Monday, the eighth of December. A quarter to five, and two days to the burial.
The back gate of Gully's yard was a wardrobe door on a hinge of wire, with a mirror in it gone black as a pond. Dot stood against it in Wharf Lane and watched her own breath go out into the fog and not come back.
She had run from the Coopers' Arms with Rhys's hand still round her wrist. It was not there now. She held the wrist with the other hand anyway, and it smelt of the nurse's oil, and she said to it, quite quietly, "Leave him in the ground. You don't know what you'll dig up."
Somewhere behind the timber stack a bolt slid.
"Five," said Micky Sprott's voice, from inside the wardrobe door. "I said five. He's not gone yet."
"It's ten to. I'm early. I'm always early for things I'm frightened of."
"He's at the front gate. He's doing his hat."
They stood on either side of a door and listened to Mr Gully doing his hat. There was a murmured word to a man with a cart, and a price. "We don't say cash this week," said Mr Gully's voice, dropping to a confidence, "we say arrangement." Then boots on the cinders, going away up the lane.
"Mission for his tea," said Micky. "He's gone an hour. Come on, Miss, and don't touch nothing."
"I won't touch anything."
"You will, though."
"I will," said Dot. "Yes."
The workshop was a tin shed with a brick end, and it was as cold as a cellar. Micky lit a hurricane lamp from a match cupped in both hands and hung it from a nail, and the dark came away from the middle of the room like a curtain.
Coffins stood on trestles in rows. Plain deal ones, and ones made out of somebody's wardrobe, with the shadow of a hanging rail still on the lid. It smelt of glue and sawdust and cold paraffin.
The elm one stood by itself under the window. It had brass handles.
"That's him," said Micky. "Wednesday's. Mr Gully did him special." He said it with pride, and then heard himself. "Well. He's paid for."
Dot went down the row between the trestles with her hands behind her back, on purpose, like a child in a shop. Her mouth had already started. It always started when she was afraid.
"Mr Bracegirdle," she said. "Good evening. I'm the registrar. We haven't met, properly. I wrote you down on Saturday and I told a lie to your son about it, and I'm going to look at your face now, and I'm sorry, but I've a reason."
The lid leaned against the wall beside him. Somebody had combed his hair with water and it had dried in furrows. They had put him in a clean shirt with the collar open and crossed his hands on his chest, big red-knuckled hands that had carried a barrow for twenty-odd years, and in the lamplight, which was yellow and soft and kind to everyone, he was the colour of every fog death she had written down since Friday. The grey-yellow of an old candle.
"He's the same as the rest," she said. "Micky. He's just the same."
"Wait," said Micky.
He went to the wall. There was a switch by the door, a brown knob on a length of flex, and hanging from the rafters over the elm coffin on its own wire, bare, one electric bulb. The only one in the yard, Micky had said at dinnertime, that Mr Gully wouldn't let anyone else touch. Micky turned the knob.
The bulb came on white.
The hurricane lamp shrank to a smear of orange. And Alfred Bracegirdle came up out of the yellow into the white, and he was pink.
Not painted, and not a doll's. It was the colour of a man come in from the cold, with the blood right up under the skin: the cheeks flushed, the lips, the ears, the great knuckles of his hands. Down the side of his neck where the shirt fell open there were patches, bright as cherries, running down under his collar. He looked, God help him, healthier than he could have looked in twenty years.
Dot took a step back and put her hand on a trestle, and it rocked.
"Mr Gully says it's the cold," Micky whispered. "Does it, Miss? Cold?"
"I don't know. I thought the cold made them blue. Every one I've seen this week was grey, or blue about the mouth like a plum." She was staring at the hands. "A woman came in. Nineteen forty-nine, it was, before you'd have been much more than a baby, Micky. Marsh Lane. A coroner's paper with two words on it, and she sat there on the bench and said, he looked so well, he'd looked better than he had in years. And I said, I'm so glad, and I wrote it down. What a lovely thing for her to say. And it was on the paper the whole time. Coal gas."
"Gas?"
"Town gas, off the fire, off the cooker. The stuff in the pipes." She was talking to the coffin now, which was easier. "It poisons the blood so it goes cherry-red and stays it. They look as if they'd come in from the cold and were just about to say something. Under a yellow lamp you'd never know. In this fog, in a bedroom with a paraffin lamp, you'd stand in the door and say, poor old man, bronchitis."
"Mr Gully switched it on Saturday," said Micky slowly. "When they brought him in. And he said, it's the cold does it. And he switched it off again quick."
"Did he."
"He says it about anything he doesn't fancy. Damp. Bad boots."
"Any other pink?"
"No," said Micky slowly. "Just him." His face was very young in the white light. "I never thought."
"Neither did I. I thought morphine, Micky. I said it to Nurse Rhys's face on Sunday and looked in her bag. I was wrong. I think it was this." She laid the flat of her glove on the elm edge, gently, and took it off again. "I think it was a gas fire."
The clothes were on a nail behind the door. They'd been taken off him on Saturday morning by the men who'd laid him out: trousers, jacket, a flannel shirt gone at the elbows, the waistcoat with its watch-pocket empty and the chain nowhere. She put that on the shelf with the other things, which was getting full.
"Family don't ask for the pockets," said Micky. "If they don't ask, they stay."
"What's in them?"
"Nothing. A pipe. A shilling. Mr Gully took the shilling."
But the waistcoat was heavy on one side. She turned it inside out, and in the inner pocket, held with a rubber band gone soft with age, was a small black notebook the size of a hand.
"Miss."
"I'm only looking."
"That's the family's. That's stealing."
"I'm not stealing, I'm reading. You can't steal reading. Nobody ever went to prison for reading." Her ears were already hot. "Put the light on the table. Not that one. The white one, it's better. Micky, please."
He stood on a box and unhooked the bulb's flex to bring it over, cursing softly, and the electric light swung across the shed and came to rest above the little table by the door. Dot opened the book under it.
It was in pencil. It was in a hard, square, careful hand, the hand of somebody who'd chalked prices on a board. There was a page of initials, and beside each one a sum, and beside the sum a row of ticks. S.P., five shillings. Mrs W., one shilling. T.B., two and six. Names or half names, one to a line, and the ticks going down the page like teeth. A dozen of them. More.
"What is it?" whispered Micky. "Is it debts?"
"Not his. Somebody else's." She turned a page. "It's who owed him. And not rent. Rent goes in a rent book. This is somebody paying him for something, and it isn't the landlord." She heard it as she said it. "Oh, you old devil. It's a tithe. It's the Bishop's own tenth, on the side."
She had a Co-op dividend slip in her handbag and the pencil in her hair. She copied fast, squatting under the bulb with the slip on her knee, and her handwriting, which was so beautiful in the register, went to pieces.
G., ten shillings. Every week, ticked, for as far back as the book went.
Dr K., two and six a week.
"G.," said Dot. "G. Gully. Micky, does Mr Gully pay somebody ten shillings a week?"
"I never see him pay anybody."
"He did on Thursday. Only he said he'd stop. He told you. He stood in your yard and told Mr Gully he'd do no more of Mr Gully's ten bob and he'd tell the council on Monday." She looked up at him. "Today's Monday."
"Miss," said Micky. He'd turned a bad colour. "Don't say it in here."
"And Dr K. Two and six a week. Kemp." She wrote it down. "For his car in the lock-up. Or for something else. I don't know. I don't know anything."
Then she turned to the page where a page had been.
It was still there, in a way. A stub, torn out close to the stitching, so close that the thread showed. There was a scrap of paper left in the crease no wider than a matchstick, and on it the tail of a pencil stroke. Somebody had had this page out, and they'd done it with a hard, hurried hand, and they hadn't cared what it left.
"There was a name on that," said Dot.
"How d'you know?"
"Because somebody didn't want anyone to read it." She held the book to the bulb and looked at the stub sideways. Nothing. She put it down on her knee. "Between the tithes and the end. Somebody took a page."
She turned to the last leaf that had anything on it.
It was very neat. At the top, in the same pencil, the date. Thursday. Under it, three words. And under the three words, ruled with a ruler and pressed so hard the pencil had cut the paper, a line ran right across the page, under every name in the book, the way you draw a line at the bottom of a sum.
She read it aloud, as she read everything.
"Thursday. Told. No more."
Micky said, "Told who?"
"Somebody." Dot sat back on her heels. "Thursday night. Mr Ferrar stood on his landing in his socks, and Mr Bracegirdle shouted down the stairwell for twenty minutes about the rent. And somebody answered him. Once. Low, he said, in the hall or the back passage, and he couldn't swear man or woman. Then the back door." She swallowed. "Told. No more. He was finishing it. All of it, Micky, the tithes, the lot. He told somebody on Thursday night, and they went out by the back door, and on Friday somebody tore a page out of his book."
"Who?"
"The nurse." It came out at once. "Nurse Rhys. It's always the nurse. She was in that house on Friday, she took charge, she told them all what to say. She was on the Row all Thursday night, she told me herself, she's got no— no, she didn't tell me that, I'm making it up. Never mind. She went white at morphine and she said, don't you ever look in my bag. And on Saturday at midnight she came down Flax Street to tell me to stay away." Her voice went up. "Micky. It fits, it fits, it all fits, why doesn't it feel like it fits?"
"I don't know, Miss."
"Neither do I. Hold the light."
She did the rest walking up and down between the trestles, with the notebook shut in her fist and Micky following with the lamp like a page boy at a very small wedding. It came out of her in the order it came, which wasn't tidy.
"The gas fire. In his room, on Saturday. I touched everything, you know I did, I touched the tap. A brass one, with a lever. It's the only fire in the room, so if he was gassed, it was that. But you can't gas a man in a room with the door open. You'd smell it in the hall. So somebody shut the room. Micky, the snake."
"What snake?"
"The draught snake. Mr Ferrar told me on the road on Saturday. He came in at a quarter to three on Friday and it was lying in the hall. Crooked. Outside the old man's door, on the hall side, like somebody'd put the cat out the wrong way. And I laughed. I laughed, Micky." She stopped. "It goes on the inside. You lay it on the inside to keep the fog out. There was one on the inside on Saturday, I saw it, I put my toe on it. But on Friday it was outside. Somebody put it out there. Somebody shut that door, and put the snake along the gap on the hall side, so the gas stayed in and the hall never smelt it. You can't seal yourself in from outside. Nobody does that to himself."
"Why'd anyone shut a door on a man and—"
"Because he'd be asleep. Or he'd be dead. And then the nurse comes, and opens the window." She put a hand over her mouth and took it off. "Dr Kemp told me, on Sunday. The window open in a fog, and the nurse said something about the soul. He called it Welsh nonsense. It wasn't nonsense. It was airing."
She stopped in front of the elm coffin.
"She'd be dead on the floor beside him," she said, "if it was full. You couldn't hold a hand in that room. Either she wasn't there, or somebody let the gas out first, and if somebody let the gas out first they knew it was there. And she said, I had his hand." She looked at Micky. "I think it was murder. I can't prove a word of it, it might all be the cold and a snake somebody kicked. But I don't believe that snake got out on the hall side by itself."
Micky's face had gone the colour of the candle. "Miss. I've got to put the light out."
"Why?"
"Because I can hear the gate."
She had heard it too, and taken no notice of it, because it was the sound of a wardrobe door on a wire hinge, and she'd been listening to herself.
The gate went again. Boots on cinders, quick and heavy, a man's who'd walked out at five to and was walking back in at twenty-five past, cross.
"Light!" hissed Micky. "Light!"
He was up on the box in one jump and had the switch knob by the flex, and the white bulb died. The lamp gave up half a room. Dot went down behind the elm coffin's trestle with the notebook in one hand and the dividend slip in the other and made herself as small as a woman in a good coat can be.
The shed door opened and let in the fog and Mr Gully.
"Micky. Who's been at that switch?"
"Me, Mr Gully. I were looking for the screws."
"By the electric? At my expense?" The voice was soft. It was always soft. It had a bereavement in it, permanently, like a coat he wore. "The Mission's got its urn gone and there's a queue at the door like the Palace. I'll go home, I thought. I'll put my feet up in my own office. And what do I find?"
"Nothing, Mr Gully."
"There's a draught in here."
"It's the back door, Mr Gully. I were putting the shavings out."
Footsteps came down the row. Dot watched Mr Gully's black boots move along the floor, an inch from the trestle's leg, and stop. He stood a long time over the elm coffin. She could hear him breathe, and she stopped her own.
"Wednesday's gentleman," said Mr Gully. "Sealed tomorrow at five, with the lid on. Cold accommodation. He'll keep." He turned. "Bank the stove. And turn off that lamp, you'll have us burnt down. You can go home, Micky."
The boots went away. A door shut. A key turned in it, or not; she couldn't tell.
She didn't move until Micky was crouched down beside her with his hand on her sleeve.
"Out the back," he whispered. "Now. He's in his office with the ledger. He'll be an hour."
On the way past the door she put the notebook back in the waistcoat on its nail, in its pocket. She left the rubber band on. She did not know if that was right.
He blew out the lamp and took her by the elbow, and they went along the wall in the pitch dark with their hands out like people in a game, and at the gate, under her glove, the iron latch was cold, and Micky whispered, "Miss. Was it him?"
"Was it who?"
"Mr Gully. It said G."
"I don't know," said Dot. "I don't know anything, I never have. Thank you. Go home."
She ran.
Wharf Lane to Church Street by a railing she couldn't see. She counted, and lost the count at eleven, and started again at one. Men stood in doorways, coughing. A dog came at her out of nothing and was gone. She was saying a speech, and it began Mr Ferrar, listen, it can't be you, and it had a middle, which was the snake. Winston had told her about the snake. Nobody who'd laid it would tell a registrar which side of the door it lay, and make a joke of it. It couldn't be him. She'd say it to him first, and then to the sergeant, and then to the fog.
There was a lamp outside number fourteen and it was burning, and the front door was open, and the hall behind it was full of light, and the light was moving.
She got to the step and stopped.
There were three lanterns in the hall. A constable in a cape stood in the doorway with his back to her, so that Dot could see only the shoulders and the helmet strap. Behind him Stanley Bracegirdle was standing against the wall, in his father's overcoat, with his mouth open. And in the middle of the hall, on the black-and-red tiles, a big man in a sergeant's greatcoat was holding up, by its two handles, a canvas bag.
It was an ordinary bag. It was the colour of a tent, gone dark at the corners with handling. There were letters stencilled on the side in white paint, and the lantern made them plain: A.E.B.
"Miss Amory," said Sergeant Bowyer. He'd seen her over the constable's shoulder; he didn't seem surprised. "You'll be wanting a word. Well, you were the one gave me the name."
"Sergeant, listen—"
"In his drawer, Miss. On top of his shirts. The old man's rent bag." He turned it so the light fell on it. "Empty. The week's rents gone."
"That's not— he wouldn't—"
The constable stepped down off the step and turned, and it was Garrard, the young one, with his cape shining wet, and between him and the door there was another man, with his hands held together in front of him and a short bright chain between the wrists.
Winston Ferrar came out of number fourteen into the fog in his London Transport greatcoat, bareheaded. His conductor's cap was on the hall table, upside down, with the badge to the wall. He walked as if on a platform in a moving bus, feet apart, and his eyes were front.
"Mr Ferrar," said Dot. "It's gas. It was gas. It was murder, it can't be you, you told me about the snake, I've seen him—"
"Steady, Miss," said Bowyer. "Not on the step."
Garrard steered. Winston came down the last step and level with her, and for a moment they were in the same lamp, a yard apart. He turned his head.
"I said I'd be first," said Winston. Then, as Garrard took his elbow: "Miss Amory. My cap. It's on the hall table. It's London Transport's, not mine, and they'll stop it out of my wages."
Dot went up the step past Bowyer and fetched it, badge side up. Garrard looked at his sergeant. Bowyer, after a moment, nodded, and Garrard put it on Winston's head himself, since his hands were chained, and set it straight.