Tuesday, the ninth of December. Twenty-five to four, and the light going.
"Where is he?" said Kemp again.
Nobody answered, because nobody could get past his hair. He had run from the Tapsells' without his hat, and it stood up off his head in grey tufts. His bag banged against his knee. Micky Sprott came in behind him, bent double, holding his ribs and grinning with terror.
"Second trestle, Doctor," said Gully. "By the window. Miss Amory wanted him where the light was."
He said Miss Amory to the ceiling. He said it as he'd have said the Inspector of Nuisances.
Dot hadn't spoken since the door opened. She had promised herself, when Micky's boots went out of the gate: don't talk. Point. He's frightened enough of a mouth.
The sun lay across the workshop flat and red, the red of a coal when you blow on it, and the coffins in their ranks along the wall were lit down one side and black down the other. Alfred Bracegirdle lay in the second trestle's coffin in his good suit with his hands crossed. The lid leaned against the trestle beside him. The screws were in a saucer.
Stanley stood at the foot with Fennimore's letter in both hands. He hadn't moved since he'd said, in a voice of mild surprise, "He looks well."
Kemp stopped in the doorway.
He stood there as he must have stood on Friday, with the lamp behind him and the room in front, a man with one foot on each side of a threshold. Dot watched him do it. Then he made himself come in.
He put the bag on the bench. He took a torch out of it, looked at the torch, and put it back. Then he lifted Alfred's hand out of the other hand and turned it over into the red light like a label.
"Nails," he said, to the hand. "The bed of the. Look at the nail bed."
Dot looked. She had seen a hundred dead hands that week, grey and waxy, with nails the colour of putty. These were the colour of a boiled shrimp, pleasant, healthy, a hand that had been out in the frost and come in to a fire.
Kemp put the hand down. He lifted the lip with his thumb, and the gum under it was the same. He turned the old man's head, gently, an inch, towards the window, and under the ear and down the side of the neck where the blood had settled the skin was the colour of a ripe cherry.
"Lividity," Kemp said. "And not blue. I'd have said cold is blue. Thirty years, I'd have." He stopped.
"In my experience, Doctor, the cold —" said Gully.
"The cold can do it. I know. A cold room, a cold shed, some of them go pink. So it's not proof, and I'll not say it is." Kemp didn't turn round. "But how many have you had through here since Thursday, Norman? And how many came up this colour?"
Gully said nothing. "Just him," said Micky, from the door.
"And mine were all yellow," said Kemp. "Four days by paraffin. Every one, and I told myself." He touched the patch with one finger and took the finger away. "Gas does this too. Holds the blood red, can't let go of it. I've known that since I was twenty-two. And a gas fire in the room, and a window open in a fog when I got there, and a nurse with a story."
Then he said it, very quietly, the way you'd say a name you'd just been given and hadn't yet checked.
"Pink. Coal gas, very likely. It wants opening."
Nobody spoke. Somewhere behind the workshop a cart went over the cobbles, and a woman's voice called a child in to its tea, an ordinary voice, without a cough in it.
"Two hundred," said Kemp.
"Doctor —" said Dot, and stopped, because she had promised.
"Since Friday. Two hundred. I looked at, what. Half." He was still facing the window. "From doors. From landings. On a nurse's word, on a son's, on a wife's, on a. I stood in a door and signed. Thirty, I told you on Sunday. Thirty certificates. I said, if one's wrong they'll open them all." He laughed, a dry sound like a drawer pulled out. "To you, Miss Amory. I said it to you."
"Let them," said Kemp. "Let them open every one."
He turned round. His face in the red light was very old and had, for the first time since she'd known it, nothing arranged on it at all.
"Telephone," he said. "Not that one. Not with him listening." He nodded at Gully. "Is there a box?"
"End of the lane," said Micky.
Stanley didn't come. Somebody had to stay with his father, and he was the only one in the yard with the right. He stood at the foot of the coffin, and the last of the sun lay on his cap, and Dot went out past him without a word.
Wharf Lane had come out to look. There were women on the steps and men leaning in doorways, all with their faces turned up, like people round a fire somebody had lit in the street. It was clear. It was cold and clear and smelled of smoke and river and, faintly, of every house in London having its dinner. Above the coal wharf the last of the sun had gone down behind the cranes, and the whole sky over them was green, real green, like the inside of a bottle, and going up through it to a blue so dark it was hardly a colour.
The call box stood at the end of the lane by the pump. Dot got the door open and held it with her foot while Kemp searched himself for pennies. He found none. She gave him four out of her coat, and he stared at them in his palm as though he'd never been paid in them.
"Button A," said Dot. "After they answer. I always forget."
He dialled. She heard the ring in the receiver, small and far off, and then a crackle, and then, in the tin box with the door held on her boot, the whole of Kemp's half of it.
"Truscott. Kemp. Emmett Kemp, Tanyard Hill. No. No, listen to me. I've. I've looked." A pause. "I have looked at him. Bracegirdle, Alfred Edwin, Cinder Row. In daylight. In daylight, man. The nails, the lips, the whole of the. Yes. Yes, I." He shut his eyes. "Coal gas, I think. Carbon monoxide, if you want it in the book. No, not on the colour alone, the cold can do it, I know. On the colour and the room. There's a gas fire in it, and the window was open when I got there, in a fog. I'd put my name to a post-mortem." Another pause, longer. "I know what I signed. I signed it on Friday, from a door. I hadn't looked. I'm telling you now I hadn't looked, and you can write that down too."
He listened. His free hand had found the wall of the box and was holding it.
"Grounds," he said. "Is that. Is that grounds?"
Whatever Truscott said, Kemp stood a long moment with his forehead almost on the black bakelite, and then he said, "Thank you," twice, and put the receiver on its hook very gently.
"Tonight," he said, to the glass. "The post-mortem. The coroner's van's coming to Gully's for him within the hour. He'll not go in the ground tomorrow. He'll not go in the ground till somebody's read him." He looked at Dot. "Truscott says, and I quote, about time."
Dot didn't trust anything she'd say. She took her foot out of the door, and the door swung shut on its spring and shut Kemp in with the smell of other people's breath, and he stood there in the box as if in a lift that hadn't started.
"Who pays?" said Gully.
He had followed them down the lane at a discreet distance, and he came up now on the far side of the box. Kemp stepped out. Gully addressed himself to a point on the pump.
"I only ask. There's the accommodation. There's the elm, which was chosen, and the slot, which was arranged. And now there's an unarranging, Doctor, that's labour, that's my men, and a van that's not mine coming into my yard, and the family with the balance still to find. Somebody pays for the unsealing." He cleared his throat. "That's all I ask."
"The Crown," said Kemp.
"The Crown," said Gully, "doesn't pay on the nail."
"Norman," said Kemp, "there's a man in your workshop who may very well have been murdered. You may charge the Crown what you like."
The car came down the lane the wrong way at four o'clock, with its headlamps on though it wasn't yet dark, and stopped with its bumper against Gully's gate. It was a black Wolseley without a scratch on it. It was the first car Dot had seen move under its own power since Friday, and every child in Wharf Lane ran after it.
PC Garrard drove. Sergeant Bowyer got out of the other side. He put his hat straight, looked at the sky as if it had been put up without a permit, and looked at Dot.
"Miss Amory. I might have known."
"Sergeant," said Kemp. He stood very straight. "I telephoned the coroner's officer. I've. Bracegirdle's death. I don't believe it was bronchitis. I signed on Friday from a door."
"So I'm told." Bowyer took out his notebook and licked the pencil. "Truscott had me on the line before you'd got your hat. Coal gas, Doctor?"
"I think so. The post-mortem will say."
"Then if it is, it's one of three. Accident, himself, or a party." He wrote it down as three words, one under the other. "Accident and himself I leave to the coroner and his jury and they're welcome. A party's mine."
"Sergeant —" said Dot.
Gully had come down to the gate behind them, to see the police off his premises, and he heard the last word. He went the grey of a wet slate. Behind him, inside the gate, the yard had heard it too: the families in their black had stopped talking, and the widow on the stool at the head of the line, who had sat there all week with her husband in a tin trunk, had a hand at her collar. Micky Sprott, who had attached himself to the tail of Gully's coat, stood with his mouth open.
"A party," said Gully. "Sergeant. A party. I've buried this borough thirty years and never had a constable's boot in my yard, and I'd like it understood, before it goes any further, I'm a man who'd not —"
"Nobody's said you would, Mr Gully."
"I'll tell you where I was." He said it fast, the way a man gets his hat before the rain. "I know how it goes. You'll ask, and I'll say, and you'll say nobody saw. So you'll have it from me, and wrote down, and not from the gutter. Friday. You'll want my Friday." He held his hands together in front of his waistcoat. "Ten to two I come out of the Tapsells' back, and up the Drift, because I'd a Friday family at two. And at the back of the Row, a couple of minutes on, some woman comes out of a yard gate slap into me. Scarf up to her eyes, a bag held up, and calls me an undertaker. To my face. Like it was language. And I was in my own yard when the pips went for two. I clipped that boy's ear for the wireless. And I never went out of it again till dark."
"He did, Sergeant," said Micky. "It rang."
"He did." It came from the stool, in a high clear voice that had been waiting all week to be asked something. "Mrs Dace. I was sat here Friday afternoon, for my Walter. Two o'clock, and him wet to the knees and swearing at the fog."
Bowyer had the pencil out. He wrote it all, and his face did not alter while he did it. He read it back under his breath, as Garrard had read Dot's statement, and at the end of it he said, to the page:
"A woman with a bag, in a fog." He shut the book. "I've my man."
"At the back of the Row!" Dot heard her own voice go up the lane and come back off the wall. "At ten to two! Sergeant, he said at the tea he never went near it. He said it to my face. And a woman came out of a gate, he says, and she'd a bag. Ask him which gate. Ask him —"
"One of them in the middle," said Gully. "I'd not know her from a gatepost, in that."
"Elsie Sallis with her slops, I dare say." Bowyer put the book in his pocket.
"She said one," said Dot. "Elsie said about one."
"But you'll not be asking me to think it's accident, Miss." He didn't look up. "Not with the week's rents in the lodger's drawer. A man dead in his room of a gas tap, and his money in the drawer of the one that hated him, and a quarrel on the stairs the night before. I don't need a jury for that. I've a man in my cell with a bag, and you've gone and given me the murder to hang on him. Well. You wanted it a murder. I'd say thank you, only it'd sound wrong."
"The bag was clean," said Dot. It came out as loud as it had in the station, and there was nobody now to hear it but a wall. "It was clean and dry, and it smelt like a chest rubbed for croup, and his shirts were black to the fold, and you've had it under a light, you've seen —"
"I heard you say, Miss. On Monday." He put the pencil behind his ear.
"Then ask the surgeon if it's gas," said Dot. She was talking to his shoulder now; he had begun to turn. "Ask him tonight. And if it is, the snake was out on the hall side by a quarter to three, so that door was shut on it before Mr Ferrar ever came in. It was long before, and there's a girl in Brook Street who'll swear where Mr Ferrar was, from half past one till twenty-five to three, and she's walked into your station once already —"
"A man dead at two is still a man dead in a house he lodges in, Miss. And the girl's a girl." He put his hat straight, though it was straight. "The divisional inspector is back from the river at seven. I'll put Ferrar to him then, and the bag, and the gas, and the doctor's name on it, and he'll charge who he likes. You can tell him about the smell. If he asks."
He went into the yard. Garrard went after him, giving Dot a look over his shoulder that was very nearly an apology and was, she thought, the young man's whole equipment in that line.
She stood in the lane. Through the gate Stanley was giving his name to Garrard, slowly, as if he'd been asked it in a foreign language and wanted to get it right. Kemp was saying, in fragments, to nobody, that he had better. That there was a form. That he'd need the. And Gully was saying that a van was one thing but a police car in a respectable yard was another, and might he know who was to be told.
Stanley had come out of the yard. He didn't stand near her; he stood a yard off, at her shoulder, looking straight ahead at the wall opposite. Fennimore's letter was still in his hand.
"Mrs Ruddock lent me the balance," he said, to the wall. "I never knew he'd seal it straight. I'm sorry, Miss."
"It doesn't matter now," said Dot.
"It weren't Winston."
"No," said Dot.
"He lent me ten bob in August." He said it slowly, as he said everything, each word put down and looked at before the next. "I said in the Coopers' he never asked for it. That weren't true. He's not let me forget it once. Every time he sees me. Ten bob. A man that says ten bob every time he sees you, he'd not take Dad's bag."
"I know, Stanley."
"I told the policeman Monday night, chest, bed." He turned the letter over. "That was what I was told. I didn't know it were a thing to be told." He waited. "I'd like to say it to him. The sergeant. He'd not listen."
"No," said Dot. "He wouldn't."
"You say it."
"I'll say it," said Dot. "I'll say it to anyone who'll stand still."
Stanley nodded. He went back into the yard to his father, and shut the gate behind him with great care.
The light went while she stood there. It didn't go all at once, as it did in a fog, when one minute was as dark as the next. It went as it must have gone before the war, in stages, on purpose: the green sky darkening at the top, the wall opposite losing its red, the cobbles turning from brown to blue. The cold came up out of the ground. Her breath stood in front of her, thin and white and quite separate, and she could see it, and she'd have wept if she'd had time.
A man was coming up Wharf Lane from the river end with a long pole on his shoulder. He stopped at the first lamp, reached up, and put the pole to it, and the lamp bloomed: a proper yellow flower, and under it, all round it, a great pool of light that reached out across the cobbles to the kerb and up the wall to the second storey and did not stop at the edge of anything. The lamps had burned all week in the fog and lit nothing but themselves. The council had put them out at a quarter to three, when the wind came, to save the gas, and now the lamplighter was putting them back.
He went on to the next. The lane came on in front of him, lamp by lamp, close and small and plain, a lane with a pump in it.
Micky Sprott was leaning on the pump with his hands in his pockets, waiting, with the huge patience of the very young, to be paid. She gave him two shillings, because he said he'd run to the Tapsells' twice, and he bit the first.
Four o'clock, and seven o'clock. She counted it on her fingers, and it came to three hours with none left over.