Tuesday, the ninth of December. Twenty-five to eleven in the morning. One day to the burial.
Sergeant Bowyer held the blanket up to the bulb and looked through it, in case there was a file sewn into the hem.
"It's a blanket," said Dot.
"Articles for prisoners are inspected, Miss." He shook it out across the desk, and a little cloud of wool and fog went up between them. He folded it in three, wrote One blanket, grey in his book, and pushed it back over the wood. "Five minutes. Constable Garrard will unlock."
"Constable Garrard's not here."
"Then I'll unlock. Five minutes."
She had carried it since before six, to the nurses' home and the solicitor's and the undertaker's, over her left arm, until it felt like her own. It was hers to hand in. There was a door with an iron grille behind the desk, and a green passage beyond it, and she stood where she was.
"Sergeant. Can I ask you something, and you not write it down?"
"No."
"Has anyone looked at the son?"
Bowyer put his pen down. That was worse than writing.
"The son."
"Stanley Bracegirdle. He owed money. He rowed with his father on the Thursday. He was out of that house from half past one on the Friday and nobody can say where he was till gone two. And it's him that found the bag gone, it's him that told you, it's him —"
"It's him that reported it, Miss, which is what the public is asked to do." Bowyer squared the book to the edge of the desk. "I know about the money. Mr Roper at the Coopers' told Garrard on Monday night without being asked, which is a rare thing in a publican. The son paid his bookmaker on Saturday. Dinnertime, in the bar. Pound notes. Roper watched him count them into the runner's hand."
Dot's mouth was open. She shut it, and it opened again on its own.
"Saturday."
"Saturday dinnertime."
"The day after."
"A son can pay a debt out of what's coming to him. It's not a crime to expect your father's barrow." He tapped the book. "And a debt is civil, and a bag is larceny. I keep them in separate drawers."
"No, wait. Say it slowly, I want to see it." She said it to the bulb, and to the Sergeant, and to the noticeboard, where somebody had pinned up a child's mitten. "The week's rents went on Friday. On Saturday a man who owes thirty pounds to a bookmaker walks into the Coopers' and pays, in notes. On Monday the bag turns up empty in the drawer of a man he can't stand. And Stanley's the one who says it's gone, at four o'clock, after he'd looked in every place in the house but the right one —"
"Quieter, Miss."
"— I'm not accusing him, I'm saying it so it's been said."
"Then say it to somebody else." Bowyer picked the pen up. "The bag was in Ferrar's drawer, on Ferrar's shirts, in Ferrar's room. I've my man."
"Somebody put it there."
"Somebody." He waited. She had nothing to put after it, and he let her see that he knew. "You told me gas last night, in this room, at the top of your voice. I rang the coroner's man in front of you and you heard what he said. Not on a registrar's say. Without a doctor it's an old man dead in his bed and a bag gone from his table. I have the bag. And I rang Fennimore's this morning, about the book. The clerk says the firm acts for a client and will say no more."
"Then Mr Gully. The undertaker. He went out the back of number nine at ten to two on the Friday, by the yards, past the back of number fourteen, and when I asked him he said he never went near it —"
"An undertaker on Cinder Row at dinnertime." Bowyer wrote something. "Fancy."
Dot put Mrs Ruddock's tin on the desk, and took the square of purple out of it, and laid that beside it. She said where it had been found, and by whom, and what Maureen Tapsell had said when she saw it.
Bowyer looked at the King and Queen on the lid for some time.
"Your landlady's tin," he said. "Found in her own yard, with a bit of coffin lining in it. And a lodger whose own route home from the river takes him by the end of Flax Street, by his own time, on the afternoon it went." He wrote in his book: One tin, Coronation. One piece satin, purple. He put both under the desk. "Thank you, Miss. It goes with the bag."
The next sentence had Nurse Rhys in it, and a quarter to three, and it stood behind Dot's teeth with its coat on. She left it there.
"Five minutes," said Bowyer, and got up for his keys.
The cell was a plank bed, a bucket, and four walls of stone that sweated at the corners. There was no window. Winston sat on the plank in his London Transport greatcoat, with his hands between his knees and his back against the wall as if it had been lent to him. He hadn't shaved. He looked as if he had meant to.
He stood up.
"Miss Amory."
"Sit down, for goodness' sake, you'll hit your head."
"I have been sitting since half past six last night, and I have formed a low opinion of that bucket." He looked at the blanket. "Whose?"
"My landlady's. She wants it back." Dot shook it out, and put it round his shoulders, and it was too short.
"Then I shall be careful of it." He pulled it round himself. "They gave me tea. It was the colour of the wall."
"I need you to tell me where you were on Friday."
"I told the Sergeant. I came off the bus at a quarter past two and walked —"
"The depot says half past one. The depot's clock is a very good clock. You told me a quarter past two, and a quarter to three home, and Bowyer's said it twice." She tried to stop and couldn't. "That's an hour nobody's got. I keep doing sums with it, and every sum comes out with you in the hall, with the snake, and that's the one place you must not be."
"The depot's clock and I have never agreed. I was late to my own christening, my mother says, by one entire hurricane."
"That's a very good story and I'll hear it another day."
"It is between me and the Lord," said Winston, "and one other."
"It's a her. You said so last night, and I've forgotten it as hard as I could."
"Then forget it harder. She has a name, and I'll not have it said in a policeman's mouth."
"It'd get you out!"
"Out! And her in Bowyer's ledger, and her landlady told, and the depot!" He heard himself, and shut his eyes. "You are a dangerous woman, Miss Amory. Four days I've known you, and I have told you more than I told my own mother. You should be licensed."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I said it myself." He sat down, slowly, on the plank, with the blanket round him. "Listen. I'll tell you what a bus company does with a white girl who's had her name in a police station over a coloured conductor. Not a sacking. Nobody puts a sacking in writing. They move her to the early turn at the far end of the route, and the girls in the canteen stop passing her the sugar, and her landlady, who is a Christian woman, finds she has a nephew who needs the room. I have watched it done. I watched it done to a girl called Pauline in forty-eight, for less. Never mind Pauline."
She waited. It was new, and she did it badly, with her whole face.
"Your pencil," said Winston. He held out his hand. "The one in your hair."
She gave it to him. He turned over the charge sheet that Bowyer had left folded on the plank, and wrote on the back of it, on his knee, with his tongue between his teeth, slowly, in a round chapel hand. It took him a long time. He folded the paper once and held it out, and then did not let go of it.
"I'll say what it says, so you can't say I hid it. It says: Sylvie. They have me for the old man. I told them I walked home at a quarter past two, and I did not. Tell them the truth, if you want to. You needn't. I'll think no less of you either way. W. Ferrar."
"I read it upside down while you were writing."
"Of course you did." He let go. "Brook Street, number six. The top bell. Miss Sylvie Arliss. Give it to her, and let her choose."
It was ten minutes from the police station to Brook Street, which was a row of tall thin houses with steps like tongues, and in the window of the fourth there was a card that said what Winston had told her the cards said. She read it twice. There was nobody to say anything to, so she went on.
Number six had five bells. She pressed the top one, and a window went up above her, and came down again, and feet came quickly down the stairs inside.
The girl who opened the door was in a London Transport coat, buttoned wrong, and a scarf over her hair. She was about twenty-four, with a wide plain face that had not slept and had decided not to mind. She had a badge on her lapel with a number.
"You're the registrar," she said. "He says you never shut up."
"That's fair. I've brought —" Dot held out the note. "He wrote it himself. I want you to know that. I didn't ask him to, I asked him where he was, and he said there was somebody, and he wouldn't say, and then he wrote it."
Sylvie read it on the second stair, holding it up to the fanlight. She read it twice. Her lips moved on the last line.
"He never wrote me a word," she said. "Not one. He tells me things. Yesterday at the depot he told me, if anybody comes asking, you don't know me. I said all right." She folded the paper along its crease. "I didn't mean it. I've been ironing since four this morning. There's not a shirt in this house that's not been done twice."
"Have you seen him since —"
"Where is he?"
"Lowmarsh station. They've charged him. It's about a bag, they say the old man's rent bag was in his drawer, it wasn't him, Miss Arliss, it wasn't, somebody put it there, and if he's put up in front of a magistrate with nothing but his word —"
"Wait there."
She was down again in under a minute, in a felt hat. They went out. On the pavement Sylvie stopped, and turned, and looked two doors up at a house with clean steps and lace at the window and a brass knocker somebody had polished that morning.
"His Sundays," she said. Then she took Dot's arm, quite hard, and they walked.
They didn't talk for a street and a half, which for Dot was a record. Then Sylvie said, without turning her head, "Is he eating?"
"They gave him tea."
"Tea."
"The colour of the wall, he said."
A laugh went out of Sylvie, short and sharp, like a hiccup, and she took her hand from Dot's arm and put it in her pocket. "That's him. He'll be doing the voices next."
"He did the duke. On Saturday. With the goose."
"He told you the goose?" Sylvie looked at her, for the first time, properly. "He tells everybody the goose. It's got a different ending every time. Last time the goose was a magistrate." She walked a bit. "I've never told him I like it. You can't tell him a thing like that. He'd stop."
"Winston Ferrar," said Sylvie, "was in my room at six Brook Street from half past one till twenty-five to three on Friday."
She said it to the Sergeant's face, across the desk, in a voice that had called stops over a full lower deck for four years. Bowyer had his pen ready. He was good at not being surprised.
"Name."
"Sylvia Arliss. Sylvie. Conductress, route forty."
"Clippie," said Bowyer, writing. "And what was Mr Ferrar doing in your room at half past one on a Friday?"
"His bus was took off the road at the river end. He walked to me. We had our dinner. He left at twenty-five to three. I know because I looked at the clock when he did his coat up." Her chin came up. "It's not a crime, is it? Dinner? And he never took no bag. He'd not take the last bit off a plate."
"Nobody's asked you about the bag." Bowyer didn't look up. "A young woman's room. Dinnertime. The Jamaican." He wrote it. "A white girl. And her word for it."
"Her word is as good as yours, Sergeant," said Dot.
"It's as good as any sweetheart's, Miss, and I've had six this year, and every one came with a clock." He turned a page. "Miss Arliss, you'll give me your address, and your depot, and your inspector's name, since I'll be writing to him."
"Write," said Sylvie. "Spell it right. He put Winston on, in forty-six. He'll not mind."
The scratch of the nib went on.
"Now." Bowyer blotted it. "You're giving him his dinner hour. Very nice. Mr Ferrar was in the house by a quarter to three, by his own account, with the old man's door across the hall and the old man alive behind it, by the nurse's time. Your hour's the hour before. It's an hour he didn't need."
It was gas, said the sentence behind Dot's teeth. It was set before you got in that hall. It was set about two. She could feel every word of it. She could have said the room and the tap and the time, and it would have gone into his book in a round clear hand, and Rhys would be in a cell by dinner with her mother's morphine behind her, and Winston would still be in his.
She held on to the desk. Sylvie looked at her, and then at the Sergeant, and then back at Dot, and said nothing.
"Two minutes," said Bowyer. "Through the bars. I'll not have a scene."
Bowyer unlocked the door with the iron grille and brought Winston up the green passage to it himself, with a hand on his arm, like a piece of furniture being delivered. He didn't open it. The bars were painted black, and painted over so many times that the ridges caught the light like the rings in a tree. Winston stood behind them in his blanket. Sylvie stood in front, in the smell of carbolic and boots. Dot, feeling like a chaperone at a dance, went and looked at the noticeboard.
"You came," said Winston.
"You asked."
"I said you needn't."
"You said a lot of things." Her hand came through the bars and took hold of the blanket's edge, not him. "You're all creased. You look like something the cat's had."
"Miss Arliss." It came out very formal, and cracked in the middle. "I had a plan. I was going to be so dignified."
"You are. You're doing it now." She was crying, quite openly, without any fuss, as if it were weather. "You're an idiot. Stand up straight."
"I am standing straight."
"I know. That's what's the matter with you."
Dot studied the child's mitten on the noticeboard for a very long time.
"Time," said Bowyer, from the desk.
At the desk he gave Sylvie her paper to sign, and gave Dot back her pencil, which she hadn't asked for and had forgotten, and then he looked at the clock over the door.
"The divisional inspector's back from the river at seven," he said. "I'll put your Jamaican to him then, alibi and all. He'll listen to a clippie's word as far as I've listened to it." He reached for the next paper. "And if a doctor ever says gas, Miss, it's murder. The police surgeon won't lay a hand on a body that's been certified, not without the coroner. And the coroner's officer won't take a clerk's word to him. So you'd want a doctor first. Round and round."
The steps of the police station went down into the fog like the steps of a swimming bath. Dot stood at the top of them with Sylvie beside her. A lorry went along the road at walking pace behind a man with a torch, and neither of them said anything until it had gone.
"What do I do?" said Sylvie. "Wait? I'm no good at waiting. I've been told I'm not."
"I can't tell you why," said Dot. "I can't tell you how I know, not yet. But everybody's got the time wrong. It was before a quarter to three, a good deal before, and it was gas, it wasn't his chest. If the doctor says gas, and the time goes back, then you were with him at the right time. Your hour's his hour. That's all it needs. It needs somebody to say gas who isn't me."
"A doctor."
"A doctor. A real one, with a certificate and a hat."
Sylvie pulled her scarf tighter. Below them the fog took the pavement, and the railings, and the far side of the road, in that order.
"They'll believe a doctor," she said.
"Then I'll get one," said Dot.