Chapter 23
The Box With the Red Tape
She saw it at two in the afternoon, in the middle of a conversation about something else.
Tessa Quill had brought the notebook back. She had said she was not supposed to, that it had been logged and bagged and was the property of the Crown, but that she was a woman of fifty-one who had not had a night's sleep since the ninth of October and she did not particularly care. She had put it down on the hospital locker in its clear plastic envelope and said, I've had a man on it since eight o'clock this morning. He's the best cryptanalyst in the county. He says it's a substitution cipher keyed on a set of birth dates. He says it'll take him a month.
She had heard the tapes. She had sat in the relatives' room the evening before, with the door closed and her hat on her knee, and listened to Martin Ashby say oh, Dan, I'm so sorry in a voice like a man laying down a coat, and when it was over she had said nothing for a full minute. Then she had said, quietly, That's enough to hang him, and had gone out into the corridor to make three telephone calls with her back against the wall.
Can I look? said Amara.
I'd rather you didn't.
I'm an archivist. I read bad handwriting for a living.
So Quill had sat down on the end of the bed, with her coat on and her cup of tea going cold, and held out the little green book, and watched. And Amara had taken it, in her bandaged hands, and drawn it gently out of its sleeve, and opened it flat on the blanket under the afternoon light from the window.
The sun lay across the page in a yellow bar. The numbers ran down in blue ink in long careful columns, as neat as stitches. 04-03-2. 09-11-5. 17-02-1. She had looked at them a hundred times in her head. They were, she had decided, a cipher that some frightened man had worked out at a kitchen table in the middle of the night, and she had known it was hopeless to guess.
She turned a page, and another. And there, near the end, in the middle of a block that otherwise looked like all the rest, she found it again. 13-44-7. It was written in the same hand, in the same ink. It had a short rule drawn beneath it. And she saw it, at last, as one sees a face in a crowd one has been looking at for an hour: not as a number but as a shape.
Three digits. Three digits. One.
It was not a code. It had never been a code.
"It's not a date," said Amara.
"No?"
"It's a shelf-mark." She heard her own voice, very small. "A location. We don't write them like that, in the register. We write them in full: Closed Collections, run thirteen, bay forty-four, box seven. But I do. On the labels. When I'm in a hurry. I've done it for twenty years, I put a dash between the figures so that it, so that the porters can read it at a glance." She lifted her eyes. "He's copied my hand. All of them are. The whole book. It's my shorthand."
Quill had gone still.
"The other numbers aren't a cipher. They're, I don't know. They're a catalog. Of what he put where." Her mouth was dry. "But this one. Run thirteen. Bay forty-four. It's a place, Inspector. It's a place I can walk to with my eyes shut. It's a box, in a cellar, in a building I've worked in for nineteen years."
It came back to her all at once, and in colors.
It was a Tuesday in November, in the second week of the month, three years before. She was thirty-eight. She was in the loading bay at the back of the archive in her gray work cardigan with a clipboard held against her chest and a pen behind her ear. Outside it was raining. The big steel door was rolled up on a gray dripping yard and a van with its engine running, and a man was standing in the doorway with a battered brown leather suitcase in each hand.
She had not been expecting him. She had been, she remembered, in a state. It was the week after the hospital. The week after the third time. They had not told anyone. They had gone, together, on a Thursday, to a small clean room with a poster of a smiling baby on the wall, and a woman had said something kind and brisk, and Amara had sat on the edge of the bed in her coat looking at a box of tissues, and had heard Daniel breathing next to her, long and slow, as if he were carrying something up a hill.
On the Sunday she had said, Take me somewhere. She had not known where. He had driven her, in the rain, because there was nowhere else, to the one place in the town that nobody would be: and she had let them in with her own key, and led him down the iron stair to the north cellar, and stood in the cold gray ranks of the steel shelving with her hand flat on a sealed box, and said, in a flat dead voice: This is the only place in the world where nothing's ever lost.
It's a lovely thought, said Daniel.
She had not heard what was in his voice.
And on the Tuesday he had come to the loading bay.
"Daniel?" she had said. "What are you doing here?"
"I've brought you some papers."
"What papers?"
"My mother's." He had looked at the floor. "I've had them in the loft. I thought the loft's damp. Letters, accounts, some old photographs. They'd rot." A thin smile. "I thought, I'm married to the best archivist in the county, why am I letting them rot?"
"They're not of any historic interest," she had said, because she was tired, and because her instinct was to be disagreeable. "Nobody wants a stranger's laundry lists."
"I know."
"We're not a storage unit, Dan."
"I know." He had put the suitcases down. He had stood there in the doorway in his raincoat with the rain behind him and his long gray-green eyes looking, not at her, but at the wall, and he had said, in an odd flat voice: "I want them somewhere safe. I want them to be somewhere you are."
She had looked at him.
"It's silly," said Daniel. "I know it's silly. But I'd like to think, if anything ever happened to me, that they'd be near you. That they'd be in the care of someone who'd treat them properly." He swallowed. "It's all I've got of her."
"Dan."
"I'd like them closed. Sealed. Don't you have a thing where you close a thing for fifty years?"
"A closure period."
"That's it. I'd like it closed. For fifty years. Nobody to read them. Not even you." And he had smiled at her then, quite suddenly, with such a bright, brave, ragged, helpless tenderness that she had felt the world tilt. "Especially not you. I'd rather you didn't read my love letters."
Oh, you fool, she had thought. You tragic man. She had put down her clipboard. She had taken a step toward him, and put her hand on his sleeve, and said, All right. She had signed the form herself, on the spot, on the top of a trolley, with a green pen: Accession 2003/44. Donor: D. Hale. Seven boxes of family papers, c. 1960–2003. Closed for 50 years at the request of the donor. She had sealed the lids with the archive's red tape, the sort with the printed county crest, and written the numbers on the sides in black marker. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. And on the sixth and seventh, because the stacks were full that autumn and the only free bay was a long way down the cellar, in her own quick hurried hand, the shelf-mark: 13-44-7.
She had carried box seven down to the basement herself.
She had laid it on the bottom shelf, in the dark, in the cold, in the dust-sweet gloom, among the sealed boxes of a hundred dead strangers, wills and diaries and ledgers and the bitter private letters of long-forgotten families, and she had stood for a moment with her hand on the red tape. She had been thinking, I will never open this. She had been thinking, in the bleak small hurt cold way of a woman who has just lost something she never had the chance to hold: At least one of us has put something somewhere safe.
"Mrs. Hale?" said Quill.
Amara looked up.
She was lying in a hospital bed in a thin cotton gown, with a stitched shoulder and two white clubs for hands, and she could taste salt. She had not known she was weeping. It ran out of her eyes and down into her ears. She said, in a quite ordinary, breathless, shaking voice: "I put it there myself."
"He's put a wall round it," she said.
She was sitting up. Dera had come in with the tea. Kit had slid round the door and stood with his shoulders against the wall, in the gray parka, with his hands in his pockets and his face still, listening. Her mother was in the corner with her rosary, her eyes closed, as if she had gone somewhere a long way off and would be back shortly.
"Do you know what a closure order is? It's a legal instrument. It's a statutory restriction on access. You can't open it. Nobody can. Not the Chief Archivist, not a magistrate, not the police, not Martin, without a signed warrant from the Lord Chancellor's office, which takes eleven weeks." Amara laughed. It was a thin hysterical sound, and it hurt her ribs. "He's put it where the only person who can get through is the one person he trusted not to try."
"And that's you," said Quill, slowly.
"That's me. I've a master key. I've the closure schedule on a shelf by my desk. I can open that box in four minutes."
"He's been looking for it in houses," said Dera. "In lofts. In lockers."
"Because nobody would think of looking in an archive. It's paper. It's other people's paper. It's the dullest place in the world." Amara closed her eyes. "That's why he picked it."
The room was still. Quill looked at the notebook, and the window, and the dim yellow face of the clock over the door. It said twenty past three.
"I'd like to do this properly," she said.
"I know."
"I need a warrant. I need a forensic officer and a bag. I need to speak to your Chief Archivist and the county solicitor, and I need a man I can trust to witness the opening. It's chain of evidence. If we touch it wrong, a defense counsel will have it thrown out in two minutes." She rubbed her eyes. "And I've got Martin Ashby loose in the county with a wound in his arm and a hole in his head, and I do not want you within a mile of that building till I've put a car on it. I can have it arranged by six."
"Six."
"I'll bring two officers. We'll meet you at the front door. We'll go down together." She stood. "It's been there three years, Mrs. Hale. It can wait till six."
"Yes," said Amara.
She did not argue. She nodded, and said six, and watched Quill go out, with her coat over her shoulders and her phone already pressed to her ear, saying in a clipped low voice, get me the county solicitor. And when the door had closed, she turned her head on the pillow, and met Kit's eyes across the room, and saw the same thing in them that she felt in her own chest: a small hard cold light, steady as a pilot flame.
Six, thought Amara. And it's twenty past three.
And he has been looking for it for a month.
"You're not going," said Dera.
"I'm not going."
"I know that look. You've had it since you were four. You had it when you got your head stuck in the banisters."
"I'm going to have a lie-down," said Amara. "I'm going to have a very long lie-down. You can sit with me, and Mama can say a decade of the rosary, and at six o'clock we'll all hear that a policewoman found a box."
Dera looked at her for a long time.
"You're a terrible liar," she said. "You always were. It's the only reason I believe you've been doing it so well this month." She gripped her sister's wrist, hard, above the bandage. "Take the boy."
They left at four.
Nobody stopped them. That was the strange thing. They simply stood up, and got dressed, and walked out. Dera had gone to the cafeteria with her mother, with a long deliberate look over her shoulder. A young doctor with a stethoscope round his neck said Mrs. Hale, I'm not sure you should be up, and Amara said, I've signed myself out, in the clear flat voice of a woman who has not slept in a month, and he looked at her face, and said, Oh, and stood aside.
The Nissan was in the staff car park, where Dera had left it with the keys under the mat. It was a small blue hatchback with a dented wing and a back seat full of tea mugs and nursing textbooks and a plastic bag of dirty laundry. The heater smelled of dust. Amara sat in the passenger seat with her bandaged hands in her lap and a hospital blanket round her shoulders, and Kit, who had passed his test in August and had never driven alone on a main road after dark, put his hands on the wheel at ten and two, and swallowed, and turned the key.
The Infirmary stood on the hill above the town, and the archive was ten minutes down the valley road.
They did not talk much. The road ran down toward the river, between low hills and the long flat silver of the water meadows, and the sun went down ahead of them in a great raw bar of red and gold. Kit drove with his chin up, and both hands tight on the wheel, and his eyes never leaving the road. He had put on the radio. It was an old cheerful song, a girl's voice singing something about summer over a jangle of guitars. He turned it down. He turned it up again.
"Dad used to sing this," he said. "In the car. Badly."
"I know the one."
"He couldn't sing. It was awful. He'd do all the high bits in a sort of strangled gargle." A tight smile. "I'm good at the high bits. I can do you the high bits."
"Don't."
"No," said Kit. "Right."
The road climbed. They passed through a village, and a wood, and a long steep hanging field with sheep in it, and the light went from gold to rose to a cold gray violet. Streetlamps came on. The first stars pricked out above the hills. And the whole of the way, as they ran down the long valley road toward the river and the town, Amara had the oddest feeling that she was being carried along very fast and very smoothly on a tide, as in a dream, toward a place she had been walking toward all her life.
Once, at the bend by the sand quarry, she saw a pair of headlights in the wing mirror, a long way back, and thought nothing of it. It was a road. People drove on it.
She was watching the town come up out of the dusk. She was watching the roofs, and the spire, and the thin smoke going up from the chimneys, and the long dark gleam of the river. And at the end of it, huge and square and black against the last red stain of the sky, the old wool warehouse on Tanners' Wharf, with its two hundred windows blind, and a single light, high up, on the third floor, that somebody had left burning.
"Is that you?" said Kit.
"No."
"Whose is it?"
"I don't know. It's Dennis's, I think. Dennis Alcott. He leaves it burning, he says it keeps the spiders honest." She did not feel her own voice. "He'd have gone at four."
They looked at each other. Kit slowed the car. In the mirror, quite close now, quite quiet, a pair of dipped headlights came round the bend of the wharf and went out.
"Mara," said Kit, very low. "I've got a bad feeling."
"So have I."
"Do you want to go back?"
Amara looked at the light. It burned in the dark window like a candle at a vigil. She thought of a green pen, and a red tape, and a hand on a sleeve. She thought of a boy standing in a doorway on a rainy quay with his hand on a door that did not open. She thought of a stone lying on a windowsill in a locked room above a chandler's shop, with a seam like a vein, that nobody had ever thrown into the river.
"No," she said. "I think it's time."
She opened the door.