Hemlock and Roses

Chapter8 A Musician

On the far side of the glass, Iris went very still.

At eleven forty-seven, another person came out of the building, walking fast.

Elias had said came out. Elias had said another person. Ashby had gone in at 11:44 — Elias had seen that. And now Ashby claimed he had come out at 11:47. By the north stair.

Elias's car had been at the loading bay. On the south side.

Two people, she thought. Two people left at 11:47. One by the north stair. One by the loading bay. Ashby was the one Elias couldn't have seen.

"And Walter Crane?" Morrow was saying.

"Crane was paid to say the building was empty. Twenty thousand." Ashby closed his eyes. "He didn't want to. He was a decent man. But his wife was ill then, and the treatments—" He stopped. "He never forgave himself. He never forgave any of us."

"You swear you didn't know anyone was inside."

"I swear it. I swear it on my children." His voice cracked. "Ortiz was supposed to be on his rounds in the east wing. Liu was supposed to have gone home at eleven. And the boy — the Vane boy — I didn't even know he existed until I read it in the papers."

"Who lit the fire, Mr. Ashby?"

Silence.

"You've told us everything else," Morrow said. "You've given us conspiracy and fraud and you've handed us Walter Crane's perjury. Give us the name."

"Not until my immunity is signed. All of it. Not just the fraud." Ashby's lawyer was nodding hard. "The DA has offered me immunity on the insurance fraud. Not on the manslaughter. Three people died, Detective. I'm not putting my name next to that without protection."

"Then give me something. Anything. Show good faith."

For a long moment Ashby sat with his hands flat on the table, very still.

"When I went down to the riser cupboard," he said slowly, "someone was already in the basement. In the archive room, next door. I didn't see them. The door was mostly shut. But I heard them."

"Heard what?"

Ashby's mouth twisted, as if the memory were a taste.

"Humming," he said. "Very softly. They were humming while they worked. Something classical. Piano music." He looked at his hands. "Chopin, I think. One of the nocturnes."

On the other side of the glass, the floor seemed to drop away beneath Iris's feet.

She didn't know why. She told herself she didn't know why. Half the world could hum a Chopin nocturne. There were a thousand of them. A hundred. Twenty-one, actually. She knew that number without having to think about it, the way she knew the number of her own fingers.

Beside her, in the dark, Morrow's junior detective, Shaw, said in an undertone, "A musician. Like Vane."

Iris turned her head very slowly.

"Elias Vane was sitting in his car," she said.

"So he says." Shaw shrugged. "Who's to say he didn't get in there before his brother? He tunes the bloody pianos. He'd have had keys. Maybe the kid followed him in. Maybe that's why he's been carrying it all these years."

"That's not—"

She stopped. Because the words that had come into her mouth were That's not him, and she had no proof, none at all, only a long grey room and a man with his hand flat against a window.

Behind the glass, Morrow was leaning back in his chair. He looked up, at the mirror, at the place where he knew she was standing. His face was expressionless. But she had worked with him for eleven years, and she could read that face like a page.

He was thinking the same thing Shaw was.

"I'll hold the charge," Catherine Bell said over the phone at noon. "Ashby's given us conspiracy and perjury, which means Crane had a reason to be silenced that's got nothing to do with your piano tuner's grief. That's reasonable doubt, and I'm not stupid. I'm not charging Vane on Thursday."

Iris closed her eyes. "Thank you."

"Don't." Bell's voice sharpened. "Because I've also got a man saying the arsonist was humming Chopin in the basement. And I've got a suspect who tunes pianos for a living, who had a key to that hall, who was on site at the time of the fire, and whose only alibi is his own word that he was sitting in a car." A pause. "Professor, if your piano tuner hums Chopin, I want to know about it."

She went to the workshop anyway.

She told herself it was because she needed to ask him about the keys. She told herself it was professional, and necessary, and nothing at all to do with her father's voice in the dark saying Stay away from that workshop. Please. For me.

She climbed the four flights of iron stairs with her heart going hard against her ribs. He opened the door before she knocked. As if he'd heard her on the second landing. As if he'd been listening for her.

He looked as if he hadn't slept either. There were shadows under his eyes like bruises.

He stood aside to let her in. He did not ask why she'd come.

"My father says," Iris said, before she could stop herself, before she'd even taken off her coat, "that after the fire you became obsessed with me. That you waited outside our house. That you rang at all hours. That you frightened me so badly I begged him never to let you near me."

Elias closed the door very gently behind her.

"Is that true?" she asked.

She did it the way she had been taught. Small, closed, simple questions. Each one a single step.

"Did you wait outside my house?"

"Yes."

Her heart dropped.

"Once," he said. "The night after you came to my door. I stood across the road for four hours. Your bedroom light was off the whole time. At two in the morning, your father came out and stood on the front step and looked at me. He didn't say anything. I went home."

"Did you ring me?"

"Yes."

"How many times?"

He didn't look away. "About four hundred."

She stared at him. He said it as plainly as he said everything, without apology and without defence, and she realised that he wasn't going to soften a single word of it. He wasn't going to make it sound better than it was. He was simply going to tell her, and let her decide.

"Did I ever answer?"

"No. The number was disconnected after the third day. I kept ringing it anyway." His voice was very quiet. "I don't know why. I suppose I thought that if I rang it enough times, someone would pick up."

"Did you frighten me?"

For the first time, he hesitated.

"I don't know," he said at last. "I hope not. I never wanted to." He looked down at his hands. "I didn't know what else to do. You were there, and then you weren't. I couldn't find the place where you'd gone."

Iris swallowed. Her throat hurt.

"Did you have a key to Linden Hall?"

"Yes. Everyone who worked on the instruments had one."

"Were you inside the building before the fire started? Before 11:52?"

"No."

"Can anyone prove that?"

"No."

"Do you hum, Elias?"

He looked at her, very still.

"When you work," she said. Her voice wasn't quite steady. "When you're tuning, or concentrating. Do you hum?"

"No." A pause. "Daniel did. Constantly. It drove me mad."

"What did he hum?"

"Whatever you'd been playing." The corner of his mouth moved, not a smile, something sadder. "He'd sit at the back of the hall on Tuesdays while you practised, and then he'd hum it in the car all the way home. Wrong, usually. He always got the left hand wrong."

The room was very quiet. Outside, the river moved.

Iris stood in the middle of the long grey room with her coat still on. Every answer he had given her was true. She could hear that they were true; she could hear it the way he must have heard the half-tone in a voice in a doorway. And not one of them helped him. Not one. A man who waited outside her house. A man who rang four hundred times. A man with a key, at the scene, with no alibi but his own word. Laid end to end, every true thing he had told her made him look exactly like what her father had said he was.

And he had told her anyway. All of it. Without hesitation. Knowing exactly how it sounded.

She thought: A liar would have made it prettier.

She thought: He doesn't know how to make it prettier. He has never once tried.

The room tilted.

It tilted quite gently at first, the long grey windows swinging slowly sideways like the deck of a ship, and she thought, with a kind of distant, academic interest, Oh. I haven't eaten since that sandwich. And then the floor came up very fast.

He caught her.

She didn't see him move. One moment he was by the door and the next his arms were around her, one hand at the back of her head, holding it against his shoulder, the way you would hold something you had dropped once before and had sworn you would never drop again.

"I've got you," he said. "I've got you."

She tried to say she was fine. It came out as something else.

She woke on a sofa she didn't recognise, under a coat that smelled of sawdust and rain.

For one long, floating moment, she didn't know where she was, and the old panic began to rise in her chest. Where am I. What time is it. What did I do. She sat up too fast, heart pounding, and looked at her hands.

Nothing in them. No cup. No phone.

The light had changed. It was late afternoon; the river beyond the windows had turned to beaten copper. The clock on the far wall said ten past five.

She had been asleep for three hours.

And she remembered falling asleep. That was the strangest thing. She remembered him lowering her onto the sofa. She remembered the weight of his coat being laid over her, very carefully, from her shoulders to her feet. She remembered the scrape of a chair being pulled close, and the creak as he sat down in it, and then a long, warm, enormous silence, and then nothing. Ordinary, clean, dreamless nothing.

No gaps. No lost time. No taste of bergamot.

He was sitting in the chair beside the sofa, exactly where she remembered, with his elbows on his knees. He hadn't moved. He hadn't picked up a tool. He hadn't, as far as she could tell, done anything at all in three hours except sit there and watch the door.

When she sat up, he looked at her.

"You slept," he said.

"I slept." She heard her voice c***k. She didn't know why that, of all things, was the thing that made her want to cry. "I haven't slept like that in—" She couldn't finish.

He didn't say anything. He got up, went to the small sink in the corner, filled a glass with water, and brought it back to her. Not tea. He put it into her hands and folded her fingers around it, his own fingers warm and rough and very gentle, and then he let go and sat back down.

She drank it. She looked at him over the rim of the glass.

"You watched the door," she said. "The whole time."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"In case someone came for you," he said simply.

He didn't say who. She didn't ask. She found that she was afraid of the answer, and that she didn't know which answer she was afraid of.

Priya rang at nine, while Iris was sitting in her car outside her own building, not quite ready to go in.