in? The back door was locked?"
"I don't know. I think so."
"The front?"
"It was open. A little. I thought, I thought I'd locked it."
"Did you use the spare?"
"The spare?"
"The key. Under the blue pot." He was watching her. "Is it still there?"
She had not thought. She went out to the back garden in the rain, with Martin at her shoulder holding the torch, and bent by the shed where the blue glazed flowerpot stood among the dead geraniums. She tipped it. The key was there. It lay in the wet earth in its little hollow, bright and brass and perfectly in place.
But the pot had been moved. She saw it at once, by the circle of paler soil on the paving where it had stood for fifteen years: it had been turned a quarter-circle to the left, and set down again, not quite square.
"They knew," she said, in a whisper.
"What?"
"They knew where the key was. They used it, and put it back." She looked up at him. The rain was running down her face. "Martin, who knew? Who knew that? Daniel. Me. Mama. Dera. You. Jo."
"Amara."
"Who else? Who else?"
"Nobody." He said it very gently. His face in the torchlight was white and still and sorrowful, and his eyes behind the lenses were wet. "Nobody else, my love. Not a soul."
He put his arms around her, there in the dark garden, in the rain. And she let him. She laid her cheek against the cold wet wool of his coat, and closed her eyes, and breathed in the faint familiar smell of him, of coffee and soap and old cold tobacco and the bitter clean tang of the pen. She was so tired. She was so unspeakably tired. And in the darkness behind her lids, small and far away, like a star going out, she heard a voice she did not recognize say, quite coolly, a question that she did not allow herself to finish.
Who else? Who else knew about the stones? Who else knew that Daniel carried them, and where he kept them, and what they were for?