Prologue
The Door at Quay Street
The rain had been falling on Dunmarrow for six days, and Daniel Hale had stopped hearing it.
He stood at the window of the rented flat with a mug of tea going cold in his hands and watched the harbor try to make up its mind. The lighthouse at the end of the breakwater swung its slow white beam across the black water, across the moored trawlers rocking on their lines, across the long wet shine of Quay Street, and then away into the dark where it left the glass holding nothing but his own reflection. A tall man, forty-four, with gray coming in at the temples and the particular stillness of someone who had trained himself, over a long time, not to look as frightened as he was.
It was twenty past nine on a Thursday night, the fifth of October. The flat was above Pettigrew & Sons, Marine Chandlers, and it smelled of tar and hemp and damp rope that came up through the floorboards from the shop below. The ceiling sloped. The radiator ticked. A single lamp with a yellowed shade lit the table where, an hour earlier, he had spread the contents of a green cardboard folder, and then, carefully, put every page back.
Tomorrow at eleven he was meant to walk into an office on Harcourt Square and say a man's name out loud, in front of a woman with a tape recorder and a lawyer's notepad, and then keep saying it until somebody in authority wrote it down.
He had been rehearsing it for eight years. He had imagined it in a hundred rooms, in a hundred voices, in the supermarket and the shower and on the long gray motorway home from places he had told his wife were client meetings. He had never imagined how ordinary it would feel, this last evening. How he would think, absurdly, about whether he had packed enough socks.
His mobile buzzed against the windowsill.
It was a small silver Nokia with a cracked screen, and it lay beside a smooth gray river stone he had carried from home in his coat pocket, the way he carried one wherever he went. The display showed a number he did not know. There was a single line of text.
LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW.
Daniel did not move.
He was already looking out of the window. He was standing in front of it, in a lit room, in plain view of anyone on the quay, and the understanding of that came down on him slowly, the way cold water comes up through the soles of old shoes. He stepped sideways, out of the light, until his shoulder touched the wall. He set down the mug.
The beam came round again. In the sweep of it, for the length of a heartbeat, the street was white, and he saw him.
He was standing under the lamp across the road, in the doorway of the shuttered net-mender's, a thin figure in a gray parka with the hood pulled forward, hands deep in his pockets. Rain ran off the hood. He was not sheltering. He was simply standing there, perfectly still, with his head tipped back, looking up at the window the way you look at a house you have been told about all your life and never been allowed to enter.
Then the beam moved on and the doorway was black again.
Kit, thought Daniel.
It could have been. He had told the boy Friday, after. He had said it twice, in the stiff careful letters he wrote, as if he were setting each word on the table to see whether it would bear weight. But it might not have been. It might have been any of the men who had spent eight years making sure he never needed to look out of a window like this one, and Daniel Hale, who had survived by learning to tell caution from cowardice, found that tonight he could not.
He crossed the room in four strides.
The book was on the chair by the bed where he had left it that morning, a fat old paperback with a cracked spine and a coffee ring on the cover: The Count of Monte Cristo, in a translation nobody read any more. He had owned it for sixteen years. It had been a gift on the first anniversary he had ever been allowed to have. On the flyleaf, in blue ink and slightly slanting handwriting, it said: For D. So you always know the sea is coming back. A.
His throat closed. He let it, for a second. Then he opened the book.
He worked fast. He had planned it as he planned everything, down to the last detail, and still his hands shook so badly that the first photograph slid from his fingers and landed face down on the boards. He picked it up. A man and a small boy on a river bank in summer, squinting into the sun, the man's hand on the boy's shoulder, the boy holding up a fish as long as his forearm and laughing at whatever the photographer had said. Dan & Kit. Aug 1996. He slid it between the pages at the place where Edmond Dantès tunnels out of the Château d'If. He folded the note, four creases, and pushed it in after. The key came off his key ring with a tearing scrape, a small brass key on a paper tag, and he held it in his palm a moment, warm from his body, before he laid it in the gutter of the book and shut the cover on it.
On the bedside table lay a tiny silver dictaphone with a cassette in it, the plastic cold and dull. He had spoken into it for three nights. He closed his fist around it and slid it into the lining of his coat.
Not there, he thought. She'll look there. They'll all look there.
He did not know why he thought it. He put the book back on the chair and put his coat over it, and then, standing in the middle of the room with his heart going like something trapped, he understood that he had no idea any more what he was protecting, or from whom, or whether any of it would be enough.
Outside, a gull cried once and was cut off.
He took the Nokia from the sill. His thumb found the number without his looking at it, the way it had found it every night for fifteen years: not her mobile, which she kept in her bag and forgot, but the landline in the hallway at home, the one with the green leather chair beside it and the answering machine she never remembered to clear. He had always loved that machine. He had loved that she was a woman who still had one.
It rang four times. He could see it as it rang: the hallway lamp, the coats on their hooks, Amara's blue scarf, the red light blinking on the machine in the half dark. He could see her upstairs, asleep with one arm flung above her head, the way she had slept since the day they met, as though even in her dreams she were reaching for something.
Pick up, he thought. Please.
The machine answered with a click and a long flat tone.
"Mara," said Daniel.
His voice came out low and hoarse and ordinary. He closed his eyes. He leaned his forehead against the cold slope of the ceiling, and he began to talk, quietly, steadily, the way a man talks at the bedside of someone who is not going to wake. He talked for a little under a minute. His free hand, the one holding the stone, was pressed so hard against the plaster that when he took it away there was a small white print on the wall.
Downstairs, in the shop, a door closed.
He stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence.
It was not a loud sound. It was only the faint heavy thud of the street door against its frame, and then the flat creak of weight on the stairs, one step at a time. Slow. Unhurried. The tread of somebody who knew exactly how many steps there were.
"I'll call you back, love," Daniel said, in a voice that was not his.
He ended the call. He stood in the lamplight with the phone in one hand and the stone in the other and the sound of the rain filling the whole room like a held breath. It occurred to him, quite calmly, that Kit would have knocked. That Kit, who had waited three years for him to say it, would have stood at the bottom of those stairs for ten minutes with his hand over his mouth. That whoever was coming up had not been afraid of anything in a long time.
He knew the step. That was the worst of it. He knew it, and the knowing came into him like a nail.
The footsteps reached the landing.
They stopped.
He watched the door. It was a plain white door with a brass number six screwed crookedly to it, and a chain he had not fastened, and a lock he had turned himself at nine o'clock. He watched the line of dark beneath it where the landing light came through. Something moved in that line: a shadow, laid across the floor, patient and exactly the height of a man.
There was no knock.
Daniel Hale, who had owed a great deal to a great many people for a long time, took one slow step backward until his shoulders met the wall. The handle began, silently, to turn.