Hemlock and Roses

Chapter5 The Gap on the Wall

Ben Okafor had worked the front desk of her building for nine years. He was six foot four, did the crossword in pen, and had a laugh that could be heard on the third floor. He also, Iris knew, never took a break on the night shift, because he said the night was when buildings got up to mischief.

"Ben. Quick question."

"Professor Sunshine." He beamed at her over his newspaper. Then his smile faltered. "Hey. You all right? You look like a Monday."

"It's Tuesday."

"Exactly. That's worse." He folded the paper. "What's up?"

"Monday morning. Early. Did anyone come in to see me? An older man, tall, grey hair? About six-thirty?"

Ben shook his head. "Not on my watch. Nobody came in from midnight till Darren took over at eight. Not a soul." He frowned. "Only you."

"Me?"

"You went out about half two. Came back a bit before four." He shrugged. "I figured you'd been called out. Police business."

Iris felt the floor of the lobby tilt, very slightly, under her feet.

"Did I say anything?"

"Said good morning. Very polite." Ben's frown deepened, as if something about it had bothered him at the time and was only now finding its way to the surface. "Called me Mr. Okafor, actually. Which was weird. You've never called me Mr. Okafor in your life. You call me Ben. Or Benjamin, when you're telling me off for the crossword."

"I was tired," Iris said.

"Yeah." He looked at her a moment longer than was comfortable. "Yeah. That's what I thought."

She was halfway to the door when he called after her.

"Professor? You weren't wearing a coat. In that rain. I almost said something. But you walked like you didn't feel it."

In the car, she did something she had never done before. She sat with the engine off in the multi-storey car park under the precinct, both hands on the wheel, and she argued with herself.

Premise one: your father says he visited at six-thirty and you let him in.

Premise two: Ben says nobody came in from midnight to eight.

They cannot both be true.

So one of them is wrong.

Ben, then. Ben must have nodded off. Ben must have been in the back office. Ben was a nice man doing a long shift, and people made mistakes. Her father was a careful man who had never told her a lie in her life. It was simpler to believe that Ben was wrong. It was much, much simpler.

And yet the part of her that had been trained, by her father, to never accept the simpler answer just because it was simpler, sat very still in the back of her mind and waited for her to notice.

If your father is right, then you let him in and don't remember.

If Ben is right, then you went out into the rain at half past two in the morning, without a coat, and came back at four, and don't remember.

Either way, said the voice that sounded like her own, you don't remember.

She took her hands off the wheel. They were shaking. She looked at them until they stopped.

Then she got out of the car, smoothed her hair, put on her lipstick in the wing mirror, and went upstairs to work, because there were fifty-one hours left, and a man in a holding cell who had handed her a blanket.

Victor Ashby had a lawyer now. The lawyer was young, expensive and visibly nervous, and he looked at Iris the way you look at a dog that has bitten someone before.

"My client will speak to Detective Morrow," he said. "Alone."

"I'm a consultant on this case—"

"My client was very clear." The lawyer cleared his throat. "He won't be in a room with you."

Iris looked through the glass. Ashby sat at the table with his back to the window, his shoulders hunched, his silver hair uncombed. He did not turn around. He knew she was there, and he would not turn around.

So she stood in the dark of the observation room and watched Morrow go in alone.

It took forty minutes. Most of it was the lawyer talking. But near the end, Ashby leaned forward and said something too quietly for the microphone to catch, and Morrow's face changed.

When he came out, he shut the door behind him and stood with his back against it.

"He'll talk," Morrow said. "Full statement. Linden, the fire, the insurance. But he wants immunity on the fraud and protection, and his lawyer wants twenty-four hours to draft the deal with Bell."

"Protection from whom?"

Morrow looked at her. He seemed to be choosing his words.

"He wouldn't say. But he gave me a message for you."

"For me."

"He said—" Morrow rubbed his jaw. "He said, 'Tell her to stop asking questions. For her own sake. Not mine.'"

Iris didn't answer.

"Hale." Morrow's voice dropped. "Is there something you're not telling me?"

She thought of Ben in the lobby, frowning. You walked like you didn't feel it.

"No," she said. And for the first time in eleven years of working with him, she lied to Morrow.

He knew. She saw him know. He let it go, the way he always let things go with her: carefully, like setting something fragile on a high shelf to deal with later.

"Forensics came back on the fire escape," he said instead. "Partial print on the third rung, in the grime. Men's, size nine. Leather sole, stitched welt. Handmade Oxford, they think. The heel's got a particular wear pattern, a man who drags his left foot slightly when he turns." He shrugged. "Expensive shoes. Ashby's the type, but Ashby was forty minutes away. Maybe he paid someone."

"A hired killer who washes up after himself?"

"I didn't say it made sense."

Iris nodded. She thought of nothing at all. She thought very deliberately of nothing.

But somewhere underneath the nothing, unbidden, came a memory of Sunday evenings when she was small: sitting on the bottom stair in the hall, watching her father polish his shoes. Black leather. Handmade. He did it every week, slowly and beautifully, the brush moving in long, even strokes. And when he stood up to put them away, he always turned on his left foot. Always the same small, dragging pivot. An old tennis injury, he said.

She put the memory down. She put it somewhere very far away.

"What size are your shoes, Morrow?" she asked.

"Ten. Why?"

"No reason," said Iris.

They released Elias Vane on police bail at ten past four that afternoon.

She hadn't planned to be there. She had told herself she needed to collect a file from the custody desk, and that it was a coincidence the file needed collecting at four. She stood by the front doors with her coat buttoned correctly this time, and a scarf, and when he came down the corridor with his belongings in a clear plastic bag, she felt something in her chest lift and then catch, like a bird hitting glass.

He saw her and stopped.

"Professor Hale."

"Mr. Vane. Do you have anyone picking you up?"

"No."

"Do you have anywhere to go? Your flat's still sealed."

"My workshop." He hesitated. "It's across the river. I'll get the bus."

"It's raining," Iris said.

"It's always raining."

"Get in the car, Mr. Vane."

He was the quietest passenger she had ever driven. He sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the road, and when she turned the radio on, he didn't ask her to change the station; when she turned it off again, he didn't ask why.

Iris had always found silence intolerable. Within five minutes she was talking.

She told him the DA had a cat named Rumpole and a terrible taste in wine. She told him Morrow had tried to quit smoking eleven times and was now on a regime of mints so strong they had once made a suspect cry. She told him about the boy in her lecture who had fallen asleep with his pen upright, and how she had stood there for a full minute, wondering whether it was art.

She heard herself and wondered where it was coming from. Three days of grey, and now, in a small car in the rain with a man accused of murder, the lights inside her were flickering back on one by one, as if they had only been waiting for the right person to stand in the room.

He didn't laugh. But at the story of Morrow's mints, the corner of his mouth moved, and she found herself absurdly pleased, as if she had won something.

At a petrol station on the edge of the river, he asked her to stop. He went inside without a word and came back two minutes later with a cheese sandwich and a bottle of water. He set them on her lap, then put on his seatbelt and looked out of the window as if nothing had happened.

"What's this?"

"You haven't eaten today."

"How could you possibly know that?"

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. She looked at the sandwich, and then at him, and it occurred to her that the only person who had ever noticed when she forgot to eat was her mother, and her mother had been dead for three years.

She ate the sandwich. It was the best thing she had tasted in a week.

His workshop was on the top floor of an old warehouse on the south bank, up four flights of iron stairs that rang under their feet. He unlocked the door and stood aside to let her in first.

Iris stopped on the threshold.

It was a long, high room full of grey river light. Three pianos stood at the far end with their fronts removed, their insides exposed: rows of hammers, rows of strings, delicate and terrible as the ribs of a whale. Workbenches ran along one wall, every tool laid out in perfect order, every chisel and pair of pliers and felt hammer in its place. It smelled of sawdust, wood polish, and cold metal.

And on the wall above the bench hung a long rack of tuning forks.

There were dozens of them, arranged by pitch, gleaming softly in the half-light. Each hung from its own small brass hook, and each hook had a tiny handwritten label beneath it.

All except one.

Near the middle of the rack, one hook was empty. The label beneath it read simply: A. 440. D.

Iris looked at the gap for a long time. She thought of a tuning fork in a plastic bag, a pair of worn initials, a coat pocket that was still warm.

She didn't say anything. Neither did he. He took off his wet jacket and hung it on the back of the door, and filled a kettle at a small sink in the corner, and then stopped, looked at it, and put it down again without switching it on.

"I don't have anything except tea," he said. "You don't drink tea."

"How do you—"

"You told me in the interview room."

She hadn't. She was almost certain she hadn't. But she was no longer certain of very much, and the words died on her lips.

She walked slowly to the far end of the room, past the opened pianos, to the one that stood apart from the others. It was an old upright, against the window, under a heavy grey dust cover. Something about the way the cover had been folded, neatly, carefully, the corners tucked under, made it seem less like an instrument waiting for repair and more like something that was being kept.

"Is this one yours?"

He was behind her. She hadn't heard him cross the room.

"Yes."

"Can I see it?"

A long pause.

"Iris."

There it was again. Her name, in his mouth, the way you say a word you have said ten thousand times.

"Please," she said.

He didn't stop her. She lifted the cover back. Walnut, worn pale on the edges where hands had rested over decades. She raised the fallboard. The keys were old ivory, yellowed like the pages of a book that had been read many times.