Monday evening, the eighth of December. A quarter to seven, and two days to the burial.
Lowmarsh police station had the fog inside it again, hanging under the electric lights in slow yellow scarves. Dot came through the door at a run and hit the wooden rail of the front desk with her stomach, and stood there with her mouth open and no breath to put in it.
The door with the iron grille was just closing on a green-painted passage. Through the last of the gap she saw a London Transport greatcoat and the back of a bare head. Then Constable Garrard's cape swung across it and the lock went over.
"Miss Amory," said Sergeant Bowyer. He was writing in the big ledger, and he did not look up. "I was going to send for you. Save my legs."
"I want to see him."
"You'll see him presently. Mind the boy."
She minded the boy. He was the same one, or another like him: a small child in a man's cap on the bench under the notices, asleep against the radiator, with a label pinned to his coat. It said FOUND, and a street she didn't know. On the bench beyond him a woman held a hen in a shopping basket and stared at nothing, and beyond her a man in a pin-striped suit lay full length with his hat over his face. The fog was in all of them.
"Now then." Bowyer blotted the line and turned the ledger so he could see it better. He was a large, pale, careful man, and he did his talking to the page. "Ferrar, Winston. Lodger, fourteen Cinder Row. That's the name, and it's a name I had already, thanks to you. Larceny from a dwelling. Property of the late Alfred Bracegirdle." He wrote it. "Son came in at four o'clock and gave his statement. His father kept the week's collections in a canvas bag, on the table in his front room. Friday the old man died. Nobody thought of the bag. Monday, the undertaker's man comes for Gully's money and the son goes looking, and the bag's not there. So he comes to me. So I go to the house, half past five, with a constable, and a search, which the household didn't object to, and there's the bag. In the lodger's drawer, on top of the lodger's shirts. Empty."
"On top," said Dot. "Not even hidden."
"He's not a clever lad."
"He's the cleverest man I've met this week. He's the one who—"
"Miss," said Bowyer, very patient. "It was in the drawer."
He turned a page.
"And here's another thing. I telephoned his depot, being thorough. His bus came off the road at half past one on Friday, at the river end, not a quarter past two like he told you. The foreman's got it in his book. Now the lodger says he was in at a quarter to three. So where was he for an hour and a quarter, Miss? Walking home in a fog, that he says he can do dead? He wouldn't say tonight. I asked him twice. And I've a tin gone off a dresser in Flax Street the same afternoon, your own landlady's, Miss, and a lodger whose own route home from the river takes him by the end of Flax Street, by his own time. I'll be asking him about that too." He tapped the ledger. "And there's a firm's name on the cover of the book that was in the bag. Fennimore and Glass, solicitors, High Street. I rang them. Shut for the fog. I'll try them in the morning."
Dot took a breath.
It was the wrong one. It went in full of fog and wet serge and boiled tea, and it came out as a cough, and when the cough was done she said, in a loud, flat voice she'd never heard come out of herself, "It was gas."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Mr Bracegirdle. He was gassed. He didn't die of his chest, Sergeant. I've seen him."
She told it standing at the rail, and she told it as well as she'd ever told anything, which is to say in the wrong order and all at once. Gully's back gate, and Micky, and the white bulb. The gas fire in the front room with its brass tap. The draught snake, lying on the hall side of the door on Friday afternoon like a cat put out, and the door shut, and nobody smelling anything in a house that smelt of the fog. The window opened afterwards for air. She didn't say Nurse Rhys. She got to the edge of the name and something in her stopped, a hand on her sleeve. She said, "and somebody who knew what was in that room came and cleaned it," and left it there.
Bowyer heard her out. She would give him that. He put the pen down and folded his hands on the ledger and let her run down like a gramophone.
"So," he said. "A clerk from the register office, that's no business being in it, goes into a private undertaker's after dark, by the back, with a boy of fifteen. And sees a dead man with a red face, by a bulb."
"By a white bulb. It was grey by the lamp."
"Pink's the cold, Miss. Every man in that yard'll tell you. My own father went pink. It's a hard week. You've been up since Friday. You've seen a lot of dead you didn't want to."
"Then telephone somebody who'll say it's not the cold!"
"Who?"
She opened her mouth, and there was nobody in it.
"Well, then," said Bowyer. He looked at her for a moment as if he might be sorry, and then he lifted the telephone off its hook and said into it, "St Saviour's Hall, please, Church Street. The coroner's officer. Truscott." He turned the earpiece a little outward, so that she would hear.
She could hear the line ticking and, behind the ticking, hundreds of people not talking. A long way off, a man was reading numbers. Then Mr Truscott's voice, tired, small, close, as if he were speaking from inside a wardrobe.
"Truscott."
"Sergeant Bowyer, Lowmarsh. I've the Amory girl here, from the register office. Says Alfred Bracegirdle of fourteen Cinder Row was gassed. She's seen a colour."
There was a pause. It was a long one.
"Not on a registrar's say," said the voice. "The doctor has certified. It's on my sheet, no further action, I wrote it myself. Get me a doctor, Sergeant. Get me a doctor, or a mark, and I'll have him on the table in an hour."
"Thank you, Mr Truscott."
The line clicked.
Bowyer set the receiver in its cradle with both hands.
"There you are," he said. "The doctor says how a man died. Only the coroner can say he's wrong, and his officer's just told us it'll not go to him. So it's chest, Miss, till a doctor says otherwise. And if a doctor ever does say gas—" He picked up the pen. "Then I've a bag in the darkie's drawer. It's the rope, Miss, if it's murder, and it's him I've got."
The woman with the hen looked round. Garrard, at the end of the desk, looked at his boots. The man in the pinstripe took his hat off his face.
"His name," said Dot, "is Mr Ferrar."
She had not decided to say it. It came out of her at a pitch she used for the pillar box and the other end of the queue, and it went up to the ceiling and round the notices and along the passage to the grille. "His name is Mr Ferrar, he's a conductor on the number forty, he served in the Royal Air Force for four years, and he walked into my office on Saturday to say it first and he was right. His name is Mr Ferrar."
Nobody said anything. On the bench the child with the label turned over.
"Well," said Bowyer, after a while. He wrote something. "Mr Ferrar's charged with the larceny. The court isn't sitting in this. Nothing is, Tuesday or otherwise, till it lifts. He'll be here." He looked up at last, and his face was not unkind. "You want to see the evidence, Miss? Since you're so fond of a bag. Garrard, fetch it."
They laid it on the desk under the station's electric lamp, which had no fog in it and no yellow either, only a hard white light that made the desk-top grey. Bowyer put on his glasses. Garrard came out with a tin tray and set it beside the bag.
On the tray lay what they'd taken from the first-floor back: a pair of boots with the laces still tied, a Bible with a pressed flower in it, a cricket annual with the cover gone soft, a handful of pennies, a shaving brush. Every one had a film on it, black and greasy. It came away on her finger. It was what everything in Lowmarsh looked like this week: whatever you left out of a cupboard for a day took a black skin of fog and soot, the pennies, the boots, the milk. And under them, folded, five shirts.
She took one out. It was white, and it had been white on Sunday. Along every fold in it ran a line, a hand's width, sharp and fine as if it had been drawn there with a ruler: a thin black stripe of soot, in the collar, across the chest, down the arm, at the bend of the sleeve.
"That drawer won't shut," said Garrard. It was the first thing he'd said to her. "It's on the window wall, Miss. You can see where the wind's been at it."
"Yes," said Dot. "I bet you can."
She put the shirt down and picked up the bag.
It was an ordinary canvas bag, like a coalman's. It had a leather handle and a brass clasp. It was creased flat, the way a bag is when it's been put away folded, with two sharp lines across the belly where somebody had pressed it. It was dry. And it was clean. There was not a mark of the black on it anywhere, not on the handles or the canvas or the white stencil letters A.E.B.; and she turned it inside out, and the lining was as clean as the day it was sewn.
"Sergeant," she said. "Look at that."
"I've looked."
"It's clean."
"It's canvas. It'd been in a drawer."
"So were his shirts." She held the white shirt up. "Look at these. Two days in that drawer and they're black along the folds like a map. Every single thing in that room has got it, the Bible, the boots, the pennies. Everything left out in the fog gets that film by the next morning, you've only to wipe a table. And this—" She held out the bag. "It's dry as a bone. It's not been in that house. It's been somewhere shut. Somewhere with the window closed."
She lifted it to her face, and it smelt of camphor.
It was not strong. It was camphor, like a chest rubbed for croup. She breathed it once more to be sure.
"It smells like a sickroom," she said.
"It smells of camphor," said Bowyer. "Every house on that Row's got a chest."
"So the old man kept it in a cupboard."
"Then why isn't it in the cupboard?"
"Because a lodger took it out." Bowyer took off his glasses and rubbed his nose. "Miss Amory. You're a clever girl, I've heard so. But you've got a bag, and a lad that hasn't a word to say for himself, and a hole in his Friday. I've charged men on less."
She put the bag on the tray, very gently, as if it might wake.
"May I see the book?" she said. "Inside. The collection book. Only to read it."
Bowyer thought about that. Then he opened the clasp with two fingers and took out a narrow oblong ledger with a marbled cover. On the front of it, printed on a paper label gone soft at the corners, were the words Tanyard Estates, and under them, smaller, care of Fennimore and Glass, High Street. He turned to the end, past pages of tidy columns. The last line was in Alfred Bracegirdle's square careful pencil, the same as the notebook's.
"Go on," said Bowyer. "Read it. Garrard'll put it down."
She read it to herself first, because she always did. Then she read it aloud, once, for the constable's pencil.
"Week to Thursday the fourth. Thirty-one pounds four shillings."
"Right, Miss," said Garrard, writing.
They gave her five minutes. Garrard unlocked the passage and stood at the far end of it with his back turned, which she understood to be a favour.
The cells were four in a row, each with a door of oak and iron and a spy hole at the height of a face, and the smell was of carbolic and old stone and many men. Winston was in the third. They had left him his coat. He sat on the plank bed with his back against the wall and his hands between his knees, and the chain was gone from his wrists, and he had the look about the mouth of someone who has been shown a joke and can't get the point.
"Miss Amory," he said. "You've come to the wrong end of the building for the register."
"Mr Ferrar—"
"Don't. I'll say it. I'm not being ungracious, Miss, I'm only being tired. I've stood on a platform for fourteen hours a day and that was restful." He stood up. It took him a moment. He put his back straight in the same way he had walked out of the house, as if it were something to be held. "Now. I hear you were shouting my name in the front office. The whole passage heard. I don't know that I ever had it said so loud. It was very fine. Thank you."
"It was the other word. I couldn't let him—"
"I know what word." His mouth went crooked. "I've heard him call the Almighty worse than that, when the tea was cold. It's a small room, this. You hear a good deal through the wall."
She came a step closer. There was nowhere to stand. She stood.
"I had a shirt out of that drawer at six this morning," said Winston. "A clean one. For the depot. I opened it and I took the top one and I shut it, or I tried to, it doesn't. And there was no bag. There was no bag in that drawer at six o'clock this morning, Miss Amory, if I never live to say another word. I'll say that to the magistrate. I'll say it to the Archbishop."
"I believe you. I told him. I told Sergeant Bowyer about the shirts, they're black along the folds and the bag's clean, it's been kept somewhere else, and it's—"
"You told him gas."
She stopped.
"I heard that too. Through the wall." He wasn't shouting. "You stood there in the front office and you told a police sergeant that the old man was murdered. With a gas tap. Which is the tap I could have walked to, in my socks, any night of the week."
"He didn't believe me. The coroner didn't believe me. I rang up for a doctor, and there isn't one—"
"It cost you nothing to say. It cost me!" He sat down again, slowly, on the plank. "Do you know what a man does with a dead old man and a bag of money, and a lodger with a rent quarrel, in nineteen fifty-two, Miss Amory? They don't try him for the bag. They try him for the old man."
"Where were you on Friday?" she said. "From half past one. The depot says half past one. You said a quarter past two. If I knew where—"
"That's between me and the Lord and one other." He said it lightly, in the voice he used for the duke. "And the one other's not for this room."
"Mr Ferrar, it might save your life."
"Then it will have to save it without her name in a police ledger." He shut his eyes, and opened them. "Beg pardon. That's a fine speech, that. Forget I said her."
"I've forgotten it."
"You're a terrible liar, Miss Amory. Your ears have gone." He was almost laughing, and he was shivering, all at once, in long shudders that came up out of his boots. The cell had no heating and no window, and the stone was sweating at the corners.
"I'll get you a blanket," said Dot.
"Don't trouble the Metropolitan Police."
"I don't mean them. I'll bring one."
"You'll be turned out."
"I'll be turned out very slowly." She had her hand through the bars before she knew it, and he took it, once, in a hard dry grip, and let go.
From the far end of the passage Garrard coughed, delicately, the way a constable coughs.
"Miss Amory," said Winston, as she turned. "Wool, if she's got it. Not that cotton rubbish they give the prisoners."