Tuesday, the ninth of December. Half past eight, and twenty-five hours to the burial.
Stanley Bracegirdle was sitting on the step of the register office with his knees apart and a letter between them, and he had been there long enough for the fog to settle on his shoulders like a second coat.
Dot came along Tanyard Road at a jog with her scarf over her mouth and the nurse's tea still sour on her tongue, and stopped in front of him. She had not slept to speak of. She had a hymn sheet in her sleeve with three names on it, a blanket over her arm that should have been at the police station two hours ago, and Mrs Ruddock's tin in her bag.
"Stanley."
He held out the letter. He didn't get up.
"It's got long words," he said.
It was a stiff cream envelope, opened with a thumb, and the paper inside had a heading in black. Fennimore & Glass, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, High Street. Dot read it standing up, out loud, since he'd plainly been unable to, slowly and in her office voice, with her finger under the line. Fennimore & Glass. She had seen the name last night, on the cover of the collection book Sergeant Bowyer held up, and her finger stopped under it, and then, because Stanley was watching her, went on.
"Dear Sir. We are instructed in the estate of the late Mr Alfred Edwin Bracegirdle, deceased, and should be obliged if you would attend at our offices at half past nine on Tuesday the ninth instant, when the testamentary dispositions of the deceased will be made known to you. That's his will," she said. "They've got a will and they're going to read it. It's a fancy way of saying, come at half past nine and bring a handkerchief."
"I don't know what to say to them."
"You don't have to say anything. You sit."
"You'll have to come."
She looked at him. He was looking at the pavement between his boots.
"I asked the police," said Stanley. "They said it's not their business. I asked Nurse and she's not been. I asked Mr Roper. He said what would he know." He turned the black band on his sleeve, which had come unstitched at one end. "You're the one told me. To my face. That you'd lied. Nobody does that."
Behind them the door opened, and Mr Pike came out on to the step in his waistcoat and sleeve-garters, holding a pencil, and looked down the whole length of himself at the two of them.
"Miss Amory. Mr Marchbanks will be here at ten."
"I know. I'll be back."
"I don't think you will," said Pike. He considered the sky, which was low and brown and not going anywhere. "I shall tell him you are at the lavatory. For an hour."
"Mr Pike—"
"I have never told Mr Marchbanks a lie." He put the pencil behind his ear. "It will be an education for us both."
He went in and shut the door, and Dot held out her hand, and Stanley took it and got up.
They walked. It was a hundred and fifty yards to the High Street by the railings, and the railings this morning had a skin on them like cold gravy. Stanley kept a pace behind, as he'd kept behind her the night she left number fourteen, and when she slowed he slowed.
"They took my statement again," he said. "Last night. That sergeant. The young one wrote it."
"What did they ask you?"
"Where I was Friday. I said. Mr Roper said it too. Gone two, he said." He counted it on his fingers. "And was the bag on the table when I went out. I said I never looked. And had I Gully's money. Everybody asks has he got Gully's money. And they ask me was it me put the bag in Winston's drawer, and I said, I didn't, and they put it down."
"Did they ask you about your father?"
"About his chest." He stopped at the kerb, as he'd stopped at every kerb, and waited for her to step. "I told them. Nurse said bed. I said bed. I don't say things different from how I'm told." He said it in his slow flat way, without pride or shame, as you'd tell the time. She didn't ask him any more about that. She was thinking of a man in a cell and the blanket on her own arm, and a hymn sheet, and the word Gully, and she put her hand out for the next railing, and lost him for a second, and turned.
He'd reached into his coat for the handkerchief she had told him to bring. It came out with the envelope, and with them something square and stiff and dark red, that flew from his fingers and landed on its face in the gutter.
"Oh, bother," said Dot.
It was in the black water at the edge of the kerb, and already going soft. She snatched it up. It was a Post Office savings book, a small one, with a crown on the cover and STANLEY BRACEGIRDLE in a clerk's ink. She didn't open it. It was his. She dried the cover as best she could on the skirt of her good coat, and gave it back.
"Mrs R'll have my hide for that coat," she said.
Stanley put the book in his inside pocket and did up the button over it.
"It's no good to Gully, that," he said. "I've not got Gully's balance. Not till the savings clear, and that's a week."
He didn't say thank you. He gave her a nod, as short and stiff as a chapel deacon's.
Fennimore & Glass was next door to the Town Hall, in a tall black house with a brass plate at the height of a man's chin. The plate said the name and nothing else. Inside there was a passage with a brown linoleum, a clerk in a cage of frosted glass, and a smell of paper that had been kept for a very long time in the dark.
Mr Fennimore received them in a room at the back with one window that looked on a wall. He was a small dry man of sixty-odd, with a high stiff collar and silver hair parted precisely in the middle, and he sat behind a desk with nothing on it but a blotter, a file, and his own two hands.
"Mr Bracegirdle. Please. And this is?"
"Miss Amory," said Dot. "From the register office. I read for him. He says I'm to stop."
"She stops," said Stanley.
Mr Fennimore looked at Dot over the tops of his glasses, as if deciding whether something in the room was a wasp.
"Miss Amory registered the death," he said. "Yes. Very well." He opened the file. "Your father made this in nineteen thirty-eight, in this office, and did not amend it. I shall read it as written."
He read it. It was four lines long.
"I, Alfred Edwin Bracegirdle, of fourteen Cinder Row, being of sound mind, leave to my son Stanley all I have. My barrow and my savings. Signed. Witnessed by two of my clerks." He turned the page over, as if there might be more on the back, and there was not. "The barrow, I understand, is kept in the yard at the rear of the premises. The savings are in the Savings Bank in Tanyard Road and amount, at the last statement, to one hundred and forty-one pounds."
Stanley was quite still.
"That's all?" he said.
"It is not a large estate."
"He said the business'd be mine. He said it. The rents, and the—" His voice had gone up, sulky and bewildered, like a child's who has been given the wrong box. "He said, when I go, Stan, it's yours."
"Ah." Mr Fennimore laid his hands flat. "I fear that is a misapprehension, Mr Bracegirdle. Your father owned nothing in Cinder Row. Not a brick. Not a slate. He was an agent, and he was employed by Tanyard Estates, on commission, of one-tenth."
Dot leaned in. "One tenth of what?"
"Of the rents he collected. Of every pound he kept two shillings. The remainder went where the owner directed. The agency was his personal appointment, and it ends with him."
Stanley said, "A tenth."
He said it once, as you'd test a stair you didn't trust. Then he looked at the wall behind Mr Fennimore's head, where there was a framed map of the borough, and his big chin worked.
"That's all he ever had," he said. "Twenty year."
"Who is Tanyard Estates?" said Dot.
Her mouth had moved, as it did, ahead of her permission. Tanyard Estates, care of Fennimore and Glass: it was the label on the collection book, last night, under the police lamp.
"Tanyard Estates is a client of this firm, Miss Amory. This firm holds the title on its behalf, in trust. That is a matter of public record."
"But who is it? A person? A company?"
"It is a client."
"Somebody's had the money every Friday for twenty years, and knows the week's collections to the penny, and every penny of this one's gone out of a bag that's now with the police—"
"The week's collections?" Mr Fennimore raised his eyes, very slightly. "I am afraid I have no instructions on that."
"Then who does instruct you?" said Dot. "If a man's been killed—"
She heard it as it left her, and stopped.
Mr Fennimore had not moved. The silver hair, the collar, the two hands on the blotter were all where they'd been, and the one window behind him let in a grey light that gave nothing away.
"If a man has been killed, Miss Amory," he said, quite gently, "then that is a matter for the police, and if the police call on this firm, they will be received. There is no charge. There is no inquiry. There is an old man who died of his chest, on the certificate of his doctor. And there is a young man who has lost his father, and to whom I have read a will." He closed the file. "I should be sorry to keep him from his grief."
They sat on the kerb outside. It was the kerb of the Town Hall, three steps from the foot of a great flight of stone stairs, and neither of them noticed.
Stanley had the will in his pocket, on the flimsy copy the clerk had made, folded in four with the crease pressed in by his thumb. He sat with his big boots in the gutter and his knees up, and looked at the fog. It went by in slow grey ropes.
"He said I'd the business," he said. "I'd sooner he'd said nothing."
"I know."
"I asked him Thursday. About Tommy Vail. About money. And he said, There's nothing for you, Stan. It's not mine. I thought he was being hard. I thought it was his way." He stopped. He'd gone slower and slower. "He meant it. It weren't his. Not any of it. He'd nothing to leave but a barrow."
Dot sat down beside him, in her good coat, on the wet stone, with the blanket on her knees. Neither of them said anything for what felt like a very long time, and she let it be.
"Last week," said Stanley. "Before Thursday. He come in late, and he sat down with the book on his knee. And he said, I'm done with it, Stan. I said, With what? And he said, I've carried that book twenty year for somebody who'd not cross the road for me." He shook his head. "I never asked who. I never thought."
"Nobody thinks. Nobody asks."
"I could have asked."
"So could I." Dot looked at the fog. "And the last thing in his notebook's Thursday, told. Told who? Somebody he'd carried it for."
Stanley was a long time looking at his hands.
"He sang," he said. "When I was little. Behind the barrow."
A door banged.
It was a side door, a narrow one at the end of Fennimore & Glass, in the wall beside the Town Hall steps, that opened on a passage to the Town Hall yard. Out of it came a man with a battered leather folder under one arm and his collar turned up to his ears, walking fast, with his head lowered, as if he didn't wish to be recognised and was too tired to arrange it. She knew the bag under his other arm before she knew the face. It was a doctor's bag with the clasp gone.
"Dr Kemp!"
He didn't stop. He'd turned up the street towards the fog, and she was on her feet, shouting through her hands, with the blanket falling off her knees into the gutter.
"Dr Kemp! Wait! Dr Kemp, I want—"
He didn't turn round, and he didn't answer. His shoulders came up under the coat, as a man's do in rain, and he walked faster.
"You never came in," shouted Dot. "You never came in the room!"
The fog took him. It took the folder, the coat, the bag, the bare grey head, and gave back only the fading slap of his shoes.
She stood with her arms out, breathing hard. Then she picked the blanket out of the gutter and shook it and came back to the kerb and sat down, rather hard, next to Stanley.
"Well," she said. "That's told him."
"He's a doctor," said Stanley.
"He is. He's a very tired one. I'm not going to say anything else about him, I'll only say something wrong." She rubbed her face with both gloves. "Stanley. Have you got to see Mr Gully this morning?"
"I said I'd go. About the balance." He gave her a heavy look. "I've nothing to give him."
"I'll come."
"You needn't."
"I'd like to," said Dot. "I've a word for him."
Wharf Lane at ten in the morning had lost none of its night. The carts stood in a row with their lamps lit, and the wardrobe boards leant against a wall in stacks like a queue of tall thin mourners. She took Stanley across the yard, past a family with a hand-cart and a coffin the colour of butter, and a man arguing over a price with his hat in his hand. The stool at the head of the line was empty. There was no Micky on the end of the trestle with a crust.
"Where's the boy?" she said, to the man at the gate.
"Cemetery. With a Friday." He didn't look at her. "Since seven."
"Wait here," Dot said to Stanley. "I'll be a minute."
"You said—"
"I lied. I'll be more than a minute. Sit down."
Mr Gully's office was the lean-to against the workshop wall, with its own small window on the yard and a stove and one shelf of ledgers. Outside the door the wireless hung on its nail in its brown case, talking low about coal. Inside there was a black leather chair and a smaller one, a bell, a photograph of the Mayor, and a telephone. In the window, for the families to choose from, hung the card of coffin linings: white satin, cream, and the one glossy purple. On the sill under it lay the tray of offcuts. Mr Gully was standing at the window with his hands behind him and his back to the door. He didn't turn round.
"Miss Amory. You'll forgive me. I don't do viewings for registrars."
"I haven't come to view. I've come to talk. Mr Bracegirdle's here about the balance, and he'll have it when his savings clear, if you'll be a Christian. That's the first thing." She shut the door behind her. "The second is, you lied."
"I beg your pardon."
"At the tea. In the Coopers' Arms, in front of the whole of the Row. You said you'd never been near number fourteen on Friday. And Maureen Tapsell says you went out of her back door at ten to two. By the yards, because you don't like being seen. And you walked the Drift to Wharf Lane, and it goes right past the back of fourteen. Right past Mr Bracegirdle's window, Mr Gully. At ten to two on the day he was gassed."
Mr Gully turned round slowly.
He was in his shirt sleeves and his black waistcoat, and the soft round face over the collar was very calm, and flushed with the stove. It was a face made for the bereaved. It had a permanent sympathy in it, like a hat. But something had gone out of it that had been there a moment before.
"Gassed," he said. "Well. That's a word. We don't say gassed in this yard, Miss Amory. We say passed."
"He was gassed."
"He was a respectable man, taken by the fog."
He looked at the pencil in her hand, not at her, and said nothing at all.
"And there's this."
She took the tin out of her bag and put it on his desk, on the blotter, with the King and Queen looking up at him. She got the lid off over the bent corner and took out the square of purple and laid it flat beside the tin.
Then she looked at the window.
On the sill, under the card, the tray of offcuts lay where it had lain yesterday, a heap of clean-cut ends: white, and cream, and three or four scraps of a deep bright glossy purple, the same purple, cut the same way on two sides.
Mr Gully looked at the satin on his blotter as he'd have looked at a bill with a wrong figure on it.
"That's mourning purple, Miss," he said. "Every furnisher from here to Gravesend lines with it. The Co-op's got a drawer of it."
"It's off your sill."
"It's off a roll. So's the Co-op's."
"It came over a wall in Flax Street last night in that tin, and Maureen Tapsell picked it out and said that's what he lined her with, before I'd opened my mouth. And that tin went off a dresser in Flax Street on Friday afternoon." Her voice was going up and she let it. "And at half past two you were still loose round the Flax Street end, and somebody walked into a kitchen there off the Drift and had a widow's savings, and here's her tin with your purple in it."
The stove ticked. In the yard, a long way off, the man with the hat had won his argument, or lost it, and was silent. Outside the door the wireless had gone on to a dance band, very low.
Mr Gully sat down in the black leather chair. He did it slowly. He laid his hands on the desk, side by side, a little way from the satin, as if it might mark them.
"I've told you what I went up," he said, very quiet, "and it wasn't Flax Street. You prove different."
"Then where were you? Two o'clock. Half past."
"You'll not have it from me."
"Mr Gully—"
"You'll not have it from me." His voice hadn't risen. It had gone in the other direction, small and clear and utterly without cushions. "I've a business, Miss Amory. Thirty years in this lane. I've buried the Mayor's own mother. I've been called a thief in my own office by a girl with a pencil, in front of my customers, and asked where I was by the minute like a tram. I don't give my minutes to the council, and I'll not give them to you. I've a telephone, and a friend in the Town Hall, and I think it right to ring him."
"Ring him," said Dot. "Say I'm here."
Mr Gully considered her a moment longer. Then he lifted the receiver off its hook and held it to his ear.
"Town Hall, please," he said.
Dot put the purple back in the tin and the lid on it and took it up off his desk, satin and all, under his eye.
"That's evidence," she said.
"It's a biscuit tin." He didn't lower the receiver. The line clicked and somebody small and far off answered. "Mr Marchbanks, please. Norman Gully."
She went out past the wireless into the yard. The cold hit her like a wet cloth. Stanley got up off the trestle's end and looked at her face and sat down again.
"Mind your own dead, Miss Amory," said Mr Gully, behind her, quite pleasantly, with the telephone at his ear. "You've plenty."