Sunday, the seventh of December. Five o'clock. Three days to the burial.
She had walked from Church Street to Lowmarsh Green by the streets, in twenty-five minutes for a fifteen-minute road, behind a man with a flare who was walking a bus. It went at the pace of a funeral. Behind the bus came a hearse with its lamps lit, and behind the hearse another, and nobody spoke. She rehearsed as she went, in a low voice, to the back of the bus. Sergeant, I'd like to report a doubt. It sounded very well. Sergeant, I have reason to think. She had never had reason to think anything in her life, and it sounded even better, and she resolved to say it in exactly those words and not one more.
Lowmarsh police station had a blue lamp over the door and a bench along the wall inside, and on the bench, when Dot pushed in out of the dark, every kind of trouble the fog had made in three days was sitting with its hat on its knee.
A telephone rang on the desk at intervals and nobody lifted it, and after the fifth ring it stopped, as if it had been let off. The stove in the corner was a black iron thing with a chimney that went up through the ceiling and a smell of hot serge coming off it, and the floor round it was a muddy map of everyone's boots.
There was a woman in a fur collar with a shopping basket on her lap, saying to nobody that she had only gone out for a loaf. There was a man of forty with a wireless set held tight under his coat, which stuck out in front like a second stomach and made a small noise every time he breathed. There was a bus driver, grey to the ears, telling a constable in a low, dazed voice that the railings at the river end had been in the wrong place. And against the radiator, in a man's cap, asleep sitting up, there was a small boy with a luggage label pinned to the front of his coat.
She read it upside down. She could not help it. In block capitals, in indelible pencil, it said: ALAN. ABOUT 5. FOUND CHURCH STREET. SAYS HIS NAN HAS A GREEN COAT.
Under it, in another hand, somebody had put: Nan not yet claimed.
"Waiting?" said the constable at the desk, a boy himself, with a red chapped chin.
"To see the sergeant. It's about a death. It isn't, it's not urgent, it's — I've been to the coroner's officer, and he said if there was a crime I ought to —" Dot stopped. "It'll keep. I'll sit."
She sat next to the boy. The bench was warm where he had been. His feet did not reach the floor, and his boots had been polished, by somebody, recently.
"I'm Dot," she told him, in a low voice, since he was asleep and it didn't count. "I've a coat that's not green. It's brown, look. It's a very poor brown, I've had it since the war. I expect your nan's is a better one. I expect she's out there this minute going along every railing in Lowmarsh asking for a small boy in a cap, and getting the wrong ones, and she'll come in here in a minute in a green coat and shout at you. And you'll be very glad."
The boy slept on. His mouth was open a little, and there was fog in his eyelashes, or perhaps only dust.
She waited an hour and ten minutes, and she was not good at it. It was going on for six. She had Winston to find, and Mrs Ruddock shut the street door at ten and charged a penny for opening it again, and at this rate she would be paying it.
The woman in the fur collar turned on the bench and faced her.
"You're the one from the register. The Tanyard Road one. You did my sister's boy."
"I did. Yes. I'm sorry about —"
"Mine'll be in your book by Christmas, won't he?" She held the basket tight. "He went for coal Thursday. He's not a man to go far. He knows the way to the yard, he's been going for thirty years, there's no call for him not to know the way."
"Not if I can help it," said Dot. It was the stupidest thing she had ever said, and the woman nodded at it, twice.
She watched her, a little later, be told that her husband had gone out for coal on Thursday and it was early days. She watched the man with the wireless be asked, very courteously, by a sergeant with a moustache and a red pencil, whether it was his own wireless, and where he'd bought it, and what the number on the back was, and whether he'd care to say that number now, or whether he'd like to take it out and look. The man took it out. It had no number on the back, only a rectangle of cleaner wood where a plate had been.
"That'll be a night in the cells, then, sir," said the sergeant. "Not a hard one."
She watched the bus driver told to go home. He stood in the middle of the lino with his cap in his hands and said he didn't know where that was. He had driven the number forty-six into the railings at four miles an hour, with forty on board, and not a scratch on anybody, and he wanted somebody to say that was a good thing. Dot said it, from the bench. "That's very good. Four miles an hour is very good, in that." He turned to her gratefully, without seeing her, and somebody took him away for a cup of tea.
The bench turned over twice while she sat on it. New troubles came in out of the fog, took their places, and went through the door at the back; the old ones did not go. A clock over the desk ticked with a sound like a small man tapping his teeth. Every so often the door opened and every head on the bench turned, together, to see if it was a green coat.
Nobody had claimed Alan. Dot took her last barley sugar out of her coat pocket, and unwrapped it, and held it out. The boy's eyes came open, dark and unblinking, and he took it and did not eat it. He held it in his fist against the label.
"He's not spoken," said the young constable, on his way past with a mug. "Not a word since they brought him. We've looked. We've looked everywhere. There's a good many green coats."
"Yes," said Dot. "Good luck."
"Next," said the sergeant.
Sergeant Bowyer was a solid, sandy man with a moustache trimmed to a ruler and a tunic buttoned to the throat, and he wrote everything in a big black book, in pencil, with his tongue pushed into his cheek. He did not look up until she was at the desk. When he did, he had already decided which box she went in.
"Miss. Name."
"Dorothea Amory. Deputy Registrar, Tanyard Road."
He wrote it down, and the name of her office, and the time, in that order, as if the fog might be asked to account for it. "Ten past six." He looked up. "You've been sitting there an hour."
"An hour and ten. I didn't mind. I've been talking to a boy."
"Alan," said Bowyer. "He's not said a word."
"He wouldn't. I was doing all of it."
"Go on, then, Miss."
"Sergeant Bowyer, I've — it's a death. It isn't recent. I mean it's recent, it's Friday, it's a Mr Alfred Bracegirdle of number fourteen Cinder Row, and I'm not sure I'm right to be here."
"Deceased."
"Yes. Well. Not — deceased. Yes."
"Fourteen Cinder Row." He breathed through his moustache. "I know Cinder Row. I was there in August for a stolen mangle and a stabbing, and the mangle was the harder to get back. That's a street with a good many people in it and no love lost. Who's certified?"
"Dr Kemp. Bronchitis and cardiac failure. Only the family have all said the same thing, in the same words, the son and the neighbours and the nurse, his chest took him, in his bed, with the nurse's hand, and the son gave me a false trade on the form. He said greengrocer, and he was an agent, he collected rents. He said it himself and then he took it back. And the doctor stopped in the middle of a sentence, and there was a window open in a fog. I've held the green form, that's the burial certificate, a day, which is all Mr Marchbanks allows, and Mr Marchbanks is going to sign it over my head at nine in the morning, and Mr Truscott said if there's a crime it's the police, and I don't know that there is. I only know there's a house that's been told what to say. Is there a form?"
She had said it in one breath. The moustache had not moved.
"Who says it's the same words? You?"
"Me. I heard it. Three times, four."
"Yourself."
"Yes. And —" She had a mouth like a tap with a broken washer. She could feel it going. "And a man who noticed."
Bowyer turned a page. "A son put the wrong trade on a form," he said.
"Yes."
"The doctor says chest."
"Yes, but —"
"The coroner's officer has seen it and written no further action. Has he a mark on him?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen him. He's at the undertaker's."
"Any property missing? A bruise, a broken window, a door forced? A person seen going in or coming out that shouldn't?"
"There was a window open. On purpose. By the nurse."
"That's a window." He wrote it down. She watched him do it, upside down, in pencil, in a large square hand. Window, open. "Miss. I've a man drowned in a horse trough."
"A —"
"Lowmarsh Green. Friday teatime. Eighteen inches of water. Couldn't see it. He walked in, in a good coat, and lay down." He did not seem to find it funny, and neither did she. "I've had nine deaths on this desk since Thursday that came in the door as a natural and went out as a natural, and every one of them had a family said the same thing. Chest, in bed, nurse. Because it's what happened. Because it's a fog. I've a sergeant on the river with fourteen off a barge, and an inspector who wants a wireless man charged, and a lady at the back door who's lost her cat. The living come first this week. I'll have the dead when I've got the living off the street."
"I've a form for a body with a mark on it," he said. He did not raise his voice. "I've a form for a body that's been found. I've a form for a person that's gone missing. You've come in with a fourth kind, Miss, and I've not got a form for it."
"Yes," said Dot. "That's fair. That's completely fair, I said it was nothing. I said to myself on the way it was nothing. I'm probably wrong."
"Then I'll say good evening."
"It's only that the lodger came to me."
It went past her a full second behind herself.
"The lodger," said Bowyer.
"He's — it doesn't matter. He's the only one in that house who says it wasn't his chest. He said — well, it's just a thing that he said, he notices things, he's been a conductor six years, and he said —"
"Lodger." The pencil had stopped over the page. "What sort of lodger?"
"Jamaican," said Dot. "He's lovely. He's a bus conductor. He came in on Saturday, he came in to say it before anyone said it about him, and I thought that was the bravest — he's very brave, honestly, he's — he's a Methodist."
"Is he."
"He's from Kingston. He was in the R.A.F."
"Had words with the deceased, did he?"
"No."
"No?"
"Well. About the rent. Only that was last week, and everyone in the house has had words with —"
The pencil was moving.
She watched it go across the page. It was a very neat pencil, and it did not hurry. Lodger. Jamaican. Rent. Words. It went down the ruled lines as a man goes down a stair.
"Name," said Bowyer.
"Oh, no."
"Name of the lodger, Miss."
"Sergeant, it's nothing to do with —"
"For the record. In case anything arises."
"Ferrar," said her mouth. "Winston. Fourteen Cinder Row. First floor back." She heard it come out, all of it, at her usual speed, the address, the floor, the back. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I don't mean he's — it was the rent, it was a quarrel about a rent that is a normal thing that happens between a man and his landlord, and I didn't mean —"
"Nobody's said anything, Miss."
"I'd like to take it back. Would you take it back? You're writing it. I'd like it not to be written. I'd like to say he's a person who's — that's not the point of what I came about. It's the house. It was never him."
"Nobody's charging anybody," said Bowyer. "The doctor says chest."
He turned the book round to read it over, with his tongue in his cheek. Then he took the pen from his top pocket, and across the head of the page, above her own words, he printed a line in capitals as square as bricks. He did it slowly, so as to get it right. She could read it upside down from the desk, as she could read everything.
LODGER FERRAR W., COLOURED, RENT DISPUTE.
And beneath it, the address.
"Sergeant Bowyer. You needn't. I'd just like you to — could you write underneath that I was wrong?"
"Were you?"
"I might have been. I'm always —" She held on to the edge of the desk. "I said the rent. It was an ordinary rent. I made it sound as if he'd — I'm dreadful at this, I say a thing and then I say the other thing, and by the time I've said the other thing the first thing's out. Could it just go back in the book?"
"It's in the book. That's where it goes." He took hold of the corner of the page and tore it out, and the small sound of it went through the whole room, a rip like cloth. The man with the wireless looked up. The woman in the fur collar looked at her basket. "Garrard. Pin."
The red-chinned constable came out from behind the partition with a drawing pin between his finger and thumb, and handed it over without a word, and went back in.
Bowyer got up. It was the first time she had seen how big he was. He walked with the page across the office to the far wall, where a cork board hung between a fire notice and the King, and stopped in front of it.
It was covered in paper. She could read it from where she stood. MISSING: Mrs Ada Leach, 81, Tanyard Road, brown coat, last seen Friday. MISSING: cat, tabby, answers to Sid. WANTED: Kenneth Dobbs, 23, for the larceny of a bicycle. MISSING: girl, 14, Mabel Shore. Please contact her mother. LARCENY. 22 FLAX STREET. TIN (CORONATION), CLUB MONEY, GLOVES. FRIDAY P.M. There were dozens, in pencil and biro and one in crayon, and some of them curled at the corners from being there since before the fog.
"That's Mrs R's," said Dot, before she could stop it. "My landlady. The young one took it down on her step."
"Then she's a form," said Bowyer.
He found a space between the cat and a tin from Flax Street. He put the page in it, and pressed the pin in with his thumb.
"You don't need to put it there," said Dot.
"It's a record."
"It's not a charge. It's not anything. He's not done anything. He came in on Saturday and said the house had been told what to say, and that's all he did, and it's a thing I said because I talk."
"I know you do, Miss. I've not charged anyone. Nobody's going to charge a man for a name on a wall."
He stood back. In the light of the one bulb the page was very white on the brown cork, and the letters stood out square and black at the height of a man's eyes.
"Sergeant Bowyer," she said. It came out very quiet. "Would you take it down? Please. I don't mean it. I'll swear I don't."
Bowyer studied her.
"We'll keep it by us," he said.