Hemlock and Roses

Chapter 9 Hegel

"When the demolition crews went in, they found part of the green room still standing. The china cabinet had come through. Most of it was broken, but some of the cups survived." He touched the rim with one finger, very lightly. "Mr. Crane asked the foreman if he could have them. He took them home and cleaned them. And then he went round, one by one, to everyone who'd lost someone that night. He didn't say much. He just handed you a cup, and said he was sorry, and left."

"He gave one to Samuel Ortiz's widow," Iris said slowly. "And Grace Liu's family."

"I assume so."

"And you."

"This was Daniel's." His voice didn't change. "He drank from it every Tuesday, waiting for you to finish practising. Two sugars. He was the only person in the building who took sugar in Earl Grey. Mr. Crane remembered that."

Iris looked at the cup. She thought of a boy at the back of an empty hall with a cup of sweet tea, humming the left hand wrong.

"Have you ever drunk from it?"

"No."

She didn't ask why. She didn't need to.

"Did he give one to my father?" she asked instead.

The silence was very short.

"I don't know," Elias said. "You'd have to ask your father."

He didn't say probably. He didn't say I'm sure he did. He didn't say anything that would make it easier. She looked at him and thought, for the second time that day, A liar would have made it prettier.

She picked up her own phone and typed a message before she could talk herself out of it.

Dad, quick question. The cup you left me. Where's it from?

The reply came in less than a minute, as if he'd had the phone in his hand.

Walter Crane gave it to me after the fire, sweetheart. One of the old green room cups. I thought you might like something from Linden. Was that wrong of me? Dad x

She read it twice. She showed it to Elias.

He read it. He didn't say anything.

It was a perfectly reasonable answer. It fitted. Crane gave cups to people connected with that night, her father had sat on the board, Crane had known him. It explained the crest, and the soot, and the cup in her kitchen.

It did not explain why Ben had sworn that nobody came into the building between midnight and eight.

But Iris was so tired of things that didn't fit. And here was something that did.

She put the phone face down on the sofa.

"Tell me something," she said. "About us. Something small."

He looked at her.

"I don't want the big things," she said. "I don't think I can do the big things tonight. Just - one small thing. Something I'd have said. Something we did. Anything."

For a while he didn't answer. She watched him decide. She was learning that he did this, that every word he gave her had been weighed first, not to make it lighter but to make sure it was true.

"There was a goose," he said.

Iris went very still.

"In March. The first spring. It was on the towpath by the river, under the railway bridge. It had fishing line wrapped around one leg. Everyone was walking past it. You stopped." He was looking at the cup, not at her. "You spent forty minutes trying to catch it. It bit you four times. You got the line off with my penknife and then you wouldn't leave it, because you said it had trauma now and needed a support network."

She didn't breathe.

"You named it Hegel," he said. "Because you said it was dialectical. It kept attacking the thing it needed most. I built it a pen on the roof of my old building out of a pallet and chicken wire. You came round every day for three weeks to read it philosophy. It hated Kant."

Iris put her hand over her mouth.

She remembered the goose.

She remembered it with total clarity. The grey wing slapping her wrist. The hiss. The terrible smell of the river under the bridge. The pen on a roof, the chicken wire glinting in the spring sun. Sitting cross-legged on tarmac with a paperback of the Phenomenology of Spirit open on her knees, reading aloud to a goose that bit the pages. She had told that story at dinner parties for years. It was one of her best stories. Everyone always laughed.

And there was nobody in it but her.

She had always told it as if she had been alone. She had never once wondered who had built the pen. Who had held the penknife. Who had stood beside her on the towpath while she was bitten four times. In her memory there was a gap beside her, a shape where someone should have been, like a photograph with a face cut neatly out. She had looked at that photograph a hundred times and never noticed the hole.

"Oh," she said. It came out very small. "Oh, God. You were there."

He got up again. He went to a cupboard under the workbench and took out a flat cardboard box. Old, soft at the corners. He put it on her knees and sat down again, a little further away than before, as if to give her room.

She opened it.

A scarf, dark green, hers. A hair tie with a little enamel daisy, hers. A train ticket to the coast, two returns, dated a summer she couldn't remember. A pressed flower gone brown. A paperback of Meditations with a coffee ring on the cover and her handwriting in the margins, every I crossed with a star.

And at the bottom, a drawing.

It was terrible. It was drawn in biro on the back of a takeaway menu. It showed a very large, very angry goose, a small girl with a lot of hair holding a book, and a tall stick figure standing slightly apart with its arms folded. Above the goose someone had written HEGEL (dialectical). Above the girl: ME (correct about everything). Above the tall stick figure, in the same quick, slanting, joyful hand:

E. (does not talk. builds things. secretly the best person in the world.)

Iris laughed.

It came out of her like something breaking. She laughed and then she was crying, both at once, with the menu in her hands, and she couldn't stop either one. She laughed because the drawing was so bad and so exactly like her, and she cried because she had no memory of drawing it, none at all, and because somewhere in the back of this man's cupboard, for seven years, in a box he had never thrown away, she had been keeping the truth about him in her own handwriting.

Secretly the best person in the world.

"I'm sorry," she said, through it. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I forgot you."

He leaned forward. For a moment she thought he was going to touch her. His hand lifted, and stopped, and settled on the edge of the sofa cushion between them, an inch from her knee, not quite touching.

"You didn't forget on purpose," he said quietly.

"How do you know?"

He looked at the drawing in her hands.

"Because nobody draws that," he said, "and then forgets on purpose."

She stayed. She didn't ask, and he didn't offer; it simply happened, the way the tide comes in. He brought her a blanket and a second pillow and then went back to his chair by the sofa and sat down.

"You're going to watch the door again," she said, drowsy, from under the blanket.

"Yes."

"All night?"

"Yes."

"That's ridiculous. You need to sleep too."

"I'll sleep when you wake up."

She looked at him in the dim light from the river. His profile against the window. His hands loose on his knees. The scar.

"What did I used to call you?" she asked. "When I wasn't calling you E."

There was a long pause.

"Mostly," he said, "you called me the silent one. When you were annoyed with me, you called me Mr. Vane, very formally, to make a point." He was quiet for a moment. "You only did that when you were teasing."

She thought about a doorway. A coat buttoned to the throat. Mr. Vane. She thought about it, and felt something cold move under her ribs, and then she was too tired to hold the thought, and it slipped away from her into the dark.

She slept. She did not lose any time.

On Thursday morning, Catherine Bell let the deadline pass without a word.

On Thursday at noon, she signed Victor Ashby's immunity agreement. Full immunity. Fraud and manslaughter. In return, he would give a sworn statement naming the person who set the fire at Linden Hall. The signing was set for ten o'clock on Friday morning, in Bell's office, with a stenographer and two witnesses.

"Twenty-two hours," Morrow said, putting the phone down. "Then it's over."

He didn't look at her as he said it. He'd hardly looked at her all morning.

At two o'clock, he closed the door of his office and sat on the edge of his desk with his arms folded.

"Your car was outside Vane's workshop all night," he said. "Shaw drove past at midnight and again at six."

Iris felt her face go hot. "Shaw was following me?"

"Shaw was following him. He's a suspect on bail." Morrow's voice was flat. "You stayed the night."

"I slept on his sofa. He sat in a chair. Nothing-"

"I don't care what happened, Hale. I care what it looks like." He rubbed his face with both hands. "You're a consultant on a murder inquiry and you're spending the night at the prime suspect's workshop. If Ashby names Vane tomorrow, every defence lawyer in the country is going to stand up and say the investigation was compromised. They'll say you coached him. They'll say you fed him evidence. They'll get him off, and if he did it, he'll walk."

"He didn't do it."

"You don't know that." It came out louder than he meant it. He took a breath. "You don't know that. You know you like him. That's not the same thing."

She opened her mouth to say I knew him once, and couldn't. She couldn't explain it without explaining everything. The programme. The goose. Fourteen months she didn't remember. A key and a cup and a phone call at two in the morning to a man who called her Rosie.

"Morrow," she said instead. "Have I ever been wrong?"

He looked at her for a long moment.

"No," he said. "That's what scares me."

Her father rang at six.

"Sweetheart. I won't keep you. Are you free tomorrow evening?"

"Tomorrow's Friday."

"I know." A small laugh. "I'm breaking our tradition. I want to see you. There's something I should have told you a long time ago, about your mother. Something I think you're ready to hear now." A pause. "Come at seven. I'll cook."

Iris stood at her window. Across the city, she could see the dark line of the river.

"Is it about Linden?"

Another pause. Very slightly longer.

"It's about you," her father said gently. "It's always been about you. Seven o'clock, darling."

He rang off.

Friday. Ten o'clock in the morning, Ashby would name the person who lit the fire.

Seven o'clock in the evening, her father would tell her a secret about her mother.

She did not know why the two things felt connected. She only knew that they did, the way you know a storm is coming before you can hear it.

That night, the temperature fell below freezing for the first time that year.

Iris was cold in a way she couldn't fix. She'd turned the heating up and put on two jumpers and she was still shivering, sitting on her bed at eleven at night with her laptop on her knees, reading and rereading Ashby's statement until the words stopped meaning anything. At half past eleven she gave up and went to the wardrobe for something warmer.