Monday night, the eighth of December. Nine o'clock, and the lid goes on tomorrow.
She got as far as the bottom of the stairs in Flax Street and sat down on them.
Her legs simply stopped, at the third step, in her good coat, with the fog still coming in round the front door behind her, and she sat with her hands hanging between her knees and looked at the hall floor. Upstairs a kettle was singing.
"Mrs Ruddock," she said, to the stairs. "I have to ask you for a blanket."
A door opened. Light fell down the flight and landed on her shoes.
"Who's that on my stairs?" said Mrs Ruddock. "I can hear you breathing from here. You sound like a bellows."
"It's me."
"I know it's you, nobody else sits on my stairs. Get up. You're letting the draught in, and I've a girl asleep on my settle."
Dot went up the flight with her hand on the rail. Mrs Ruddock stood in the kitchen door with her arms folded over her apron and her hair set in tight pins for the night. She looked Dot up and down as she looked at the coal bill.
"That's a hat that's been to a funeral."
"It's been to two. And a police station. And an undertaker's. I've had a very busy Monday, Mrs R."
"Then you'll wipe your feet on it. In. And keep your voice down."
The kitchen was as it always was, small and hot, the lino shining, the wireless off. Somebody's small black shoes stood together on the mat, drying. On the settle by the range, under a coat and a crocheted blanket, lay a long lump with a crop of pale hair at one end.
"Maureen Tapsell," said Mrs Ruddock, low. "Went off at eight and hasn't moved. One night, I said to Beth Rhys, and one night it is. She talks in her sleep. It's all sorry." She moved the kettle to the side before it woke anybody. "Well. What is it you want, and what's it going to cost?"
"A blanket. For a man in the cells at Lowmarsh Green. He's his coat and nothing else, and there's no fire, and it's a stone room, it sweats at the corners. A wool one. He asked for wool. I'd owe you, you can put it in the book—"
"Which man?"
"Mr Ferrar. The lodger at fourteen."
Mrs Ruddock went into the front room, where her own bed was, and Dot heard a drawer, and another, and somebody shifting a lot of things that didn't want shifting. She came back with a folded blanket over her arm, grey-blue, with a binding gone pale, thick as a doormat.
"That's my mother's," she said. "Pure wool. Nine and six a pound, wool is now, and you're looking at three pound of it." She put it down on the table. "It'll come back with the print of a policeman's boot on it, you see if it don't. And don't let them put it on the floor of that station, I know what those floors are. Put it on the man."
"Thank you, Mrs R."
"It's in the book. Twenty-eight and six if it doesn't come back, and it'll not be worth twenty-eight and six when it does."
Dot stood with her hand on the wool. It was warm from the drawer, and heavy, and the only thing she had got all day that she had asked for.
"It was gas," she said. "Mr Bracegirdle. Somebody turned his fire on him on Friday, and this evening they've found his rent bag in Mr Ferrar's drawer, clean as a Sunday collar, and charged him with it."
Mrs Ruddock had the kettle in her hand. She filled a stone bottle from it, and screwed the stopper down hard, and set the bottle on the end of the range for the girl.
"Then somebody's done a wicked thing," she said. "That's a penny of coke, that bottle, and Beth Rhys'll not be paying it."
"The desk takes nothing for the prisoners after eight at night or before six in the morning. Sergeant's rule." Dot picked the blanket up and held it against her coat. "I'll be out before six with it, and at the desk when they unbolt. I'll go quiet. I'll not wake the girl."
"You'll not wake me either," said Mrs Ruddock. "Some of us pay for our sleep." She took the blanket back off Dot, shook it once, and folded it smaller, with the pale binding inside. "Ernie Bowyer's rule, is it. I knew his mother. She'd a mangle on the Green and a lip on her you could have hung washing from, and he's the image. Don't you let him keep it for the station."
The knock was three raps on the street door, at ten to ten, evenly spaced.
Mrs Ruddock's head came round. She looked at the clock, and at her apron, and then put a hand up to the pins in her hair.
"That'll be Cyril," she said. "Go and let him in. No. I'll go."
They went down together. On the mat in the small hall stood a small man in an overcoat and a hat with a fold in the crown that had been there since the war before last, holding a brown paper parcel out in front of him like a man delivering a subpoena.
"Mrs Ruddock," said Pike.
"Mr Pike."
"Cyril," said Mrs Ruddock, more quietly.
"Miss Amory." He gave the parcel to Dot. "Your gloves. You left them on the counter at half past ten, when you went off to Mrs Ormerod. It is eleven hundred yards by the streets."
"You didn't have to, Mr Pike. I'd have got them in the morning."
"You would not. You would be at the police station before I had the door unlocked, and without them."
They stood, the three of them, on a mat about the size of a tea tray. The two of them had a trick of not looking at each other now that Dot knew, like people at a dance who have been told to go on. Mrs Ruddock looked at the hatstand. Pike looked at the ceiling rose, as if it might be off true.
"It is not my intention to stay," said Pike.
"It's gone ten to ten."
"Then I shall stay ten minutes."
"You'd better. It's coming down out there." She turned and went up ahead of them, straight-backed, and said over her shoulder, in a voice gone pleased and crosser at once, "And you'll wipe your feet."
"I have wiped my feet," said Pike, to the stairs.
He didn't go up, though. He waited until the kitchen door had opened and shut, and then he turned to Dot in the little hall, and took his hat off, and looked at the fold in it.
"Your report to the coroner," he said. "It was blotted before it was dry. It will have offset on the facing page. I was going to raise it."
"Mr Pike, I've had the worst day of my life."
"I am aware." He turned the hat. "Mr Marchbanks telephoned at four. He asked whether you were in. I said you were out on inquiries. He asked into what. I said the dead."
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'All of them, Mr Pike?' and put the receiver down." Pike considered the ceiling rose again. "I heard about the lodger."
She opened her mouth.
"You were right, about the house," said Pike. "About there being something. I thought so on Saturday." He put his hat on his head, took it off, and put it under his arm. "That's all. Good night, Miss Amory. Don't leave them again."
He went up the stairs one at a time, and knocked on the kitchen door of his own accord. It opened, and then there was nothing.
Downstairs, in her own cold room, she put the blanket on the chair, the gloves on the blanket and the lamp on the washstand. She sat on the bed with her coat still on, a sheet from the back of the Co-op ledger on her knee, and got the pencil out of her hair.
"Right," she said.
She was too tired to be frightened, and it left room.
"Here's what I know, and I'll say it and you can stop me." She said it to the washstand. "Somebody took that bag off his table on Friday, with the money in, and kept it three days somewhere shut and dry. Then it went in Mr Ferrar's drawer after six this morning, because at six he took a shirt out and there wasn't one. And it was there at half past five when they looked."
She wrote six in the morning to half past five.
"Stanley first, because he's the easy one. He lives there. He knows the drawer won't shut. He can't stand the sight of Mr Ferrar. He says the bag's gone the minute Gully's man is at him for money, and off he goes to the police, and lo, they find it. That's very neat." She chewed the pencil. "Only Stanley hasn't the brains to be neat. He's never done a thing in his life he wasn't told to. And where would he keep a bag three days in that house, where Elsie hears a mouse turn over?" She wrote him down anyway.
"And I was on those stairs from half past ten, flat to the wall, and everybody who went up or down went past under my nose."
She wrote them in a column, in a hand that was getting worse, saying each aloud.
Nurse Rhys. Down from Mrs Ormerod's, with her bag.
Gully's man. A coat-hanger for the suit. The wrong door.
Elsie Sallis. Her cocoa tin, for the wreath.
Mrs R. The pie dish, and up for his black tie.
Stanley. Lives there.
She stopped. Then, because a list must be complete, she wrote one more line.
Me.
She laughed. It came out as a hoot. She hadn't a witness for her own morning but a bedridden woman of eighty-four who thought everybody was the nurse. The laugh went on longer than it ought and turned into something else, and she waited for it to stop.
"The smell," she said, when it had. "Camphor, like a chest rubbed for croup. Every house on that Row's got a chest, Sergeant Bowyer says. And every chest on the Row has had Nurse Rhys's oil rubbed on it, out of the brown bottle in her bag, which I looked in on Sunday, and she snapped it shut and told me never to do it again."
She put the pencil against the first line.
"Nurse Rhys. Who said half past three, I had his hand, and he'd been lying in gas since two. You can't hold a hand in that room. You'd be on the floor beside him. Who told Mrs Ormerod it was her came up the yard, so the old lady'd never look again. Who went the colour of the wall when I said pink at the tea, and took my wrist, and said leave him in the ground." She tapped the pencil. "Who was in that room. Somebody was in that room after, and opened the window, and moved the snake, and made him tidy. And she's the only one says she was."
Then Gully's man, on the landing at the wrong door. They're all the same in this light, Miss. She underlined him once. The others she left.
"That's two," said Dot. "There's two. And one of them's my friend."
She lay back on the bed with the list on her chest. Through the fogged window, very faint, came a bell, St Saviour's or some other. She counted the strokes. Ten. She'd go at six, to the nurses' home, before Rhys could get her hat on, and knock, and say it to her face.
She sat up and wrote Nurse Rhys again, in capitals, at the bottom of the sheet, and drew a ring round it. Then she drew the ring again, and again, round and round, until the pencil went through the paper.
She slept in her coat, in the end, with her boots on the floor where she could find them, and woke in the dark with the pencil under her cheek.
St Saviour's was striking the half. She counted it out of habit and got one. Half past five. She lay a moment listening to the house: Pike long gone, the kitchen overhead quiet, the fog pressing at the window like a face. Then she got up and folded the list into her bag.
She put the gloves on. She put the blanket over her left arm. She went along the passage in her stockings, carrying her boots, and had her hand on the latch of the street door when the cry came from the back of the house.
It was short and high, like a gull's. It wasn't a scream. It was the noise a person makes when they put their hand on a thing in the dark that they didn't expect to be there.
Dot put her boots down and went back along the passage and through the scullery. The back door stood open on the yard, and the fog came in over the step, brown in the dark, tasting of pennies. There was a candle-end in a jam jar on the lid of the coal bunker. By it stood Maureen Tapsell, in her stockings and somebody's cardigan, with the scuttle at her feet half full and a tin in both her hands.
"I were doing the coal," she said. "For the range. She said I weren't to touch her coal. I'll not have a night for nothing."
"Maureen, what is it?"
"It were by the bunker. Against the wall, there." She tipped her head at the back wall, black and wet, and the fog on top of it like a wet sheet. "Like somebody'd slung it over."
Dot came across the flags and held the jar up.
It was a biscuit tin, the square sort, with a lid. On the lid the King and Queen looked out of a frame of gilt flags, crowned, pleased with themselves, the paint worn to the tin at the corners where a thumb went. One corner of the lid was bent in, sharp, as if it had come down on stone.
"That's Mrs R's," said Dot. "That's her Coronation tin. That's on the board at the police station. Somebody had it off her dresser on Friday."
"I only looked in it," said Maureen.
Dot took the lid off. It came hard, over the bent corner, with a squeal.
There was no money in it. There were no gloves. At the bottom, folded small and square, lay a piece of cloth. She took it out and let it fall open over her fingers in the candle.
It was satin, a hand's width each way, cut clean on two sides and frayed on the others, and it was purple. Not violet. Not plum. A deep bright glossy purple that took the candlelight and gave it back, too fine for anything in that yard.
Maureen looked at it. She didn't touch it.
"That's what he lined her with," she said. "Mr Gully. For my Christine."
The scullery door banged back against the wall.
Mrs Ruddock stood in it in a dressing gown the colour of gravy, with her pins in and a shawl over the pins, and the face of somebody woken by her own lodgers twice in one night who means to charge for both.
"What's all this? It's not six. I've one creeping about in the passage like a burglar, and another shrieking in my yard, and the whole of Flax Street—"
"It's yours, Mrs R," said Dot. "Your tin. Maureen found it by the coal. There's nothing in it. Not a penny. Not your gloves."
"They've bent the lid," said Mrs Ruddock. "Take it to Ernie Bowyer on your way. I'll want it back." She pulled the shawl round and went in, and they heard her on the back stairs, going up, one step at a time and every one of them offended.
Dot stood with the tin in one hand and the purple in the other.
"It's him," she said.
Maureen looked at her.
"It's Gully. It's Gully, Maureen. He was out your back at ten to two, and he says he was never near. And he'd his man on the landing yesterday at a door that wasn't his. And forty coins in his biscuit tin on Saturday, like the rent, from a lady he can't name. And on Thursday Mr Bracegirdle told him he was finished and Gully said over his dead body, Micky heard him. And he's had the good of it, and come down the Drift in the night and slung it over, empty, with his own lining in it, as you'd throw out a sweet paper. And I'm going to—" She stopped, because her breath had gone and her words hadn't. "It's his."
"I never said he took it," said Maureen. "I said what it is."
She picked up the scuttle, and the jam jar, and went in past Dot to the scullery with the coal, to earn her night.
Dot folded the satin small, as she'd found it, and put it back, and pressed the lid down over the bent corner until it caught. She put the tin in her bag. She went back along the passage and put her boots on in the dark, and went out of the street door into Flax Street with the blanket over her arm, and pulled the door to behind her.
The fog was brown and thick and full of the morning's first coal smoke, and there was no one in it. She turned towards Bridge Street. At every step the tin knocked against her hip through the bag, a small flat sound, like somebody at a door.
"Nurse first," she told the fog. "Then him."