Chapter 19
The Night the Tea Tasted Wrong
The kitchen clock said ten past one when the latch of the back door lifted.
She heard it before she saw anything. She had been sitting in the dark for two hours with her back to the dresser, in the angle between the wall and the table, with the old ash stick across her knees and her coat still buttoned to the throat. She had stopped feeling her feet at midnight. She had stopped feeling the cold at about half past. She had listened, with her whole body, to every sound the old house made: the slow ticking of the boiler, the long sigh of the pipes, the creak of the third stair settling, once, twice, in the empty hall. She had listened to the rain thin out and stop. She had listened to a fox scream in the gardens behind Silver Street, an appalling sound, like a woman being strangled, and had felt the hair stand up all over her scalp.
And now the latch.
It was a small metallic click, deliberate, almost delicate. The door at the back of the kitchen swung inward a few inches on its hinges and stopped. A line of pale gray light lay across the terracotta tiles, and in it, slowly, a shadow moved.
"Kit?" whispered Amara.
She had not meant to speak. It came out of her on a breath, hoarse and hopeful, the word she had been rehearsing for two hours. She sat with every muscle locked and her eyes on the line of light, and a figure came in out of the garden, quietly, and stood against the wall just inside the door, and she saw the shape of it, the breadth and height and the dark flat outline of a hat, and her heart gave one huge slow lurch and sank like a stone.
It was not a slight figure. It was not a boy.
The light came on.
"Amara?" said Martin.
He stood in the doorway with his hand on the switch and the night at his back, in his long black overcoat, with the collar turned up and a gray paper bag in his other hand. The kitchen leaped around her in a hard white glare. She put her arm up against it. She was blinking, with tears running down her face from the sting, and through them she saw the big stooped figure with its face turned toward her, as white and startled as a face at a window.
"My God," he said. "You're sitting in the dark."
"I was waiting for Dera."
"Dera's on nights."
"She sometimes comes by."
"At one in the morning?" He took a step into the room. His eyes went over her, the coat, the stick, the book lying on the table in its pool of dark, with a swift and thorough flick. "Amara, my love. You gave me such a fright. I saw the back gate swinging when I drove by. I thought, God, someone's, I came to see. And the door was unlatched. I thought you'd been, I thought they'd come back."
"You were driving by."
"I couldn't sleep." He closed the door behind him. He did it carefully, with a soft click. "I've been up since four. I've been sitting in the car at the end of the road for an hour, like a lunatic, thinking about you. I thought, I'll just look. I'll just see that the lights are off." He held up the paper bag. "And I thought, I'll bring her something. Jo's rock cakes. She made them on Sunday, I didn't, I couldn't eat them."
"That's kind."
"It's nothing."
He put the bag down on the table. He stood with his gloved hands loose at his sides, and the kitchen hummed round them in its flat white glare, and the clock ticked, and she thought, with a small cold clear voice at the very back of her head: He has not asked why I'm sitting in the dark with a stick.
He has not asked why the door was unlocked.
He did not look surprised.
"Will you sit down?" she said.
"If you'd like." He pulled out the chair across from her and lowered himself into it. He sat very heavily, like an old man. He took off his hat and laid it on the table, and rubbed his face with both hands. Then he reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out a Thermos flask, a green plaid one, dented, with a tin cup screwed over the lid, and set it down between them with a small flat clunk.
"What's that?"
"Tea. I brought it for myself. I thought, no. Nobody should be alone on a night like this."
He poured it carefully. It came steaming into the tin cup, pale gold, with the smell of bergamot and honey. He held it out to her across the table in both hands, and she looked at it.
"I'm not thirsty."
"It's only Earl Grey." He smiled, wearily. "I've sugared it. You look as if you could do with it. Your hands are shaking."
They were. She had not noticed. They lay on the cold pine like two small trembling animals, white and bandaged, with the knuckles standing out. She folded them.
"Thank you. In a minute."
"Amara."
"In a minute, Martin."
He did not argue. He set the cup down on the table in front of her, an inch from her hand, with the steam rising from it in a thin curling thread, and sat back in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest and his sleeves pulled down to the knuckles. He looked at her. And in the hard white light he looked old, suddenly, and ill, a grayish sagging man with a drawn mouth and pouches under his eyes, who had not slept for a month.
"I've been unfair to you," he said.
"Have you?"
"Tonight. At dinner. I've been, I was short. I'm sorry. It's only that I hate it. I hate to see you doing this to yourself." He leaned forward. "You're not eating. You're not sleeping. You're running around the country with, with God knows who, and ringing lawyers. And there's something going on that you won't tell me."
"There's nothing."
"There's the book."
"I told you. There was only my handwriting."
"I don't think that's true." He said it very softly. "I think you found something. In the Dumas. I think there was a key in it, or a note. I think you've been to Dunmarrow, and I think you've seen something that you shouldn't have, and I think it frightened you." His eyes held hers. "I'm not angry. I'd just like you to tell me."
The clock ticked. The tap dripped, once, twice, into the steel sink. Her fingers on the cold pine were quite numb.
Don't give him anything.
"I haven't been to Dunmarrow," she said.
"You went on Saturday."
"I went to see Jo."
"Jo was at the hospital with her mother all day Saturday." The voice did not change. It was warm and gentle and slightly regretful. "I rang her. I asked, in passing, whether you'd been round. She said she hadn't seen you since the funeral. I thought, how odd."
She stared at him.
How much? How much does he know?
"Martin," she said, and her own voice came out thin, "what is this?"
"I'm trying to help."
"You followed me."
"I looked after you."
"You were in the car. At the storage place. The green one, with the, with your, you were there, weren't you? You were sitting in the car outside the gate and you were watching the door." Her voice rose. "And at the bottom of the lane. On Sunday. With your lights off."
"I keep an eye on people I love."
"Who were you talking to? In Dodd's office? Who did you tell him you were?"
"Drink your tea," said Martin.
It was said so quietly, so evenly, with such simple tired courtesy, that for a second she did not understand. She looked at him. And in that second, in the white light, for the first time, she saw it. She saw it quite plainly, as one sees the real face under a mask, not by any sudden change, but by the dreadful cumulative absence of everything she had always known. The kindness had not gone. It was there. It was all still there, warm and rueful and patient. But it was no longer for her. It had been set on one side, like a coat on a chair, and behind it there was something else, flat and cold and utterly attentive, watching her with the unblinking patience of a man waiting for water to boil.
Good girl.
She lifted the cup.
She did it slowly. She raised it, with both shaking hands, and held it under her nose. The steam curled up. Bergamot, honey, hot tin. And underneath, so faint that she would not have caught it had she not spent nineteen years among the smells of an invalid's kitchen, a small thin bitter chalkiness, like the smell of an aspirin dissolved in water.
She put it to her lips. She let the hot liquid touch her mouth. It was sweet. It was far too sweet. And on the back of her tongue, beneath the honey, an ugly dry acrid note rose up and coated her gums, and she felt the muscles of her throat contract.
She set the cup down.
"It's bitter," she said.
"It's the bergamot."
"It's not."
"Amara." He smiled. It was the old smile, the dear familiar one, creased and gentle and full of weary affection, and she thought she had never in her life seen anything so frightening. "Please. Drink it. It'll help you sleep. You'll feel better in the morning. I promise you. You won't feel a thing."
You won't feel a thing.
She sat still. A tremendous quiet had come down on her, a high clear ringing silence, like the silence in a church. She looked at the cup of pale gold liquid on the table in front of her. She looked at his hand on the table, in its black glove, lying beside the paper bag. She looked at the cuff of his sleeve, riding up a little, as he leaned forward, over the wrist.
And she saw them. They had healed. They were no longer scabs. They had faded to four long thin shining pink lines on the white inside of the forearm, evenly spaced, each the length of her finger, like the stripes of a small tiger, as neat and regular as the teeth of a comb.
"They weren't roses," she said.
Martin looked down.
He did not hurry. He drew the cuff back over the lines, deliberately, with his other hand, and smoothed it. He sat quite still for a time with his gloved fingers resting on his wrist. Then he lifted his head, and the smile was gone, and his face, in the glare of the bulb, looked quite different. It looked tired, and plain, and rather sad, and extraordinarily calm.
"No," he said. "They weren't."
"I didn't want it to be you."
He said it almost gently. He had put both hands flat on the table. He was looking not at her but at the grain of the wood, at the scars and rings of fifteen years, and his voice was low and level, the voice of a man reading from a page that he had read many times.
"I didn't want it to be anyone. I didn't want it to start at all. It was one envelope, Amara. That's how it began. The first Friday of March, 'ninety-nine. Dan gave me four thousand pounds in a carrier bag to take to a man I was afraid of. And I drove to Dunmarrow with it on the seat beside me. And I thought, he'll never count it. Nobody counts what they're afraid of." The dark eyes flicked up. "I put three in the envelope. I kept one. Jo's mother needed a hip. Ben had his fees. I told myself I'd put it back by the summer."
"Martin, please."
"You can't know what it's like. You don't owe anyone. It's, it's so easy. Every month, one in four. Then one in three. Eight years of Fridays, and I got so good at it that I started doing Crane's books as well, because nobody else could be trusted with the sums. And every time I sat in that cane chair and he said, how is our friend? I said, doing his best." He laughed, without sound. "And Dan was paying every penny. Every month. In good faith. He thought he owed, he thought he was drowning, and he was paying a debt that I had arranged, on paper, so that it would never end."
"Four hundred thousand," said Amara. "He paid four hundred thousand."
"Four hundred and eleven." The big gray face twisted. "Crane thinks it's a hundred and eighty-four. The rest was mine. Do you know what it feels like, to have two hundred and twenty thousand pounds that isn't yours? It sits in you. It sits in you like a stone."
"And the house."
"It was only a, it was a charge. A piece of paper. I only needed to be able to say, if anyone asked, that you'd both guaranteed it. That the whole of Hale Marine was on the table. That there was no way out but to sell." His voice cracked. "I did it on a Friday. The twelfth of March. You were in Nigeria. Dan had gone off to some funeral, he never said whose, he never said anything. I had your signature from the Christmas cards. I practiced it for a week."
She stared at him.
"Then in September he found the gap. He'd been keeping his own book, the true one, he'd been writing down every pound that left his hand. And in September he sat down with a pencil and he saw it. He came to me, Amara, the third of October, he sat in my office with his hands on his knees and he said, Martin, I know. I'm not angry. I'm going to the police about Crane. They'll ask me who carried the money. I'd rather you came with me, and told them yourself." The tears had begun to roll down his face. "He was being kind. He was offering me a hand."
"And you took it."
"No. I thought of Jo." He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist, leaving a smear. "I'd have lost the house. Ben's whole life. They'd have said I was a thief and a, and a Crane's man. I'd have gone to prison for twenty years. And Dan, he'd never have, he'd have been a witness, he'd have been a hero. It was the one thing I couldn't stand."
"The book."
"The book. Yes." He nodded slowly. "I only wanted the book. I thought, if I had it, the real one, the pencil one, there'd be nothing to show. They'd have his word and mine. I'd have time to put it right. I told him. I said, Dan, give me the book, and I'll make it go away. And he said no. He said, Martin, it's already in a place you'll never look." He gave a thick laugh. "I've been in every house he lived in. I've been in every attic. I even had your loft done, did you know that? In March, the same weekend. I thought, it'll be in a book. He's a book man. And all this time. All this time, under my nose."
"You killed him."
"I didn't want to."
"You killed him."
"I sat with him," said Martin, "for an hour."
There was a long silence.
She did not hear the rain. She did not hear the boiler or the clock. She sat quite still, with the blood roaring in her ears, and her mouth open, and her gaze fixed on the big gray tired face across the table. An hour. She could see it. She saw a low bright room, the slope of a ceiling, a man in a chair by a table, with a tin cup in his hand, talking in a low voice, and another man opposite him, quiet, patient, with his gloves on.
"He asked for you," said Martin. "At the end. Did you know that? When he couldn't, when he'd stopped being able to say anything. I held his hand. He said, Mara. Over and over. Mara. Tell Mara." His eyes were full. "I said I would."
She screamed.
She had not known it was coming. It tore out of her from somewhere underneath her ribs, a raw high animal sound, and she flung herself backward out of the chair and the chair went over with a crack. The stick was in her hands. She swung it. It was a long heavy ash staff with a brass ferrule, her father's, and she brought it round in a flat whistling arc with every ounce of her body behind it, and it caught him across the shoulder with a dull meaty crack that jarred her to the teeth.
He grunted. He did not fall. He had come up out of the chair in one fluid movement, much faster than she would have believed, and his gloved hand closed on the end of the stick and wrenched it from her grip with a twist that tore the skin from her palms. She felt the bandages go. She felt a hot flood. And then his other arm came round her waist, enormous, iron-hard, and lifted her clean off the floor.
"Don't," he said, into her ear, panting. "Don't. Don't, Amara. Don't make it, I don't want to hurt you."
She kicked backward. Her heel caught his shin. She heard him curse, a thick wet sound, and the arm tightened until she could not breathe. His chest was hot and hard against her back. She could smell him, the soap and sweat and wool and the clean sharp medicinal stink of the pen, and somewhere in the roaring of her skull she thought, quite distinctly, with an odd calm that she would never forget: This is the smell that was in the room.
She threw her head back.
It hit him in the face. She felt it connect, the whole hard curve of her skull against the soft bridge of his nose, and a crunch, and a hot gush of wetness down the back of her neck. He roared. His grip loosened. She dropped, and her feet hit the tiles, and she twisted in his arms like an eel and drove her knee up with all her strength.
He doubled over. The breath went out of him in a long whistling groan. She tore herself away and fell against the table, and the Thermos went over, and the pale gold tea splashed across the pine and ran in a bright stream onto the floor. She snatched up the first thing her hand touched. It was a bread knife. It lay on the board where she had left it on Wednesday, long and serrated, with a black handle.
She spun round with it in both hands.
He was standing in the middle of the kitchen with one hand pressed over his nose and the blood pouring through his fingers, down his chin, onto the white shirt. His glasses had gone. His face was a mask of red. And his eyes, as he lowered the hand and looked at her over the long wet dark smear of his own blood, were not angry. They were not even afraid. They were quite simply, quite terribly, patient.
"Put it down," said Martin thickly.
"Stay away from me."
"Put it down, my love. You'll hurt yourself."
"I'll kill you."
"No," he said. "You won't."
He came at her. He did not run. He walked, slowly, with his arms hanging, through the spilled tea and the blood, with the light shining on his wet red face, as a man walks across a field toward a horse that will not be caught. And she stood with the knife shaking in her bandaged hands and her back against the table, and the whole room swam, and the dark red shine of the blood on his chin dripped, dripped, dripped onto the tiles.
She lunged.
She felt it go in. It was not like anything she had imagined. It was not clean. It was a dull heavy resistance, a drag, as if she had pushed the blade into a loaf of wet bread, and then a give, and then something grated against something harder. He made a sound she would hear for the rest of her life, a high, astonished grunt, like a child that has been struck. His hand shot out and caught her wrist. The blade had gone into the meat of his left forearm, through the sleeve, through the glove, a full three inches, and it stood out of him with the black handle quivering, and the blood came welling out around it in a hot dark flood and ran down her hands and her wrists and her sleeves.
They stood locked, face to face, with their breath mingling.
Then he hit her.
He used the back of his right hand. It was not a blow she saw. It was a sudden white detonation at the side of her head, a roaring, a slow tilting wheel of lights, and the table came up and caught her across the hip. She felt the cold of the tiles on her cheek. She felt something warm running into her eye. She tried to get up, and the floor lurched, and somewhere a long way off a man's voice was saying, thick and wet and urgent, oh God, oh God, oh God, over and over, and then her own name, and a hand closing in her hair.
The tin cup of tea was on the floor by her face. It lay on its side in a puddle of pale gold. And in the last small clear spot of her mind, as the kitchen darkened and drew back and the hand in her hair began to drag her across the tiles, Amara Hale looked at it, and thought, quite calmly, like a woman writing a note in the margin of a book:
He's brought another.