Bryony
Twenty-two days to the weld. Morning. High water.
Door three's glass was empty by morning.
Not the morning after. The next. Ruddock's boy had run to the yard at first light, and the sergeant and I had gone round. The hatch behind the cullet heap hung open on one hinge. Tar cut through. A bright scratch on the ward, where somebody had shoved a key and not minded who knew. Inside, the glass was wet and the glass was empty. I looked at it with my hands in my pockets. The sergeant stood next to me going a funny colour with the effort of not helping. The heat, I supposed.
I'd slept through it. Face down on my bed with a rag round my hand, from the minute I got in. That's the part I couldn't forgive. I'd said I'd watch them.
Three keeps gone. And a captain who wouldn't put a man on a door.
So I wanted a look at door four. Before Ivo Dace got his hand on it, if he ever got his hand on anything. He'd said it was his, in the captain's yard, with his arms folded. I'd sooner see a lock before a man like that had been at it.
Wenna had the lighter at the Steps at seven. The sergeant sat in the bow with his knees up and half a bun in his fist he wasn't eating, and I sat in the middle on a coil of rope.
"It's a short slack today, ducks," said Wenna. "A quarter hour, then it runs. So sit where you're put."
She rowed us round the point. The harbour was slate-coloured and oily, with a little lift on it from somewhere else. We went past the Weigh House, black to the second storey, its water-gate steps going down into the harbour like a lip. I didn't look. I looked at the sergeant's boots, which were large.
Dockyard next. Cranes. Masts in rows. Hot pitch coming across the water, and under it coal and wet rope, the whole yard going about its business with a great noise of nothing to do with me.
The ship-lock is a stone box. Gates at each end, big as barn doors for a giant, and under the gates the culverts, which fill and empty it. Tunnels you could drive a cart down. Door four was in the wall of the lower one, at the foot of a water-stair that goes down off the dockyard quay. When the tide's running, the culvert goes through the gate like a mill race and nothing stands there. At the very top, the water stops. For a quarter hour you can stand on the last dry step with the plate at your knee.
Hollin put it where you'd have to want it.
Wenna brought the lighter in under the quay wall with the water flat as a tray. No run in the culvert. It was standing. She dug an oar in against the bottom step and said, "Out you get. Mind the weed, it's grease."
I went first.
You look at the lock. That's what you do. You come to a plate, you look at the plate. The frame it's set in. The iron round it. Whether the work's been got at.
Hollin's mark in the corner, small. Good. The iron sweating with the damp. The square for the hand, a hand's width, rimmed with green. There was a scrape on the lip of it, new and bright, where something had lain across it and been dragged.
And a hand in the square.
Laid flat. Thumb tucked under, as you do it. As I'd have done it. Square palm. Short nails. A rope-scar across the root of the thumb, white against the brown. A good hand. A working hand.
There was a man on the end of it. Face down in the weed at the stair foot, hanging off his own arm in the water like a skiff off a painter. I saw that. I saw it as you see a coat on a hook, and I went on looking at the plate.
The plate was dry. In the corners of the square, dry, where the harbour hadn't reached it. The door sat shut in its frame. Shut, and a hand on it.
I had it in about as long as it takes to read a notice.
"He's paid it," I said. "Look. It's gone to behind him, they do, there's no wedge. He's paid it and the legs have gone. Mine went. Then the tide's come up the stair and he couldn't climb." I put my thumb on the scrape. "Door's done him."
"Bryony," said Gannet.
He'd stopped on the step behind me. For a bit he didn't say anything else.
"That's a man," he said.
I didn't turn round. "I know it's a man."
"I know you do," he said, and went past me down the last step into the water.
It was up to his knees. He didn't notice. He got both hands under the man's shoulder, the one that wasn't hanging, and lifted, and the arm came off the plate with a small wet sound. Then he took the head in one hand, by the hair, as you'd take a cabbage, and turned it up out of the weed.
I hadn't meant to look. I looked.
Forty, or thirty-five. Brown, weathered. A pale line across the forehead where a cap had sat. Weed in the mouth. Eyes open.
There was nothing wrong with the face. No mark. No fear. I've handled a thousand key blanks, and this was one. All the shape and nothing cut. Drawn blank. That's the word for it.
This one hadn't been left.
Gannet took the man's ear between a finger and thumb and folded it forward like a page. "Look."
I went down a step. Behind the ear, in the soft place under the bone, there was a row of little red dots. A dozen. Then another row under it. Then a third. Like the holes you leave in a sampler. Fresh. Not a one of them had closed.
"Needle," said Gannet. His voice had gone flat. "That's the quiet ward, that is. I've sat by a bed full of that for eighteen years." He put his thumb at the corner of the mouth, where a pink froth had dried. "And he was breathing when he went in. That's the froth. He wasn't dead. He'd nothing left in him to make him fight, so he went down like a dropped coat."
"Somebody did that."
"Somebody drew him blank," said Gannet, "and put him in the water."
And put his hand on the plate.
I looked at the plate. At the scrape. I'd put my thumb in it myself, like a fool, and been proud of reading it.
Hollin never made a door that took a man. One thing, and let you go. Twelve years under his bench, and I'd stood on his stair and said Door's done him as if it was written on the iron.
"I'll get someone," said Gannet. He didn't move. He stayed there in the water with the head still in his hand, holding it up out of the weed as if it'd mind.
Wenna had held the lighter off the stair the whole time with the oar braced on the bottom step. She called up that the slack was going, and that we'd want a rope on him before the water turned.
The dockyard came. It does, if there's a thing to look at. A lock-keeper in a long coat, three caulkers off the quay with their mallets still in their belts, a pair of Guild constables who'd run from the gate with a hurdle between them and their helmets knocking. They got the man up the stair between them with the water pouring out of his coat. He left a trail of weed all up the steps.
"Anybody know him?" said the older constable.
"Not off the yard," said the lock-keeper.
"Waterman," said a caulker. He'd taken the man's hand off the hurdle and was turning it over. "Look at the callus. Oars, that. Not ours."
"Never seen him," said another.
"Not off the Steps, he's not," said Wenna from the boat.
"Then he's off the river," said the constable, and nobody argued, because nobody had an argument.
I did what I'd come for. You learn a lock on a stair like that fast, because the water's about to take the chance off you. The frame was set in the culvert's own stone, not cut in after, so Hollin had hung the door first and had the mason build round it. A strip of brass showed under the plate's lower edge where the cradle left the frame. It ran off sideways through the wall toward the lock gate, to the pier on the far side of the culvert mouth. That's where the hatch would be. Out on the pier face, a hand above the water at the top of the tide and out of reach at any other time. Stair, plate, hatch: all of it wanted the same quarter hour.
You'd need a boat and a key and a head for it. I looked at that pier a long time.
They laid the hurdle flat on the quay.
Ivo came along the quay with his dockyard rule in his back pocket. He walked as he always walks, as if the stones owed him. He saw the hurdle. He stopped.
He didn't look at the man. He looked past the hurdle and the constables, down the stair, at the plate.
"Door four's mine," he said. To me. He'd come down three steps to say it. "I'm at it tomorrow, at the slack. You keep off it today, Pask."
"There's a man on your plate."
"There was a man on my plate," said Ivo. "He's on a hurdle now." He put his hand to his chin and took it away again. "I never knew him."
I hadn't asked.
"You can't open it," I said. "You won't pay it."
"I'll open it," said Ivo. "I'll not pay it. I've told the captain." He went past me, close, and the tar on his cuff brushed my sleeve. "Hollin said. At the bench. With you under it."
Then Captain Haverill came down the quay with the roll in his walk, and a clerk behind him with a cold.
He stood and looked at the hurdle a while. The gulls came and sat on the lock gate and looked at it as well.
"Drowned?" he said.
"Looks it, sir," said the older constable.
"He's been drawn blank, sir," said Gannet.
He'd come up out of the water. He was wet to the thigh, and the red had gone out of his face, and he'd put himself between the hurdle and the captain without, I think, deciding to. "There's needle marks behind the ear. Three rows. They're fresh. And his hand was on the plate, laid there, I'd say, by whoever did it."
Haverill put his spectacles on. He bent. He looked behind the ear, a good long look, and he straightened up.
"Lightermen drown," he said.
"He's not a lighterman, sir. Nobody knows him."
"He's a man in the water in a dockyard, Sergeant." He put them in his pocket. "Write drowned."
"Sir—"
"Drowned." He said it without heat. "The clock stands, and I've a door to open tomorrow, and I've no mind to have every constable in the port at my back till the weld. Constable, take him up to the dead-house. Say drowned." He turned to go. Then he turned back. "Pask. Door three's hatch."
"Open since the night. A key. Not me."
"I didn't say it was," said Haverill, and went up the quay.
Two constables lifted the hurdle. The caulkers went back to their pitch. I stood there with a stair full of weed and a door I'd looked at for the better part of a quarter hour and not seen.
The water was starting to move. You could hear it, a low suck in the culvert, like a thing clearing its throat. Wenna said, "Slack's gone, ducks. In or I'll leave you." I didn't get in.
My hands had started going. Both. The right in its rag, the left bare. I put them under my arms and that did nothing. It wasn't the cold, though the culvert breathes cold out of the dark, like a cellar. It wasn't the man. I'd seen the dead. I'd seen Hollin dead, and my mother, and I hadn't shaken.
It was the plate. All night he'd been on the end of that scrape. Somebody had stood on this stair in the dark and put his hand in the square and held it there while the door looked him over. A deep door's meant to be paid by people who are carrying something. They'd laid a man on it with nothing in him.
Something went round my shoulders. Heavy. It smelled of bread, and soap, and a bit of mutton.
"You're shaking," said Gannet.
"I'm not."
"Fair enough," he said, and didn't take it off.
It was the one that had torn on the grating. Somebody had sewn it up, in big black stitches, a boy's work, and I put my thumb on them and didn't say who. It came to my knees. I'd have given it back. I put my hand out to do it and then I didn't.
"Whoever's emptying the keeps," I said. "He killed him."
"Or whoever's paying him did."
I turned my head. He was looking at the culvert. He hadn't got a wedge, or a pick, or any idea how it worked, and he'd put his finger on it like he'd been told.
"Why'd you say that?"
"Because the man who did that wasn't doing it for himself," said Gannet. "You can see. He hasn't a thing in his hands. It's all been done for somebody." He rubbed his face. "I don't know. I'm no good at the clicky bit. I'm only saying what he looked like."
I thought it was Ivo. I thought it twice. The scrape on the plate, the tar on his cuff, how he'd come down three steps to tell me whose door it was.
"Then we'll find both," I said.
"Yes."
The boat bumped at the bottom step. The water was running now, loud in the culvert. I pushed my hands up inside his sleeves, up to the elbow, where it was warm, and I never found the cuffs.