Chapter 21
The Boy Who Came at Three in the Morning
The pain arrived in the right order, like guests.
First there was the throb in her head, a deep dull pulsing behind the left ear, as if somebody were knocking on a door from the inside. Then the burning stripe across her shoulder, where the stitches pulled when she breathed. Then the hands, both of them, swaddled and numb and weighing about a hundredweight, and the bruise down the whole length of her hip, and the dry sick sourness in her mouth, and, last of all, as if it had been waiting politely for its turn, the grief.
She lay and let them come. The ceiling was white. There was a strip light with a dead moth in it. A machine somewhere to her right was ticking, faintly, in a regular small voice, and from the corridor beyond the door came the squeak of rubber soles and the rattle of a trolley and a woman's low laughter. A smell of hospital soup hung on the air. The window was a blue rectangle with a pigeon on the ledge.
"She's awake," said somebody.
"Mara?"
It was Dera. She had been asleep in the vinyl chair by the bed, with her knees drawn up and her braids falling over her face, and she came up out of it all at once, in a scramble, knocking over a paper cup. She was in yesterday's clothes. There was a smear of mascara down one cheek. She seized Amara's bandaged hand in both her own, and held it, and then, seeing what she had done, let go with a gasp and hovered over it like a woman afraid of crushing a bird.
"I'm all right," said Amara. Her voice came out in a croak. "Did he, is he?"
"They haven't found him."
"Oh."
"They found the car. At Harleigh. Round the back of the services." Dera's voice shook. "There was blood all over the driver's seat. All over. And a, there was a trail. Into the woods. They've got dogs." She swallowed. "He can't have gone far. They say. With the head wound, with, he'd lost so much. They're saying a pint and a half, from the garden alone. They think he'll, he'll turn up in a ditch."
"He won't."
"Mara."
"He won't," said Amara. She closed her eyes. "He knows what he's doing. He's done it before."
Her mother was in the corner by the window. She had not spoken. She sat straight in an armchair, with her rosary in her lap and her headscarf on and her hands folded, and she was looking at her elder daughter with a face that was no longer a cameo but something older and stranger and worn, like a stone step that a great many people have climbed. She had been there, Dera said later, all night. She had not eaten. She had not slept. She had sat and watched the door.
"Nne," said Ngozi.
"Mama."
"You are alive." It was not a question. It was a kind of flat astonished statement, like a woman announcing a result. "The doctor said you would be. I told him I knew. I said, my daughter is a stubborn girl. She is not going to die in a kitchen."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." The old woman rose. She crossed the floor in two steps and laid a dry hard palm against Amara's cheek. It was shaking. "Never be sorry to me. I am only sorry that I was not there." She bent. She kissed her on the forehead, once, hard. And then she straightened, and wiped her eyes briskly with the back of her hand, and said in a voice like a slamming drawer: "Now. There is a policewoman outside. She has been outside since six. She says she must speak to you. I told her she would wait until you had eaten a boiled egg."
Tessa Quill came in at ten with a plastic cup of tea in each hand, and sat on the end of the bed.
She did not say anything for a long time. She looked at the bandages. She looked at the monitor. She looked, in the end, at Amara's face, with that steady, tired, unsparing gray stare, and her own face did something that Amara had not seen it do before. It went slack. It was a small thing, an unclenching of the jaw, a drop in the set of the shoulders. For a moment she looked quite simply like a woman who had been awake for thirty hours and had been afraid.
"I've been calling you a liar in my head," she said, "for about a week."
"I know."
"I'm not saying it to be unkind. I'm saying it because I'd like us to be honest." She set one of the cups on the locker. "I knew you'd been to Anselm. I knew you were holding something. I thought, she'll come when she's ready. I thought, if I push, she'll shut like a clam. I was wrong, and a man nearly killed you." Her mouth tightened. "I'm sorry."
"I should have told you."
"Yes. You should." Quill looked at her hands. "But you'd have been a fool to, in the circumstances. You didn't know who you could trust. I've been a police officer for twenty-six years, Mrs. Hale, and I couldn't have told you myself." She drew a breath. "So. I'd like you to tell me now. All of it. From the beginning. And I'd like you to leave nothing out."
So she told it for the second time.
It was easier. That surprised her. She lay propped on four pillows with her bandaged hands in her lap and the sunshine slanting through the blind in long yellow bars, and she told it simply, in order, like a report: the book and the key and the photograph, the note, the bank, the unit, the green car and the man in the black coat. She told Quill about the stones. She told her about the gray parka and the notched stones, and the e-mails, and the boy called Kit who was Daniel's son. She said the name Crane. She said it aloud, in a clinical room, and felt Quill's pen stop.
"Victor Crane," said Quill, very softly.
"Martin carried his money. For eight years. And stole from both of them." She hesitated. "He told me. Last night. Not in so many words. He said, I only wanted the book. He said he'd been looking for it for months."
"What book?"
"A ledger. The true one. Every pound Daniel really paid, in what month, to whom. That's what he was going to hand to a detective on the Friday. That's what he was killed for." She swallowed. "And I think it's still out there, because Martin never got it. And I think that's why he came to the house."
Quill sat still. The monitor ticked. In the corridor a wheel squeaked past, and somebody called out a name, and from the window came the long soft bleat of a bus.
"I'd like to see them," she said, at last. "The notebook. The note. Where are they?"
"In my bag. Dera's got it."
"I'll need to take them."
"I know."
"I'll sign for them. I'll give you a receipt. They won't, nobody will touch them but me." Quill rose. She walked to the window, and stood with her back to the room, looking down at the car park, with her hands in the pockets of her coat. When she spoke again, her voice was very low. "Do you know why I didn't want this case?"
"No."
"I had a feeling." She turned. "In the first hour. When I stood in that flat. I thought, this is a very clean killing. This is somebody who has done a great deal of thinking. Somebody who knew exactly how long it would take, and exactly what he would find, and exactly what he'd need to carry out when he left. And I thought: that is not a person who is acting on impulse. That is a person who has been planning for a very long time." She took a breath. "I've seen it twice before. Both times it was somebody the victim loved."
"Yes."
"I should have asked you who his friends were. In the first week. I asked who his enemies were. I'm ashamed of that." Quill's jaw set. "Martin Ashby's DNA is under your husband's fingernails. Dr. Khalid rang me at seven this morning. He'd been working all night on the samples. We took a swab from the blood in your garden, and it matched." Her gray eyes met Amara's. "It's over, as far as the evidence goes. I could take it into a court tomorrow. All I need is the man."
"And the book."
"And the book." Quill nodded. "I don't suppose you've any idea where it is."
"No," said Amara.
She said it quite truthfully. She lay with her head against the pillow and her eyes on the white ceiling, with the dead moth in the strip light, and thought of a green cloth notebook, and a row of numbers, and a number that was not a date. 13-44-7. She thought of it, and let it go. It slid away from her like a fish. It was too small, too vague, too deeply buried under the great gray tide of exhaustion and morphine. She said, No, and Quill nodded, and went away, and the door closed with a soft click.
She woke in the dark.
It was a particular dark. It was not the dark of night, but of a hospital ward at its lowest ebb, the small blue hours between three and four, when the corridor lights are turned down and the monitors glow like tiny green moons and the whole building seems to be holding its breath. A single bar of light lay across the floor from the gap in the door. She could hear Dera breathing, in the chair, a slow gentle snore. Her mother's bed had been made up in the side room. Outside the window the sky was black, with one cold star.
She did not know what had woken her. She lay quite still, with her eyes open. She was aware of a presence in the room, as one is aware of a draft: a faint cool unmistakable change in the air. She did not turn her head. She said, softly, to the dark:
"I thought you'd come."
There was a long silence.
Then a chair creaked, at the foot of the bed, in the shadows beyond the green glow of the monitor. Somebody had been sitting there. Somebody had been sitting there for a long time, perfectly still, in the dark, like a figure in a church.
"I didn't think you'd be awake."
The voice was low and hoarse and young. A shape moved against the faint gleam of the corridor. It stood up. She saw the gray parka, the narrow shoulders, the hood put back. She saw a pale face, and a thatch of dark hair with a cowlick standing up at the crown, and a pair of gray eyes, enormous and bruised, set deep in a face that was thin, and unshaven, and ravaged with exhaustion. He had a padded brown envelope in his hands. He was twisting it, round and round, between his fingers, as if he were wringing a neck.
"Kit," said Amara.
"Yes."
"You came."
"I heard it from Mrs. Lyle-Bayliss. She heard it on the wireless." The boy's voice cracked. "I got the first bus. I told the constable on the door I was your nephew."
"It's even true."
"I suppose it is." The ghost of a smile touched the pale mouth, and died. "God. I don't know what to say. I'd got a whole speech. I can't remember a word of it."
"Sit down."
Kit sat. He did it carefully, on the edge of the chair, with his knees together and his hands in his lap, like a child in a headmaster's office. In the green glow of the monitor he looked about twelve. He was not looking at Amara. He was looking at her bandaged hands, the heavy white cocoons on the blanket, and his face was wet.
"I did that," he said.
"You didn't."
"I should have been there. Dera said you'd gone home alone. I was at her flat, I'd had two helpings, I was watching the football with her. And I thought, he'll come for the book. I thought it on the plank, and then I let her take me home." He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I thought, one night. It's only one night."
"You couldn't have known."
"I did know. That's the whole, I knew exactly." The words came out of him in a whisper. "I stood across the road from that flat for four hours, and I knew somebody was going to come, and I went for chips. And I did it again."
"Kit."
"I'm a coward."
"No," said Amara. "You were frightened. There's a difference." She did not know where the words came from. They came out of her whole, in her own voice, in a clear low tone, as if somebody else had said them first. "I know the difference. I've had a good deal of practice this week."
He stared at her.
"And you're not a coward," said Amara, "because you knocked on that door, Kit. In the middle of the night. A boy, alone, with nobody. You put your hand on the wood and said Dad. I'm told that's the bravest thing a person can do. I'd say it's the second bravest. The first is coming to a hospital at three in the morning to a woman you've known for five days."
His whole face quivered. For a moment he said nothing at all.
They sat in the dark for a long time.
Nobody spoke. In the next room a patient coughed, a small dry bark, and was still. A bell chimed in the corridor, softly, twice. Behind the blind the black square of the window was beginning, very slightly, to gray at one corner.
"I brought something," said Kit.
He held out the envelope. It was a stiff brown padded one, torn open at the end, addressed in a careful black hand that she knew: Christopher Lyle, 9 Fenner Road, Dunmarrow. The postmark said Dunmarrow. The date was the fifth of October. There was no return address.
"He posted it on the Thursday," said Kit. "From the box on the quay, about the time he'd have been, I don't know, tidying the flat. It was on the mat when I got home on Saturday, under the pizza leaflets, and I didn't open it. I couldn't. I just put it in the biscuit tin with the others and went back to Quay Street. Mrs. Lyle-Bayliss gave it me again last night, with a cup of tea. She said it'd been sitting there for a month looking at her." His voice cracked. "I read it in the bus shelter. And I thought, I should've done this a month ago. I thought, I've wasted her whole month."
"What is it?"
"Tapes."
He tipped the envelope. Three tiny cassettes slid out into his palm, each no bigger than a matchbox, in a clear plastic case, with a label in black ink on each. 1. 2. 3. Behind them fell a folded sheet of paper, and a small silver machine with a cracked lid, the size of a cigarette packet. It was a dictaphone. It had a single worn button. And it had a tiny dent on one corner, where it had been dropped, once, on the floor of a rented room.
Amara looked at it. She could not speak.
"There's a note," said Kit.
She could not lift her hand to take it. He unfolded it, and held it to the light from the corridor, and read it aloud in a low shaky voice, as a boy reads in a school assembly.
"Kit. If this reaches you, then I was too late, and I'm sorry for it. Please give these to Mara. She won't know she needs them. Play them in order. I will say everything. It will take about three hours. She'll want tea. D."
There was silence.
"He's asking for tea," said Amara.
"Yes."
"He'd have wanted a biscuit. A plain one." She began, quite quietly, to laugh, and the laugh turned, as laughs do, into something else, and she lay with her head on the hard hospital pillow and the tears running sideways into her hair. "Oh, Daniel. Oh, you fool. You absolute, ridiculous fool."
She felt the bed give. Kit had moved. He had come round the side, in the dark, with his hands held out in front of him like a boy approaching a skittish horse, and he sat down on the very edge of the mattress, stiff as a post, and hesitated. Then he put out one hand and laid it, carefully, on the white wrapped bulk of her bandaged palm. His fingers were cold. They were long, and thin, and brown, and the nails were bitten to the quick, and they were, she saw with a small hard shock, exactly the shape of the ones that had held a fish up to a camera in 1996.
"I've not got a, I don't know how it's done," he said.
"Nor have I."
"I'm not going to call you Mum."
"Good," said Amara. "I'd hate it."
"Mara, then."
"Yes."
"Mara." He tried it, as a man tries a stair in the dark. "Right. That's, I can do that."
He did not take his hand away. They sat there, with the dictaphone and the three tapes lying between them on the blanket like a hand of cards, and a gray line came up behind the blind, and a long way off, in the dim gold of the waking city, a lighthouse swung its beam round for the last time and went out.