Chapter 25
What He Said Through the Glass
They kept Martin Ashby alive for nine days.
It was not mercy. Dr. Khalid, who came to find her in the corridor of Dunmarrow General on the second morning with his tie loose and his eyes red, said so quite plainly. It was surgery and luck and a good vascular team. The steel had broken his pelvis in three places, snapped four ribs, and burst his spleen like a plum, and for thirty hours he had hung between one state and another with a machine breathing for him. Then, on the third night, he opened his one good eye and asked for a glass of water, and the ward sister, who had been told what he was, gave it to him anyway.
"He's asking for you," said Quill.
She was standing at the window of the relatives' room with a paper cup of tea going cold in her hand. She looked as though she had not slept since the funeral. She had been in the cellar at twenty-five past five, with six officers and a paramedic, and she had seen the whole of it: the boy on the floor with the gray parka soaked black; the stacks closed on the pinned man; and Amara Hale sitting on the bottom step of the iron stair in the dust, with an open envelope in her lap, not crying, not speaking, holding a boy's horn-handled knife in both hands like a candle.
"He's asking for me," Amara said.
"He's been asking since he woke. He says he'll make a full statement. He says he'll say it all, every word, and he wants you there." Quill turned. "I can't make you. I'd rather you didn't. A solicitor will say it taints the interview, and God knows I've enough to defend. But he's been told he'll probably not walk again, and he's very calm, and I think, I think, he means it. If he won't talk to me he'll talk to you."
"Where?"
"I can put you behind the glass. Next door. Sound only, with a screen. He needn't know you're there."
"He'll know."
"Then he'll know." Quill set down the cup. "Amara. Is there anything you want from him?"
She thought about it. The question was fair. She looked out of the window at the car park, where an orderly in a green tunic was wheeling a man in a gown toward the smoking shelter, and thought of a flat above a chandler's and a book on a chair, and a sentence at the back of her mind that had been there since the second Saturday of October, like a stone in a shoe.
"One thing," she said. "How he knew where to go."
"Your sister rang me at ten past four," said Quill, unexpectedly. "From the cafeteria. She said, I know you told us to wait, she's gone anyway, with the boy, and I'm so sorry, I couldn't stop her. I was in a car by half past. I'd have been there at five if the county solicitor had let me bring the warrant. I took six officers on my own authority and I've been before a disciplinary panel since." She gave a short dry laugh. "I'd do it again. I'd like that on the record."
"Thank you."
"Don't." Quill's mouth tightened. "I was twenty minutes late."
The interview room on the third floor of the hospital had been made for the purpose, with a one-way pane and a small speaker, and a plastic chair set at the back for the use of anyone who preferred not to be seen. She took it. Beyond the glass, in a lamplit cell of pale green, Martin sat propped in a wheeled bed with a drip in his arm. They had cut away what was left of his hair. His head was a bald round bruise, stitched in three places, with the left eye still swollen shut, and he looked, in the cold light, a great deal smaller than he had in her kitchen, and much older. A solicitor in a gray suit sat beside him with a legal pad. Quill sat opposite, with a young detective constable at her elbow and the recorder humming on the table.
"For the tape," said Quill. "Interview commenced at ten fourteen. Present, Detective Inspector Quill, Detective Constable Rahim, Mr. Martin Ashby, and his solicitor Mr. Greaves. Mr. Ashby, you understand that you remain under caution."
"I do."
"You've had advice."
"I've had a great deal of advice," said Martin, in a dry papery voice, and almost smiled. "Mr. Greaves would like me to say nothing at all. He thinks I'm a fool. He's right. I'd like it noted that I'm doing this against his advice and in full possession of my wits."
"Noted," said Greaves, wearily.
"Then tell it from the beginning."
He closed his eye. For a moment she thought he was in pain. But when he spoke, it was in the same level, pleasant, precise voice in which he had once read the minutes of a quarterly meeting, and it did not alter until the end.
He told it all.
He told how, in the spring of 1999, he had been the accountant to a small freight firm, a thin anxious man of forty-five with a mortgage and a mother-in-law, carrying a plain brown envelope to a salvage yard on Gaunt's Wharf for a friend who was afraid to go himself. How he had counted it in the car, on the seat beside him, and found that it came to four thousand pounds, and how the thought that came to him then had arrived whole, in a clear and ordinary voice, like a stranger's remark on a train. Nobody counts what they're afraid of.
"It was so easy," said Martin. "That's what nobody tells you. Each time is so small. It's only the next one. I'd have said, until that spring, that I was a decent man."
"Go on."
He told how it had grown. How for eight years he had put three in the envelope and kept one, and had kept two sets of books, and had learned to write a different hand in each; and how the money had gone, not on anything wicked, but on a hip, and a son's fees, and a roof, and a conservatory, and the gradual, shabby, unnoticed engineering of a comfortable life. He did not make excuses. He said it like a man reading a charge. And he told how, in the autumn of 2006, he had walked into a rented room on Quay Street and had found a tall tired man with a cup of tea, sitting under a sloping ceiling, who looked up and said, Hello, Martin. I thought it'd be you.
"Why Quay Street?" said Quill.
"What?"
"You've told us you didn't plan it. That you only meant to take the book. Yet you were in Dunmarrow on the fifth of October with a pen of insulin in your coat and a rented key. Why that flat?"
For the first time he hesitated.
"I didn't know where he'd gone," said Martin. "He wouldn't tell me. I'd seen him on the Tuesday, in my office, and I'd said, Give me till Friday, and he'd said, I've a place. And I drove home that night and sat in the car in my drive and thought, he's gone to the lawyer. He's going to hand it in. I had a wild idea that I might still talk him round." He wet his lips. "I rang the house on the Wednesday. To see if he was back."
"You rang Mrs. Hale."
"I rang Amara."
She did not move. She heard it as one hears one's own name called in a crowd: a small cold touch, quite distinct, on the back of the neck.
"She was lovely about it," said Martin, and his voice softened. "She always was. It was a quarter to eight. I could hear her cooking. She said, oh, Martin, hello, he's away, he's down in Dunmarrow, I haven't spoken to him since last night. I said I'd hoped to catch him. She said he'd be back at the weekend. I was about to put the phone down." He smiled faintly. "And she said, I know where he is if it's urgent. It's a funny little place, he's taken a flat above a ship's chandler on the quay. It smells of tar and rope. He says you can see the lighthouse from the bed."
"She said that."
"She was only chatting. She said it quite innocently. She was proud of him, I think. She said, it's the first time he's ever not stayed in a hotel. And I wrote it down on the back of my hand." He held up the hand, with its tangle of tubes, as if she might still see the ink. "She never knew. She didn't know what she'd said. She gave me his address, and the name of the street, and the, the lighthouse. She told me, herself. All of it. She never told anyone else."
There was a long silence. In the next room the young constable had gone white. Quill, who did not turn her head, put down her pen with a small, steady, deliberate click.
"Thank you," said Quill. "Mr. Ashby. For the tape, you're confirming that you learned the location of the flat from Mrs. Hale."
"I am."
"By a telephone call. At about what time?"
"A quarter to eight. The fourth of October. A Wednesday."
A Wednesday, thought Amara.
She was sitting quite still in the dark. Her hands were cold. She was looking at a man through a pane of glass, and she was somewhere else, standing in a kitchen on a Wednesday evening with a half-chopped onion on the board and the shipping forecast murmuring, with the receiver tucked under her chin and her eyes full of tears from the onions, and she was hearing her own voice, light and fond and a little proud. He says you can see the lighthouse from the bed. She had said it to make Martin laugh. She had said it because it was nice, because she loved the foolish romantic man who had taken a flat by the sea. She had told his killer where to find him, and had gone back to the stove, and chopped an onion.
She had thought of that call a hundred times. She had gone over it, sentence by sentence, for any hint of the thing she'd missed, and found it always as plain and ordinary as bread. Martin rang. He asked for Daniel. I said he was away. She had never once, in all those weeks, heard what she'd said.
You always did tell everyone everything, Daniel had said once, with love. It's your best fault.
"I went down on the Thursday," said Martin, in the same quiet voice. "I parked in the car park by the quay at six and I walked along to the chandler's. I told the old landlord in the shop I wanted a length of hemp, and while he was fetching it I took the spare key from the hook behind the till. I put it in my pocket. I'd never done a thing like that in my life. It was the easiest thing I've ever done." He swallowed. "I sat in the park till it was dark. I had a flask. At ten to ten I went up."
"And he let you in."
"He didn't need to. I had the key." The bruised face turned slowly toward the window. "He was standing against the wall. He'd heard me on the stairs. He had the little Nokia in his hand, he'd been ringing someone, I think, he put it down on the sill as I came in. He looked at me for a long time. And then he said, Hello, Martin. I thought it'd be you. And then, Sit down. I'll put the kettle on. As if I were the, as if I were a friend."
"Mr. Ashby."
"He was glad," said Martin. He began to weep. It was quite silent. It ran down into the stitches in his cheek. "That's what I can't get past. He was glad. He thought I'd come to give myself up."
"Mrs. Hale," said Quill.
She was standing at the glass. She did not know when she had risen. The little speaker crackled; Quill had turned in her chair and was looking at the mirror, as if through it, with a face of the deepest human sorrow. And on the other side, Martin Ashby, too, had turned his head. He could not see her. The pane gave him back only his own battered face. But he looked at it anyway, with his one eye wide and wet, and said, in a voice of such gentleness and shame that she could hardly bear it, "Is that you, love?"
She did not answer.
"I'm sorry," said Martin. "I've wanted so long to say it. I never meant it to be you. You must understand I never meant that."
"You've said that," said Amara, quite clearly, through the speaker. "In my kitchen. With a knife in your hand."
"I know."
"You said you only wanted the book."
"Aye."
"I told you," she said. "Didn't I?"
"You did."
"It was me."
"It wasn't your fault," said Martin. "Don't think it. It was never, it wasn't you. You only answered the phone." And then, to her own astonishment, and the whole room's, the man in the bed said, in a thick low rush, "And the boy. I never saw the boy. I thought the place was empty, I never thought. I never meant him. I'd have given my life." His mouth worked. "He had Dan's way of standing. I looked at him and I thought, that's Dan. And I didn't stop."
She stood still.
She had thought that she would feel rage, or triumph, or nothing. She had thought of this moment on the iron stair in the cellar, with a boy's blood drying on her hands. But what came to her, standing there, was a small flat cold clarity, like the clearing of a window. She understood that it was true. She understood that it did not matter. Two men were dead, and a third in a rented room had been told he would be forgiven, and had chosen otherwise. And she had said a sentence on a telephone, in love, in a kitchen. That was all. That was what a life was made of. Whatever came after, in the dark, it would be the sentence she'd carry, and not the axe.
"Take him back," she said, to the glass, and to no one. "I've heard it."
She went out.
In the corridor Quill caught up with her. She said nothing. She took her by the arm, not hard, and they went on down the long polished passage together, past the lifts and the vending machine, and out through a glass door onto a small cold roof garden with two benches and a dead geranium, where a gray November wind was blowing across the city from the sea. Far down the hill the harbor lay in a sheet of pewter. The lighthouse stood on its spit, tiny and white, with its lamp already burning in the afternoon dusk.
"He'll plead," said Quill, at last. "Greaves will see to that. He'll go down for life. We found the other copy of the tape in his safe. It's all there, the Wednesday, the Friday, everything. And we've had Crane."
Amara turned her head.
"Monday. At the yard. Burroughs and twenty officers, at six in the morning. The old man was feeding his pigeons." Quill's mouth moved. "He asked if he might finish. He stood in the loft in his camel coat with a bucket of corn and let them all out, every one, and he watched them go up over the water. And then he put out his hands. He said, Well. I did say it was a matter of time. Rook was in the office. He had a suitcase packed. He'd been packed for a month." She shook her head. "He said to me, very civilly, Is there a message for Mrs. Hale? I said I'd ask. Is there?"
"No."
"I thought not."
"Tell him I found the ink," said Amara.
"The ink?"
"He'll know." She was looking at the lighthouse. "I told him I'd read his name into every microphone in Britain. I'd like him to know I haven't forgotten."
Quill leaned on the rail beside her. "It was a phone call," she said. "I want you to hear me say it. If it hadn't been that call, it would have been another. He'd have found him. He'd been following the man for a week."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"No," said Amara. She was looking at the lighthouse. "But I'd like to."
She stood there a long time, with her hands in the pockets of her coat, and the wind pulling at her hair. Below her the city lit itself, window by window, in the dusk, and somewhere in it, three miles away, in a tall plain house on Tanners' Wharf, a gray cellar was being sealed with yellow tape. In a drawer in the mortuary, in a labeled steel box, a gray parka lay folded in a polythene bag. She had asked to have it. They had told her, after the trial.
I'll wait, she thought. I'm good at waiting. I'm an archivist.
And, quite quietly, for the first time since the night the telephone rang, she cried.