Tuesday, the ninth of December. Six in the morning, and dark. Twenty-eight hours to the burial.
The district nurses' home was a tall thin house in Bridge Street with a lamp over the door and a bell-pull that a hundred years of nurses had worn to a rag. Dot pulled it. She had barely let go when the door was open and there was a torch in her face.
"Who's dying?" said Nurse Rhys.
"Nobody. Yet. I mean, somebody is, but it's not a bed." Dot put up a hand against the beam. "It's me. Don't shine that at me, it's like being looked at by a lighthouse."
The torch went down, and stopped on the blanket over her arm. Rhys stood in the hall in a grey flannel dressing gown, with her hair in one long plait over her shoulder, and looked at Dot for a full second in the dark. Then she said, in exactly the voice she used to Pike's cough, "In. Wipe your feet. Not a sound on the stairs, there's three of them asleep who've been up since Saturday."
They went up four flights without a sound, and Dot carried her shoes in one hand and held the rail with the other, and the tin in her bag knocked once against the banisters, and Rhys looked round.
Rhys's room was at the top, under the slates, and it held a narrow bed made square, a washstand, a chair, and a small spirit stove with a kettle on it. On the wall over the bed, in a black frame, was a photograph of a woman in a hat, perhaps sixty, plain and stern and laughing at whoever held the camera, with Rhys's exact jaw. There was a hymn book on the chair. A brown bottle stood by the jug on the washstand, with a cork in it, and a label gone yellow, and the smell of it was all over the room.
"Sit," said Rhys.
Dot sat, on the bed, because the chair had the hymn book, and put the blanket beside her. Rhys lit the stove with a match and stood with her back to it, her arms folded, like a nurse at a bedside.
"Now. It's six o'clock. I've had two hours. You've had none, by the face. It must be something you can't say in daylight, and I'll thank you to say it and let me get dressed."
"I've been to Gully's," said Dot.
Rhys's arms stayed folded across the dressing gown, and the kettle behind her had begun to tick.
"I went in by the back yesterday, at dusk, with Micky Sprott, and I switched on the white bulb over Mr Bracegirdle, and he's the wrong colour. All of him. His face and his hands and the patches down his neck. Not the cold, I don't think, not when every other one in that shed's grey. I think it's town gas. Off the fire in his room, the brass tap. And the snake was outside, on the hall side of the door, on Friday at a quarter to three. Mr Ferrar kicked it straight, which is how I know. And the window was open when Dr Kemp came, and you told Dr Kemp it was custom. And there's a page torn out of his notebook, right at the stitching." She was on her feet. She had not known she was going to stand up. "You said, I was with him, I held his hand. You'd have been dead on the floor beside him. In that room. You couldn't have held his hand for a minute and lived. And I thought—"
"What did you think?"
"I sat up all night thinking a thing about you I'll not say," said Dot. "So I'll give you one of mine first. And then you'll give me yours."
She didn't say what she'd thought all night. Rhys knew anyway; you could see it arrive.
"You've been to the notebook," said Rhys.
"I copied three lines."
Rhys sat down on the hard chair, on the hymn book, without noticing it, and put both hands on her knees. She looked at the photograph over the bed, briefly, as you look at a clock. Her hands began to shake, both together, from the wrists, a fine fast tremor Dot had never seen in them, and she pressed them flat against her knees to stop it and they went on.
"Oh, Dorothea," she said. "Oh, my girl. I'd not have killed that man."
"Then say it," said Dot. "Whatever it is."
"It's not for the likes of you."
"That's what everybody says. You said it to Stanley, and Kemp said it to me. And somebody has died, and there's a man in a cell." She sat down again, on the edge of the bed, and something went out of her at the knees. "Mine first. So it's fair. Nobody knows this. Not Pike. Not anybody."
"You don't need to."
"I look at my mother's entry," said Dot. "Every week. Nineteen-forty, October, entry two hundred and twelve. I go down in my dinner hour and I stand on the box and I look at it. Twelve years I've been looking. She isn't in that shelter, Nurse Rhys. She went out to fetch a woman from the Row and she didn't come back, and the book says a shelter, and I go and look at it every Saturday and every Wednesday like a person going to a grave. I told Mr Pike I was after the new volume. I don't know what I'm looking for. That's mine."
Rhys was quiet for what seemed a long while. Then she stood up, and turned to the stove, and made the tea, in a brown pot, with her back to the room. She poured two cups. She put one in Dot's hands and closed Dot's fingers round it, hard, as she'd close them round a thermometer.
"Drink that," she said.
Dot drank, and it was black and stewed and scalding.
Rhys took the pins out of her plait, one at a time, and laid them on the washstand.
"I wasn't in that house till after three. I'd been with Rita Pardew since half past twelve, at number three, and her boy came at twenty to three. The yards run into each other. There's a gate. I went through it with my bag."
She unwound the plait, which was long and dark and grey at the ends, and it went round her fingers as she talked.
"First Friday. It was the first Friday, Dorothea. I'd a pound in an envelope in my pocket, I'd had it ready since the morning, and I'd been in that house every month for five years and never once late."
"Late with what?"
"Wait." She raised one hand, with the hairpins in it. "The passage was thick with it. The back one, by his kitchen. I smelt it on the step. I said, the pressure. It's been going all week, the pressure, it's dipping in every house in the borough, the flame goes out and the gas keeps coming; I'd seen two since Wednesday. A woman in Marsh Lane. A boy of nine. I said, not him, and I went in."
She stood with the hair across her wrist and her eyes on the floorboards, and Dot did not speak.
"The door was shut, his room. And the snake was on the wrong side, out in the hall along the bottom, tidy as a ruler. I thought, Stanley, the careless great lump. I kicked it out of my way and I opened the door."
"And?"
"It took me in the face." Her voice had gone very low. "Like a wet sack. I'd my sleeve up before I could think. I got as far as the window. I put it up. I'd a job to get the sash, it's stiff, and the fog came in, and I stood with my face in it, and I was sick out of it into the yard. Then I looked."
She put the hairpins in her mouth, and took them out again.
"He was in his chair by the fire, with his feet on the fender, like he'd dropped off after his dinner. Rosy. He looked like a boy. I've laid out four hundred, and I never saw one look so well."
Rhys took the kettle off the stove with the tail of her dressing gown and set it on the floor.
"The tap was on. Full on, and nothing lit. I turned it off. I put my hand on his neck, and it was cold. And I thought, pressure. That's all I thought. The flame's blown out and he's asleep and it's the pressure, and it's an accident, God help the man, and it's the Gas Board's."
"But it wasn't the pressure."
"I didn't know that then." She had the plait finished and she pinned it, hard, up on her head, as if she were putting her hat on for an inquest. "I stood in that room and I thought about what an accident is. It's the coroner. It's a doctor, with a knife, and a policeman with a notebook, and everything in his pockets in a row on a table. And I knew what was in one of his pockets."
"The book."
"The book." She sat down. "March of nineteen forty-seven. Eleven Cinder Row, the back room. It was my mother. It was her stomach, and she screamed, three weeks, Dorothea, all night, every night, so the whole street heard it, and the doctor came twice and said soon, and it wasn't soon. I'd morphine in my bag. I gave her the lot. I sat with her till she stopped."
Dot put the cup down on the floor, very carefully, on its saucer, as if the floor were water.
"Alfred Bracegirdle collected the rent on that house," said Rhys. "He heard the street talk. He could do a sum. The next month, on the first Friday, he came to my door. He never said a word about it. He said, It's a bad time for chests, Nurse. You'll have a great deal on. And I gave him a pound. And I've given him a pound on the first Friday every month since. He had it in his book, with a mark. Five years."
"And you tore out the page."
"I took it out of his waistcoat and I tore it out, right at the stitching, so it'd not show. And I put the book back where it was. I burnt it that night in that grate." She tipped her head at the small cold one under the slates. "A pound a month, and a mother, in three lines of pencil. It's all it was."
"Then the door. I moved the snake inside, where it lives. So nobody'd ask why it lay in the hall. I sat on the stair for a good while. Then Stanley came in."
"And you told him."
"I gave him a cup of Elsie's tea, and sat him down at the table, and I said, His chest took him. In his bed. I was with him, holding his hand, about half past three. I said, Say that. You don't want policemen and a cutting-up this week." She looked at Dot at last. "He said, Yes, Nurse."
"And then?"
"We carried him. Stanley took the legs. I'd have liked a stronger man." She stopped a moment and went on. "To the bed. It took the two of us. I laid him straight and folded his hands. Then I went down and told Elsie Sallis and I went up and told the old lady at the top. His chest. In his bed. And I stood at the door and Dr Kemp came, with a lamp, and stood on the sill. He never came past it. I said it was his chest, and he looked at the window, and he asked, and I said it was custom, a soul going out. And he wrote it. He'd signed a dozen. He signed on my word."
"He wrote last seen alive by me."
"He'd have written anything. It's the tiredest man in London."
"The yard," said Dot. "Mrs Ormerod says somebody came up the yard with a bag. Before Woman's Hour. She says you said it was you."
"I said it were me. She'd not leave it. The old lady's sharp, she's got nothing to do but listen." Rhys shook her head slowly. "It wasn't me. I was on the far side of the yards with Rita, sweating. I said it to quiet her. And you'll want Gully's money."
"How did you know that?"
"Because everyone in that house has been asked whether they'd got it. I never paid him. I thought Stanley had. I thought, that's Stanley's to pay."
She got up and went to the washstand. She took the brown bottle in her hand, and held it out to Dot, cork and all, with the label to the light.
"The oil. You'll say it's on the bag. Elsie Sallis had that off the young constable by nine last night." She pushed a sleeve at her. "Smell your own coat. Every chest in Cinder Row has had that on it since October, and every cuff on the Row, and mine. It's in every house. You've it on you now."
Dot lifted her cuff and smelt it, and it was there, on the wrist where Rhys had held her at the funeral tea, as strong as the bottle.
"Thursday," said Dot. "Thursday night, whoever it was on the stair."
"Who?"
"Mr Ferrar heard somebody answer Mr Bracegirdle on the stairs, low, and then the back door. Where were you?"
"On the Row till all hours. Two chests and a breech. I'd not know which door was which." Rhys put the bottle down. "Nobody'll swear to me. You'll have to take it as it stands."
Dot did what she'd known she would do since Bridge Street, and had been trying not to.
"Then we'll go to Rita Pardew," she said. "This morning. She'll say she had you from half past twelve till three, and that's that. It's only a doorstep, Nurse Rhys. It's ten minutes. If we've got you to Rita, you're clear, and I can stop."
"No."
"It's the easiest thing—"
"You will not," said Rhys. It was the voice for a crowded ward, flat as a board. "You'll not drag a girl three days out of childbed to her door in the fog to be asked where I was. I've had my hands in her since half past twelve and I've been back every day, and she's not to be frightened, not by me, not by you. If you want it tested, test it some other way." She picked up the hymn book off the chair and put it on the bed. "I'll not have it. Ask me anything else."
Dot looked at her, a woman of forty-four in a flannel dressing gown with her hair pinned up like a helmet. Her hands had stopped shaking.
Dot picked up the hymn book instead. There was a loose printed sheet in the back of it, a hymn for Advent in small type, with the back blank. She took the pencil from her hair.
"The time. I'll say it, so you can stop me."
"I've never stopped you yet."
"Everyone's alibi was for half three." She turned the sheet over. "That's what it's been, all of it, mine, Mr Pike's, everyone in Lowmarsh who's said where they were. Because that's when the nurse was holding his hand. And it wasn't. It couldn't be. Mr Ferrar came in at a quarter to three and the snake was already lying on the hall side, so the door was shut on the gas before a quarter to three, and if the door was shut before, then the gas was on before, and somebody came up the yard with a bag well before that. That's two o'clock. Probably about two."
Rhys did not move.
"So it's not when I said," she said. "It's before that."
"Between Elsie taking his dinner plate at a quarter to one, when he was at his table and right as rain, and a quarter to three. That's the window. And Friday, in the fog, in that window, who was in that house or near enough to be, with no clock on them?" Dot wrote as she talked. "Not you, at Rita's, on your word. Not Mr Ferrar, and I'll come back to him. I want the ones who could get to that door with nobody looking."
She wrote in the small tidy hand she used for the register, on the back of the hymn, and read each line aloud as she made it, quite evenly, like an entry.
Mr Gully: out of Maureen's back at ten to two, still loose at half past two round the Flax Street end, near had Mrs R off her own step, and says he was never near.
Stanley: in the house till half one, the pub "gone two", and his dad's watch gone.
Elsie: home all afternoon in the basement, the yard "about one", and didn't hear a thing.
She put the pencil to the top line and underlined it twice.
"Gully," she said.
"Norman Gully," said Rhys.
"He went out Maureen's back at ten to two, and Maureen told me so, and he stood at the tea and said in front of the whole Row he'd never been near number fourteen. And he lied. On the Thursday, in his own yard, Mr Bracegirdle told him he was finished with his ten shillings, and Gully said over my dead body, and Micky heard him. On the Saturday somebody paid him forty half-crowns for a Wednesday slot, out of nothing, and he can't say whose hand. A lady. And at half past two he's still loose round the wrong end of the Row, when he'd a yard full of dead to see to." She put the hymn sheet down and opened her bag. "And there's this."
She took out the tin, and got the lid off over the bent corner, and laid the square of purple on the blanket between them.
"That came back over Mrs R's wall in the night. In her own tin, that went off her dresser on Friday. Maureen found it at the coal. She says it's what he lined her baby with."
Rhys looked at it without touching it. Then she took it up between her finger and thumb, the way she'd take up a dressing, and turned it to the window.
"That's coffin satin, right enough," she said, and put it down.
"He's had the most to lose and done the most lying." Dot folded it and put it back, and pressed the lid down. "It's Gully."
"And the others?"
"They're open," said Dot. "Stanley, he's got a debt. Elsie, she was in the yard with the slop pail about one, and then nothing, not a board creaking, for two hours. Mr Ferrar. You. All of you open. I'll say it once and then I'm to leave it. It's Gully I want."
"I'll go to the police," said Rhys. "This morning. I'll say gas, and the door, and the snake, and the time I found him. I'll say it as it was."
"Not yet."
"Dorothea—"
"If you tell them gas today, they'll hang Winston with it." Dot folded the sheet in half and put it in her sleeve. "He's got a bag in his drawer and a hole in his Friday. Gas is murder, and murder wants a man. You tell them and they've got what they need to charge him properly. It's got to be somebody else first. Give me till the light."
"And my mother?" said Rhys.
She said it quite gently, still standing by the washstand with the brown bottle at her elbow.
"That's yours," said Dot. "It's not mine, I'm not going to touch it. I took it to the door and I'm putting it down."
Rhys turned to the little window under the slates, where the first grey was coming, the colour of dishwater, without a shape in it.
"I thought it was only the fog, Dorothea," she said. "God forgive me, I thought it was only the fog."