The Width of Glass

Chapter Ten — What Vera Found

Eliot pov

Vera called at seven thirteen.

She didn't say hello. She said, the cash went to three places. The first is a private investigator operating out of Kennington, name of Roy Greer, specialises in locating people who don't want to be located. The second is a locksmith. Not the one on Peel Street. A different one, no shop front, works privately, the kind you find through the kind of people who need doors opened without the owner knowing.

I said, and the third.

She said, a man named Paul Wenn. Forty three, former police, left the force under circumstances that were described officially as retirement and unofficially as the alternative to a disciplinary hearing. He does private work now. The nature of the work is flexible.

I said, flexible meaning.

She said, meaning he does what he's paid to do and doesn't ask questions about why. He has a history of taking commissions from men in domestic situations who need someone to do things they can't be seen doing themselves.

I sat with that for a moment.

I said, so we have someone finding her, someone who can get through her door, and someone who does the flexible work once he's inside.

Vera said, that's how I read it.

I said, timeline.

She said, Greer was paid three weeks ago. The locksmith two weeks ago. Wenn was paid six days ago.

Six days ago. I ran the calculation backward. Six days ago Mara had been in her apartment, had crossed the street for the first time, had sat in my kitchen and asked me twelve questions from a notepad and drunk her coffee with both hands wrapped around the mug and left at nine thirty and crossed the road and gone upstairs and turned her lamp on.

Six days ago Daniel had already put three people in motion.

I said, is Wenn active.

Vera said, the payment was a retainer. He's waiting for instruction.

I said, can you find him.

She said, I already have. I'm sending you an address. Eliot, this needs to move today. Not this week. Today.

I said, I know. Thank you Vera.

She said, don't thank me. Just finish it.

She hung up.

I looked at the address she sent. Wenn lived in Deptford, a flat above a dry cleaning business on a residential street that would be quiet at this hour on a weekday morning. I looked at the time. Seven twenty two. I looked at the file on my desk, eight weeks of accumulated detail, the withdrawn complaints and the financial records and the pattern across three women and now this, the three payments that together constituted not a threat but a plan, a specific and staged plan with a locksmith and a flexible man and a woman in a fourth floor apartment who locked her door with the chain and the deadbolt and didn't know that neither of those things were the problem anymore.

I called a number I hadn't called in fourteen months.

It rang four times and then a man's voice said, I wondered when you'd surface.

His name was Marcus and he occupied a position within an institution whose name I had signed documents promising not to disclose in any context, which I was about to do technically indirectly in service of something I was prepared to defend if it came to that. Marcus and I had worked together for six years and had, at the end of those six years, arrived at a mutual and unspoken understanding that each of us possessed enough information about the other to make any formal falling out inadvisable for both parties.

This was, in the professional context we had inhabited, what passed for a close friendship.

I said, I need a favour.

He said, you need more than a favour. You need the kind of institutional weight that produces a specific kind of conversation with a specific kind of man. I'm going to assume you have enough to justify that conversation.

I said, I have three withdrawn complaints, a pattern across three women over nine years, financial transfers to a private investigator, an unlicensed locksmith and a former police officer with a flexible working history, and a rental car that has appeared outside a residential building seventeen times in six weeks.

Marcus was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, send me the file.

I sent it.

He called back in eleven minutes, which was faster than I had expected and told me the file was sufficient and that he was prepared to move on it. The conversation with Daniel would happen today. Not a police conversation, not yet, but a conversation with enough weight behind it to make the cost of continuing a clear and present reality rather than an abstract possibility.

He said, this woman. She's not connected to any of this professionally.

I said, no.

He said, then how did you come to have eight weeks of surveillance on her former partner.

I said, I live across the street.

There was a pause.

Marcus said, of course you do.

He said he would be in touch by noon and hung up.

I stood at the window and looked at the fourth floor of the building across the road. The kitchen light was on. She would be getting ready for work, or already gone, moving through the city in the ordinary way of someone who didn't know that six days ago a man named Paul Wenn had received a retainer to wait for instruction.

I typed a message.

Don't go anywhere alone today. If you need to leave the office at any point take a cab not the tube. I'll explain tonight.

Her reply came three minutes later.

How bad.

I looked at the question for a moment. Two words, no punctuation, the same economy she brought to everything when she was being direct rather than careful.

I typed. Bad enough that it's moving today. Are you at work.

She said. Just arrived. Eliot.

I said. Yes.

She said. Whatever you're doing. Thank you.

I put the phone down and looked at it for a moment on the desk in front of me, her message sitting on the screen in the grey morning light coming through the window, and I thought about what she had said the previous evening. That she hadn't expected to feel less alone here than she had in two years.

I had not said the corresponding thing, which was that I hadn't expected to feel anything in particular and had been feeling something I didn't have a clean name for since approximately the fourth evening she had sat at her kitchen table with her light on and her book open and her feet pulled up underneath her.

I had not said it because the timing was wrong and the circumstances were wrong and there was a man named Paul Wenn in Deptford waiting for instruction and until that instruction was permanently unavailable I was not going to say anything that shifted the weight of what was between us, because she had enough to carry and I was not going to add to it before I had done the one thing I was actually in a position to do.

I went to my desk.

I looked at the file.

I thought about Claire Ashworth in Marseille under a different professional name. Sarah Fielding with her withdrawn complaint and her city she had left without a forwarding address. The woman before them whose first name might have been Kate and whose current location nobody had been able to confirm.

I thought about Mara arriving with her lamp and her two suitcases on an October Tuesday and the specific quality of relief in the way she had stood in the street for a moment before going inside, as if she were asking the building something and the building had answered correctly.

I thought about the line she had written at the bottom of her notepad and crossed out but hadn't torn away.

I hadn't been able to read it from across the table. I had not tried particularly hard to read it. But I knew the shape of the thing it probably said and I was aware that knowing it, and doing nothing about it until this was finished, was the most difficult exercise of restraint I had managed in a considerable time.

Marcus called at eleven forty seven.

He said, the conversation happened.

I said, and.

He said, Wenn has been stood down. The locksmith has been advised that his services are no longer required under circumstances that will make him reluctant to offer them to Daniel Marsh or anyone connected to him again. Greer has been spoken to in terms he found persuasive. And Daniel himself has had a conversation with two people whose institutional weight he correctly identified as sufficient to make continuing inadvisable.

I said, how did he take it.

Marcus said, the way men like that always take it. He was charming and cooperative and utterly furious underneath and he will spend the next several weeks deciding whether we meant it.

I said, and if he decides we didn't.

Marcus said, then we have a second conversation that is considerably less collegial than the first and produces consequences he will not be able to manage his way around. The documentation you sent me is enough for that conversation. It is also enough, if it comes to it, for the kind of formal process that produces the kind of record that follows a person in perpetuity.

I said, does he know that.

Marcus said, he knows that now, yes.

I said, thank you Marcus.

He said, you live across the street.

I said, yes.

He said, Eliot. Get a hobby.

He hung up.

I sat at my desk in the quiet of my apartment and looked at the file and thought about the word finished and what it meant and what came after it.

Then I picked up my phone and typed a message to Mara.

It's done. Come over when you're home.

I put the phone face down on the desk and waited.

Outside the window the street went about its ordinary afternoon business, unhurried and indifferent, the same street it had always been, and I sat in the middle of it and felt something I hadn't felt in a long time.

I felt like I was in the right place.