Chapter 2
A Stranger's Voice Before Sunrise
"Mrs. Hale?"
It was a woman's voice, low and unhurried, with the flat vowels of the coast in it and something underneath that Amara recognized at once, with the part of her mind that went on working while the rest of her fell away. It was the voice of a person who has had to say this sentence a great many times and has learned that the kindest way to say it is slowly.
"Yes," said Amara.
"My name is Detective Inspector Tessa Quill. I'm with Dunmarrow CID. Are you the wife of Daniel Hale, of Fourteen Marsh Lane, Wexcombe?"
The hall was cold. The floorboards pressed against the soles of her bare feet like a sheet of ice. She could see her own breath faintly, a pale smudge in the gray light from the fanlight, and beyond it the front door with its chain, the coats on their hooks, the umbrella stand, the framed print of the Wex at sunset that Daniel had bought her in a charity shop in their first year and hung crooked on purpose because she hated it when things were straight. All of it seemed to have gone very slightly out of focus, as though a pane of glass had been slid in front of the world.
"Yes," she said again. "I'm his wife."
"Mrs. Hale, I'm very sorry. I'm afraid I have some bad news about your husband."
Amara sat down.
She did it slowly, as if she were lowering herself into water. The green leather chair took her weight with a long soft sigh. The cord of the telephone pulled taut across her knees. Somewhere in the kitchen the refrigerator hummed and cut out, and in the quiet that followed she heard a small dry sound that she realized, after a moment, was her own breath catching and releasing, catching and releasing, like a bird beating itself against a window.
"Tell me," she said.
"Yesterday evening, a little after seven, the landlord of a property on Quay Street attended a flat to collect a payment. He couldn't get an answer. When he let himself in, he found a man on the floor." The voice paused, and went on, very evenly. "A man matching your husband's description. We found a driving licence and a card in the wallet with this number on it. The name on the card was Mara, home."
Mara. It broke something in her, that. Not the news. The name. That he had written it on a card in his own cramped hand, in that mad small script he used for shopping lists, and put it in his wallet where a stranger could find it, and that a stranger had.
"Is he alive?"
"No, Mrs. Hale. I'm so sorry."
She waited to feel something. She had read that it came in a wave, a black wall of it, and she braced herself, with her fingers clamped on the arm of the chair, the way you brace for the kick of a door you know is about to slam. But what came instead was a sort of astonished flatness. A numb white hush, like snow falling on a street that has already been emptied of people.
"How?" she said.
"We don't know yet."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"I mean that at this stage there is nothing to tell us how he died." A slight rustle of paper at the other end. "There's no obvious injury. No sign that the flat was broken into. No sign of a struggle that we've yet identified. The door was locked from inside when the landlord arrived."
"Locked."
"With a latch. Yes."
"Then he—" She heard her own voice rise, thin and unsteady. "Did he do it himself? Did he take something?"
"We have no reason to think so. We found no note, nothing of that kind. I don't want to speculate, Mrs. Hale, and I'm sorry to be asking you this, but I do need to know whether your husband had any medical condition. A heart problem. Epilepsy. Anything we should be aware of."
"No." She shook her head, as if the woman could see it. "He had a cholesterol thing. Statins. He was fit. He ran. He ran on Sunday, he did ten miles on Sunday, he was fine."
"I understand."
"What does no obvious cause mean?"
"It means that the pathologist will examine him this afternoon, and it may take some time to give you an answer." A pause. "Mrs. Hale, is there somebody with you? Somebody who can stay with you? And someone who could drive you to Dunmarrow? We'll need you to identify him. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to ask it today."
Amara looked at the red light blinking on the answering machine beside the telephone.
"I'll come," she said.
She did not know how long she sat there after the line went dead.
When she became aware of herself again she was still in the green chair, with the handset in her lap and her feet drawn up under her, and the hall had gone from gray to a thin watery gold. The first bus of the morning shuddered past on Marsh Lane. Mrs. Gethin's cat sat on the front step, staring in through the frosted glass of the door with its tail wrapped around its paws.
Her hands were shaking. It was not a tremor but a deep slow shudder, running up through her wrists into her shoulders, as though the cold had gotten into the machinery and could not be turned off. She looked down at them. They were her hands. Long fingers, the nails short and clean, a faint stain of ink on the right forefinger from the green pen she used in the archive. She wore two rings. One of them was a plain gold band that Daniel had slid onto her finger on the sixth of September, fifteen years before, in a cold church with a leaking roof, with a trembling hand and an expression of such complete amazement that the vicar had laughed.
Mara, he had whispered. Mara, I'm actually doing it.
She dialed Dera first. Her sister answered on the second ring, bright with sleep, saying, "What, what, who's dead?" with the habitual dark cheerfulness of a woman who has worked nights in an emergency ward for twelve years, and Amara said, "Dera," and no more, and heard, down the line, the bright voice stop.
"Where are you?"
"Home."
"Don't move. Don't do anything. I'm coming."
"Dera, I have to go to Dunmarrow—"
"Then I'll come to Dunmarrow. Is it Daniel?" A silence. "Oh, Mara. Oh, no. Oh, love."
"Don't tell Mama," Amara said. It was an absurd thing to say. It came out of her like a reflex. "Don't tell her on the phone. Wait until I—"
"I won't. I'll tell her in person. I'll bring Father Ikenna." Dera drew a long ragged breath. "Who's going to drive you? Are you all right to drive? You're not to drive."
"I'll ring Martin."
"Martin," said Dera. "Yes. Yes, ring Martin. He'll know what to do."
She rang Martin.
She had not expected to be able to say it. She had expected her throat to close. But when the phone began to ring, she found that she was standing in the hall quite steadily with her coat held in one hand, and that when he answered, on the first ring, in a voice that was not at all the sleepy one she had expected, she heard herself say, in an ordinary clear voice, "Martin, it's Daniel," and then nothing else at all.
There was a short silence on the line. It was a small thing, shorter than a breath.
"I'm coming," said Martin.
He was there in seven minutes.
She was waiting for him on the front step when the car came down Marsh Lane, a dark green Volvo estate with a dented rear bumper and a spray of road mud up its flanks, moving much too fast for the wet cobbles. It swung in against the curb with a hiss of tires. The door opened before it had stopped rocking.
She would remember, afterwards, how he looked. How he came up the path at a half run with no umbrella, in a heavy black overcoat thrown on over what appeared to be pajama trousers, his thinning hair plastered flat by the rain. His broad face was gray. There were deep violet hollows under his eyes. He had cut himself shaving, a small bright nick along the jaw that was still beading, and his eyes were red-rimmed and wild. He took her by both shoulders and looked at her, and his own face seemed to come apart.
"Say it," he said, hoarsely. "Say it properly."
"He's dead," said Amara. "Martin. They found him in the flat. He's dead."
Martin Ashby made a sound. It was low and strange and she did not know what to call it. Then he pulled her against his chest, hard, his arms wrapped around her so tightly that her face was crushed into the wet wool of his coat, and she felt the whole big body shaking against her. The coat smelled of rain and coffee and cold cigarettes, which was odd, because he had given up smoking in 1999.
"I'm sorry," he said into her hair. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, my love."
"You were quick," she said stupidly, into the coat.
"I was awake." His voice cracked. "Jo's mother's in the hospital. I've been up since three."
"Oh. Martin. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. For God's sake. Don't you dare be sorry." He held her away from him, and wiped his face with the heel of his hand, and she noticed, in the dim, that he was wearing leather gloves, black ones, though it was not cold enough, and that the cuffs of his coat came down to the knuckle. "Where's your bag? Get your bag. I'll drive you."
They left Wexcombe in the early gold light, the town sliding past the windows in long wet reflections: the war memorial with its sodden wreaths, the closed butcher's, the river brown and swollen between its iron rails. She sat with her bag on her knees and her coat buttoned to the chin and her gaze fixed on the wipers, watching them sweep and return, sweep and return, with a steady patient shriek of rubber on glass.
The Volvo smelled of old coffee and wet wool. On the dashboard, among a litter of sweet wrappers and spare fuses, lay a crumpled car park ticket, curling in the heat from the vents, and her eyes slid over it as eyes slide over a thing at the edge of a long fall. QUAY ST CAR PARK, it said, in smudged blue print. She read the words without reading them. Beneath the words was a date and a time, and the time and the date were out of focus, because her eyes had filled again, hot and sudden, and when she wiped them the numbers had gone into a blur.
"Is that yours?" she asked, dully.
"What?"
"The ticket."
"Ah. Yes. Last week. A supplier lunch in Dunmarrow." Martin did not look round. He had both hands very tight on the wheel. "Don't mind the mess."
She did not mind it. She did not mind anything. She watched the road open and close in front of them, the slick gray ribbon of the motorway, the lorries throwing up great walls of spray, the unending procession of red tail lights vanishing into the haze like the slow beads of a rosary. Her mind, left to itself, did the only thing it knew how to do. It began, patiently, to catalogue.
Daniel Hale. Born the fourth of April. Height six foot one. Eyes gray-green. Scar on the left shoulder, shiny, the size of a hand: a kettle, he said, when he was six. She had traced it with her fingertip on the first night, in the light of a streetlamp, and he had flinched very slightly and then smiled and said, Aunt Rose never forgave herself. Allergic to penicillin. Right-handed. Hums when he shaves. Burns toast. Leaves every cupboard door in the house open, and has done since the day we met, and I have shut them behind him for fifteen years.
Dead, said a small calm voice somewhere at the back of her head. Dead. Dead. Dead. It did not seem to be attached to anything. It was simply a word, like a number in a ledger, waiting for its entry.
"Talk to me," said Martin. "Say anything."
"I can't."
"Then I'll talk." He cleared his throat. "Did he say anything to you? On the phone, this week? Did he sound ill?"
"He sounded happy."
"Did he mention a doctor? A pain?"
"No."
"Did he mention anyone he was meeting? Anyone he'd, been out with?"
"Brightwell." Amara turned her head. "He was meeting Brightwell. The contract. You told me. You said it was the biggest of his year."
"Yes." Martin kept his eyes on the road. A muscle jumped in his cheek. "Yes. That's right. It was."
They stopped at the services outside Harleigh at a quarter past eight, because she asked him to, and because she was going to be sick. She was, in the end, quietly, thoroughly, in the cubicle of a ladies' toilet that smelled of pine and bleach, with her forehead against the cold partition and her hair falling in her face, and when she was done she stood for a long while at the basin looking at the white stranger in the mirror. Her eyes were swollen. Her mouth had gone strange and pale. Behind her a hand dryer roared and cut out and roared again.
He was waiting for her by the coffee counter with two paper cups, one in each hand, and a small, ridiculous, tender smile that did not reach his eyes. "Sweet tea," he said. "Three sugars. Doctor's orders. Drink it."
She drank it. It was scalding and thick and tasted of nothing. She watched over the rim of the cup as he put his own down on the counter and took from his coat pocket a small flat black case, and flicked it open, and drew out a pen-like device with a clear window and a dial. He turned away, a little, toward the wall, with the quick unselfconscious grace of long practice, and she saw him pull up the hem of his jumper on one side and press the end of the pen to his stomach, and hold it there for a count of five, and put it back in the case.
"Sorry," he said. "Blood sugar's all over the place. Grief does it."
"It's all right."
"I forget you've seen it so many times."
She had. She had watched her father do it at the kitchen table in Enugu Road every morning for nineteen years, with the same unembarrassed care, and she knew the sound of the click, and the faint antiseptic smell of the swab, and the way the room seemed to fall quiet and respectful while a grown man looked away from his own hand. It was one of the most familiar things in the world to her. It did not seem to belong to this.
"Come on," said Martin, gently. He put his hand on her back. He was very warm. "Another hour. Then you'll know."
Dunmarrow came up out of the rain like something surfacing.
First there was the smell, which crept into the car through the vents: salt and diesel and rotting weed, the particular cold iron smell of an estuary at low tide. Then the long gray sprawl of the container port, the cranes standing along the water like the skeletons of enormous birds, the gantries and the stacked steel boxes in their dull colors, red and blue and rust. Then the old town, a tight jumble of slate roofs and narrow brick streets climbing a steep hill from the water, with the harbor spread below it, wide and dark and pitted with rain.
"Quay Street," said Martin, quietly, and took the turn without needing to be told.
She noticed it. She noticed it distantly, the way you notice a speck on a lens. But she was looking, by then, at what was in front of them: a narrow cobbled street running down along the water, hemmed in on one side by a row of old warehouses converted into flats and on the other by the harbor wall, and at the bottom of it, drawn up across the road, a police car with its light turning, soundless and blue, in the rain.
There was a strip of tape between two bollards. A uniformed constable stood with his back to the wind and a clear plastic cape flapping around his shoulders. Beyond him, set into the ground floor of a tall narrow building the color of old teeth, was a shop front with a dark green door and, above it, a wooden sign in flaking gold paint.
PETTIGREW & SONS. MARINE CHANDLERS. EST. 1887.
She knew it at once. She knew it the way you know a place from someone else's description, from a voice on a telephone, from a joke at the other end of a line at night. She looked up. Above the shop, on the second floor, there was a small square window with a sloping lintel, and in it, behind the wet glass, somebody had left a lamp on.
It was the yellow glow of a shade that had faded with years. It burned patiently in the gray morning, with no one near it. She stared at it. Somewhere in the pit of her stomach a cold thing turned over and was still.
"Amara," said Martin. "Amara. Look at me."
She did not. She opened the car door. The rain hit her in the face, soft and cold, with the taste of salt in it, and a gust came off the harbor and filled her coat like a sail. Her feet found the cobbles. Seagulls screamed overhead, wheeling, enormous and white against the low sky.
Across the road, in the doorway of a shuttered shop, the shadows lay thick and still. She did not look at them. But as she straightened, with her bag in her hand and the rain running down her neck, she became aware of a feeling that she would come to know very well in the weeks ahead, a faint cold prickle between the shoulder blades, as if a hand had been laid there and taken away.
"Mrs. Hale?"
A woman was coming toward her down the wet street. She was fifty or thereabouts, small, square, in a dark raincoat and flat shoes, with short iron-gray hair cut close to her head and a plain, tired, intelligent face. She did not hurry. She walked like someone who has long since stopped expecting any day to be easy. When she reached Amara, she did not offer her hand. She stood in the rain with her own hands in her pockets and let her gaze rest on Amara's face for a moment, patiently, as one might look at a house before knocking.
"I'm Tessa Quill," said the woman. "I'm so sorry. I'm so very sorry that we're meeting like this."