Tuesday, the ninth of December. Five to one. One day to the burial.
The doctor's wife had told her through a door on a chain. Cinder Row, she said, number nine, the cellar; he had gone every day at one since Saturday, for the girl, and come back at two with his hat in his hand and nothing to say. Dot had not stopped to ask what girl. She had run the whole of Tanyard Hill in a fog that tasted of pennies, and she went down the area steps of number nine two at a time and hit the door with her shoulder, and it opened, because nobody on Cinder Row had locked a door since the war.
The cellar was one room and a scullery. There was a board over the broken pane with newspaper packed round it, gone soft and brown, and the wall under it was black and shining to the height of her knee, wet in a straight line, like the mark on a bath. A stove with no fire in it. A bed. Beside the bed, on two chairs, a drawer, with a folded blanket in it, and nobody had taken it away.
Maureen Tapsell sat at the table with her hands round a cup that didn't steam. She was nineteen. She looked up when the door banged and looked down again.
Dr Kemp was on a box by the stove.
He had his hat on his knee and his bag between his boots, and he looked like a coat someone had left on a chair. He got up when Dot came in, out of habit, and then didn't seem to know what he'd got up for.
"Miss Amory," he said. "I'm. This isn't."
"I know it isn't. I'm sorry. Good afternoon." She had practised that on the hill, good afternoon, and she had practised being gentle, because there was a girl at the table and she was very much aware of the drawer. "I've come to ask you for something, and I'll do it badly, so I'll do it fast, and you can tell me to go and I'll go. Only I'd sooner you didn't till I've finished, because I haven't a second go. I've been through them all. Every door. You're the last."
"Miss Amory —"
"They're putting Mr Bracegirdle's lid on at five. Mr Gully's got him on a trestle under a white bulb, and I've seen him under it, and he's red, Dr Kemp, he's red in the face and the hands and down the neck, like a man come in from the cold, and he didn't come in from any cold, he was in his own room, by his own fire. I'm not a doctor. I've said so to a sergeant and a coroner's officer and they've both said so back. So I'm not asking you to say anything. I'm asking you to look. Come to the yard before five, and look at him for one minute, and then say whatever you like."
Kemp looked at his hat.
"Before I go," said Dot, "I'll ask you the other thing, because it's been sat on my chest since Monday night, and I'd sooner have it out than go on making it into something. It's in Mr Bracegirdle's notebook. Dr K., two and six a week. I kept saying rent. I can't make it be anything but rent. Is it rent?"
Kemp began to laugh.
It was the worst noise she had ever heard a man make. It wasn't a laugh at all, it came from very low down, in a series, like something being dragged. He put his hand over his mouth and it came out round the edges. Maureen didn't move. She looked at him, and then at Dot, and then into her cup.
"Rent," said Kemp. "I own a. Miss Amory. I own a stethoscope and a. A mortgage." He wiped his eyes with the flat of his hand. "The house on the hill is Lucy's father's. He left it to her. It's mortgaged to the chimneys. If I sold it I'd owe the bank. Every stick in it's on the never-never. The chairs. I'd tell you what a chair cost —"
"Then the half-crown —"
"Lock-up. Half a crown a week. For the Austin, for the calls. I can't get a night call down that hill on foot. Ask him. Ask —" He stopped. There was nobody to ask. His mouth stayed open around it for a moment. "Yes. Well."
"I'm sorry," said Dot. "I'd sooner have asked." She could feel her ears. "And this morning, at the side door of Fennimore's, I shouted at you down the High Street like a fishwife, and you never turned round. Why Fennimore's?"
"To find out who owns this." He pointed, without looking, at the wall. "Look at it. She was six weeks old. Look at it. I've written to the Medical Officer three times and he's a man with four hundred to count, and I thought, if I'd the owner. If I'd a name, I could write to a person, a person with a house, to say, come down here, come and put your hand on it." He laughed again, quietly, and let it go. "Fennimore's man said he wasn't at liberty. Liberty."
"And then what? If you had him?"
"Then I'd have the street condemned." He said it to the floor. "Unfit. The Medical Officer has only to put his name to it, on a doctor's say, and it's gone. The Council buys it for the dirt, Miss Amory, and not a brick. The ground's worth so much, and what's stood on it's worth nothing, because it's unfit. So the owner is paid for the mud. He'd lose the rents and the walls, and get a cheque for the mud." He turned the hat a quarter round. "Owners hate a doctor with a pen. I've been a doctor with a pen for eleven years, and nobody has ever once been frightened of me."
The stove ticked, though it was cold. Dot looked at the box he sat on. It was an orange box. It still had the printing on the end, and the paper had gone soft, and there was a place in the middle worn pale where a man had sat.
"He comes every day," said Maureen.
She had not looked up. Her voice was flat and small and exact, the way it had been at the crossing on Tanyard Road, as if she were reading it off the inside of a lid.
"One o'clock. He sits. He never says nothing much. He held her while I made the tea, the day she went, and then he never give her back till I'd asked him twice." She turned the cup a quarter round on the saucer. "I don't know what he does for the rest."
"That's the rest," said Kemp. "That's all there is, my dear."
Dot sat down on the other chair, because her legs asked. She said the next part carefully, and slowly, to the top of his head.
"Dr Kemp, I've got to know what I'm asking you to do. When you signed him. On the Friday. Did you look at him?"
Kemp looked at his hat.
"I stood in the doorway," he said. "I had a paraffin lamp. It was black as. There was the bed and there was the window and the fog was coming in, and the nurse said his chest, and she'd been with him. She'd been with him, she said. I've known her nineteen years." He turned the hat round. "I've signed two hundred since Thursday. I've looked at perhaps half."
"It says last seen alive by me."
"I saw him the Tuesday before. For his feet." He rubbed his face with both hands. "The form wants a date. It wants a date near. I put the fifth. I put what it wanted." He looked up, and the eyes were red and quite clear. "I never touched him. I never touched him, Miss Amory. I've told nobody. I've told you and this girl."
Maureen said nothing at all.
"Then you needn't touch anything," said Dot. "You look. That's all. He's under a white bulb, he'll not mind. You look at his hands, and then you say it was his chest, or you say it wasn't, and I'll believe you either way, I'd have to. Only somebody has to, before five. I'll carry your bag."
"And then?" said Kemp.
"And then the coroner has to listen, and then the police surgeon has to cut, and if it's gas, then it's not the when Sergeant Bowyer's got. There's a man in the cells at Lowmarsh for a bag, Dr Kemp, Mr Ferrar, who lodged upstairs, and a girl in a felt hat who walked into that station this morning and was told she was his sweetheart, which she is, and so what. She was with him from half past one. If the time goes back she's an alibi and if it doesn't she's a sweetheart. It's all on one word. I'd say it myself if I were anybody."
"You are anybody," said Kemp, not unkindly.
"Yes," said Dot. "That's the trouble."
"It's half a mile, in this," said Kemp. "To look at a man by a bulb."
"Then I'll bring the bulb. I'll unscrew it myself. It's only forty watts, and I'd carry it in my teeth, and you could look at him here on the drawer —"
"Miss Amory. It's a bulb. In lamplight," said Kemp, "they all go yellow."
"That's the point! Under a white bulb —"
"The whole borough's been yellow since Thursday. I've not seen a face in daylight in four days. Nobody has." He said it like somebody reading out a bad weather report. "Bring me daylight. Bring me a — I don't say I'd —" His hand shook, and he took it in the other hand. "You want me to say gas. To the coroner. In my own hand."
"The doctor says how you died," said Dot. "Only the coroner can say the doctor's wrong. And Mr Truscott won't put it to the coroner for a clerk. He said, bring me a doctor."
"Then he'll go on waiting."
"Dr Kemp, please."
"If one's wrong," said Kemp, "they'll open them all. Do you understand? All of them. Two hundred. They'll go back through every certificate with a lens. They'll strike me off. And this street's got no doctor but me and a nurse, and the nurse is." He shook his head slowly. "This street'll have no doctor at all."
It was very quiet in the cellar. Above them, somebody walked across a floor in boots.
"He was a good man," said Maureen suddenly.
She said it to the cup.
"Mr Bracegirdle. He cried on that step. He give me the year's money and cried. I don't know what he was. But he cried." She looked at Dr Kemp for the first time. "You'll come tomorrow."
"Yes."
"One o'clock."
"Yes, my dear."
He picked up his bag. He went out past Dot, up the area steps, and she could hear him going up them one at a time like somebody carrying something too heavy to hold in his arms.
She stood at the top of the steps and couldn't remember which way was the road.
The queue for the coffin-maker at the corner of Cinder Row had gone round into Bridge Street, and stood there in a line of hats, in a silence. A dustman's horse stood patiently with a nosebag and no dustman. Somewhere behind the wall of fog a boy was calling the Standard, as if a thing could be sold that nobody could read.
She had been so sure that if she asked properly he would simply come, like a dog to a whistle, and she had brought a whole plan with her, with hats in it. A door banged somewhere up Cinder Row. The fog moved, all in one piece, like a curtain when somebody opens a window in the next room, and lay down again.
It was twenty to two. Winston was in a cell, it was three hours to the lid and five to a man in a white collar, and she had nobody. She walked up to Tanyard Road with her hands in her pockets, counting the lamp-posts she couldn't see, and got eleven.
St Saviour's struck two as she came in the front door of the office.
The queue turned its whole head as she came in. There were thirty-odd of them, in their black, along the wall under the notices, holding their green forms out in front of them like tickets at a fair, and not one of them said her name. The fog had made the front room dim as a cave, and the desk lamps were lit, and at hers, at Dot's own desk, in Dot's own chair, with his coat still on and her blotter squared in front of him, sat the Superintendent Registrar.
Pike was by the stove with his hands behind him. He looked at her once, and it was the look he gave a column of figures that had gone wrong somewhere in the middle and he couldn't yet say where.
"Miss Amory," said Mr Marchbanks. "Sit."
She didn't. She stood in her wet coat with her hat in her hand. Nobody had spoken to her in that voice since school. It was the voice from the telephone, in the room, which was worse.
"I have had a telephone call from Dr Kemp yesterday evening," said Mr Marchbanks, "to say that a young woman from my department was still telephoning his surgery, and that he could not sleep. A second from Mr Fennimore's clerk at ten, to say that the same young woman had come to the office with a Mr Bracegirdle and asked a series of questions to which the firm was not at liberty to reply. And a third, at half past ten, from Mr Norman Gully, to say that she had walked into his premises with a biscuit tin and raised her voice in front of his staff." He laid the three fingers of one hand on the blotter, one after another. "And Mr Pike informs me that you have been in the lavatory since half past eight."
"I said an hour," said Pike, to the stove. "It was an hour. I didn't say which."
"Mr Pike," said Marchbanks, "will have a note on his file."
"It will be my third, sir," said Pike.
Dot heard her own voice getting ready to go up, and thought: don't, and then thought: oh, I'm going to. She said that there was a man in a cell, and a man in a coffin, and that if Mr Marchbanks would only put his coat on and walk to Wharf Lane, it would take nine minutes, she had timed it, and he would see for himself the colour of the man. Mr Marchbanks said that he did not view colour. Norman Gully, who had the paupers' contract, had telephoned him at home on Saturday to complain of a deputy holding a green form, and he had signed over her head, and he had been right to, and that was the last time he proposed to hear the name. He dealt in totals. Her ears were not the colour of anything she had a word for.
"You are suspended," said Mr Marchbanks, "pending the instructions of the Registrar General. I shall write to him this afternoon. I have already written the letter. Your keys."
"Sir. There's a man in Lowmarsh station who —"
"I do not doubt it. There are four hundred and twelve people in this borough who have died since Thursday, and my clerks have not, in six days, had time to sleep. I have not one more hour to give to a theory." He held out his hand, palm up, flat. "Keys."
She had them in her coat. She had not known that. She took the ring out of her pocket, the big brass one for the front door and the small one for the strongroom and the little steel one for the GREEN cabinet, and the ring was warm, and she put it down in the middle of the blotter, on the oblong of green baize she'd looked at for six years.
Pike, by the stove, had shut his eyes.
Mr Marchbanks laid his hand over the keys and drew them in.
"Go home, Miss Amory," he said. "The dead can manage without you."