Chapter 3
The Flat Above the Chandler's
The stairs began behind the shop.
You reached them through a narrow side door that smelled of linseed and wet rope, down a flagged passage lined with coiled hawsers and tins of marine paint and a brass ship's bell on a bracket, and then they rose steeply into the dark in a single straight flight, uncarpeted, the treads worn into shallow dishes by a hundred and thirty years of boots. A single bulb hung on a flex from the ceiling of the landing above. Somebody had drawn a chalk circle on the lowest step, with a number inside it, and beside it a strip of yellow tape had been stuck across the banister at the height of a man's thigh.
"They'll be coming down in a few minutes," Tessa Quill said. "Forensics. I've asked them to wait until you've been in. I'd rather you saw it as he left it. I'm sorry, that's a hard way to put it."
"Don't apologize," said Amara. "Please. Everyone keeps apologizing."
Quill glanced at her. It was a short, sharp, assessing look, and then something in the square tired face eased. "All right," she said. "I'll try to stop."
Behind them the side door scraped. Martin stood in the opening with the gray daylight at his back and the rain streaming off his shoulders, holding his hat in both hands. He had put on a proper coat in the car, a long charcoal one, buttoned to the throat, and his thick black gloves, and he looked, in the cramped passage, enormous and out of place, like a man standing at the edge of something he could not make himself step over.
"I'll wait here," he said.
"You don't have to," said Amara.
"I'd rather." He swallowed. In the dim, she saw his throat work. "I don't think I can. I'm sorry. I'm no use to you up there. I'll be here when you come down."
"It's all right."
"It isn't." He tried to smile and it went wrong. "But thank you."
She went up with Quill behind her. The treads gave back a hollow, rising note under their feet, a sound like a drum being played slowly in another room. Halfway up she caught the smell, faint and sour and unmistakable under the tar and the hemp: the smell of a place where something had been very recently and very badly wrong. It was not decay. It was sweat and cold tea and something sharper beneath, thin and clean and clinical, which she knew and could not for the moment name.
At the top, on a tiny square landing, was a white-painted door with a brass number six hanging crookedly from a single screw.
"The latch is a spring lock," Quill said, quietly. "It catches when the door closes. You can open it from inside without a key, but from the landing you need one. The landlord has a master. The tenant had his own, and it was on the table, inside." She paused with her hand on the handle. "I'm going to ask you not to touch anything. If you need to sit down, tell me. If you need to leave, leave. Nobody will think any worse of you."
"I won't need to leave."
"Most people say that."
The door opened. Amara went in.
It was smaller than she had imagined.
She had built it, on the telephone, out of his voice: the sloping ceiling, the bed like a boat, the knocking radiator. She had imagined it with a kind of cozy, cluttered, seaside cheerfulness, the flat of a man at a conference letting the weather and the gulls and his own absurd bed amuse him. What she saw instead was a single narrow room under the eaves, the ceiling coming down so steeply on the left that a tall man would have had to stoop to cross it. The walls were cream. The wood floor was bare and scuffed. There was a kitchenette no bigger than a cupboard, with a two-ring hob and a single steel sink, and a small round table pushed against the wall beneath the window, and beside the table, a wooden chair with a gray overcoat draped over its back.
It was the coat she had bought him two Christmases ago, from the shop on Silver Street. She knew the exact weight of it on its hanger.
Her eyes moved on.
There was the bed, a built-in double set low under the slope of the roof, its blue cover pulled up and smoothed as if no one had lain in it. A chest of drawers with its second drawer standing a little open. A wardrobe, door ajar. A pair of black brogues side by side on the mat with their toes to the wall, laces tucked in, exactly as he left them at home every night of his life. On the table, a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses lay folded on a paper napkin. Beside them stood a blue enamel mug. She stopped.
It was his mug. She had not known he had brought it. It was the chipped blue enamel one with the white rim that lived on the second shelf in the kitchen on Marsh Lane, that nobody else was allowed to use, that had gone through camping trips and a flooded cellar and one terrible week in 1998, and he had carried it two hundred miles in a bag so that he could drink his tea in the morning out of the right cup.
There was a brown skin on the tea inside it. Cold, untouched, a third full.
"Mrs. Hale?" said Quill.
"I'm all right."
"Take your time."
She took it. She stood in the middle of the floor with her hands pressed flat against her coat, breathing through her mouth, and let herself look, slowly, at the rest.
There was a window set deep into the wall above the table, small, square, with a wide wooden sill painted white. Beyond it she could see the quay, the long gray curve of the harbor wall, and at the far end of the water, a tall white lighthouse standing against the rain. And on the sill, next to a dead fly and a rusted paperclip, lay a river stone.
She went to it before she knew she had moved. It was no bigger than her palm, flat and smooth and the color of wet slate, with a thin white seam running through it like a vein. It was exactly like the sixty or seventy others on the windowsill at home, in the old Kilner jar, the ones he had been collecting since the day she met him, one for every year, one for every town. It's a thing, he had told her, years ago, awkwardly, with that careful half-smile. My father had it. You pick one up and you carry it a while and then you give it back to the nearest water. So the river remembers. And she had asked, Remembers what? and he had looked at her, and for a long moment she had thought he was going to say something else, and then he had said, Whatever we leave.
Her fingers hovered over it. She did not touch it.
"He took one with him," she said. "Wherever he went. He had a stone in his pocket."
"We've logged it."
"It's a stupid thing."
"It isn't," said Quill. "I've been doing this twenty-six years. It's never the large things that undo people. It's always the little ones."
The floor was the worst of it.
She had known it would be. She had kept her eyes from it since she came in, as one keeps one's eyes off the sun, but the room kept drawing her gaze back to a certain place on the boards between the bed and the radiator, where a rag rug lay rucked and twisted, thrown into a heap against the skirting. The wood beneath it was dark. There was a stain there, wide and uneven, the size of a man lying curled, a dull brown tide that had soaked into the grain and dried in a glossy crust at the edges. It had a smell. It was not blood. It was the damp-wool, stale-cellar smell of old sweat, and under it, still, that faint sharp medicinal note.
She knew it. Standing there, with her gaze on the floor, she suddenly knew it.
"It smells like a clinic," she said.
Quill's head turned. "What do you mean?"
"There's something. Under the, under the rest." Amara pressed her fingertips to her mouth. "Like antiseptic. Alcohol. The little wipes. Swabs. My father was diabetic. He injected every morning for nineteen years. The whole house smelled of it. I'd know it anywhere."
"Was your husband diabetic?"
"No. Never." She turned. "Never. He was tested. He had a check every year for the cholesterol."
"We found no medication in the flat. Nothing prescribed." Quill took out a small notebook and wrote in it, quickly, in a cramped upright hand. "The landlord keeps the place spotless. He may have disinfected the bathroom. But I'll note it."
Amara looked again at the dark stain on the floor.
They had told her on the telephone: no obvious cause. She had pictured it as something clean, like sleep. But the room had a violence in it. It was in the heap of the rug. It was in the overturned kitchen chair lying on its side by the sink, with one leg bent. It was in the faint dusty smear of a palm on the cream wall by the door, a pale hand-shaped print at the height of a man's head, and below it a long dragging mark, a dirty streak, as if a body had gone down slowly with its fingers clawing at the plaster.
"He fell there," she said, in a small voice. "He was standing, and he put his hand on the wall, and he slid."
"That's what we think."
"He was alone."
"I think so."
"Why do you think so?"
"The chain was off the door. The latch was on." Quill closed the notebook. "The door's self-locking, as I said. So anyone who left after him would have closed it behind them, and it would have locked by itself. That's the difficulty, Mrs. Hale. There's no evidence that anyone was here. But there's no evidence that no one was."
"His phone," said Amara.
"Yes."
"You said on the telephone that it wasn't there."
"No phone. We found the charger plugged into the wall by the bed. Not the handset." Quill's gray eyes did not leave her face. "You told the sergeant that he carried a green folder."
"Cardboard. A tab, a clip. He had it on Monday." Amara went cold. "It's not here?"
"It isn't."
"He never put it down. It was like a, it was like a child's blanket. He took it to meetings. He never lost it."
"Then someone may have taken it. Or he may have left it somewhere. We're checking the train, the station, the restaurants nearby." Quill hesitated. "I'll be honest with you. I find it odd that the things that are missing are the things that would tell us who he'd been speaking to."
"Someone took them."
"Possibly."
"Someone was here."
"Possibly," Quill said again, evenly. "I don't want to make you afraid, Mrs. Hale. But I don't want to lie to you either. At present I have a forty-four-year-old man with no medical history, no injuries, no sign of forced entry, dead on his own floor in a room that locked itself, with his phone and his papers gone. I don't know what I have. I'd like to find out."
She stayed for twenty minutes.
She did it as she did everything, with a kind of stubborn thoroughness, systematically, as though by cataloguing she could make it hold still. The wardrobe: two shirts, pale blue and white, ironed by her on Sunday; the dark suit in its cover; the green knitted tie she had given him for his birthday and he had claimed to hate. The bathroom: a toothbrush in a glass, a razor on a shelf, a bar of the lemon soap he liked, a damp gray towel on the rail. A man had washed his face in that basin on the morning of the day he died. A man had dried his hands on that towel. She stood and looked at it with her hand over her mouth.
On the chair by the bed, under the coat, she saw the book.
She would not, at the time, have been able to say why it stopped her. It was a thick old paperback, the cover soft with years of handling, the spine broken white in a dozen places and crossed with a faded coffee ring. She did not need to see the title. She knew the shape of it as she knew the shape of her own hand. It was the copy of The Count of Monte Cristo she had found for him in a secondhand shop in Hay on their first anniversary, wrapped in brown paper with a bit of string, with a message inside the front cover that she had agonized over for an entire afternoon.
For D. So you always know the sea is coming back. A.
He took it everywhere. He had read it eleven or twelve times, he said, and he never seemed to be reading it at all: he would simply sit with it open on his knee, turning a page now and then without his eyes moving. She had once teased him about it. You don't even like long books. And he had said, with an odd, bright, brittle humor, It's not about the length. It's about a man who comes back from the dead.
She put out her hand. Quill's hand, very gently, came down on her wrist.
"I'm sorry. Not yet. It's all going to be logged and examined. You'll get everything back."
"It's a book."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"It's just a book."
"Mrs. Hale. It will come back to you."
She nodded. She let her hand fall. She would think of that moment often in the weeks that followed, the weight of Quill's palm on her wrist and the soft broken spine under the gray coat. She would think of how close she had been, and how little she had known, and how a woman may stand with her fingertips an inch away from the truth and still be, in every way that matters, perfectly in the dark.
The landlord was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
He was a small, anxious, damp man of sixty, with a comb-over and a cardigan buttoned wrongly, who held a bunch of keys in both hands and kept moving them as if telling beads. His name was Pallister. He gave it three times. He had owned the building since 1979, he told them, and the shop, which was let to the Pettigrews, and he had never in twenty-seven years had so much as a burst pipe.
"He was ever such a quiet gentleman," he said. "Ever so polite. Paid cash up front, a week at a time. Said he was only here for a week or two. Said he'd be, he'd be having visitors, now and then, but nothing noisy." His eyes filled. "I never heard a thing. Not a thing. I was downstairs in the shop doing the stock till gone eight on Thursday and I never heard a thing."
"On Thursday," said Amara. "You were here on Thursday night."
"Till eight. Eight-fifteen."
"And you didn't see anybody on the stairs?"
"I didn't, no. Only I did think," said Pallister, "I did think, when I came to knock on Friday, that it was awful quiet."
"You said he booked it himself," Quill put in. "Through your website."
"Yes. September. He sent me an email. Gave his own name, his own card." Pallister looked from one of them to the other, bewildered. "Is that, is that wrong? Only I thought the company had arranged it. He said it was business. He said it was personal business, he said, it was something he'd been meaning to do for a long time."
Amara stared at him.
"The docks," she said slowly. "Somebody at the port found it for him. He said so."
"I'm afraid I can't say, madam. I only know it was his card."
There was a short silence. Water dripped from the drainpipe outside the door. At the foot of the stairs, standing a little apart from them in the doorway with the rain dark on his coat, Martin Ashby had not moved. He was staring down at the black gloves in his hands. His shoulders were bowed. As she looked, he raised his head, and his gaze met hers across the width of the passage, and she saw that his eyes were full.
"Amara," he said, hoarsely. "Come away. Come away now. You've seen enough."
She let him take her arm. She let him lead her out into the wet noise of the street, where the gulls were screaming and the wind came off the harbor with the smell of salt and diesel and something old and cold and unresolved, and where, on the second floor of the narrow gray building behind her, a lamp with a faded yellow shade went on burning in an empty window.
Personal business, she thought. Something he'd been meaning to do for a long time.
It was the first time that she thought the word lie. She did not yet think it about anyone but a landlord. But she would remember, a long time afterward, with the same cold clarity, that the rain on her face that morning had tasted like tears, and that she had looked back once, over her shoulder, and in the black mouth of a doorway across the road she had seen, or thought she had seen, a flicker of something gray, there and gone, like a hood turning away.