Tuesday, the ninth of December. Two o'clock. One day to the burial.
Dot went home because she'd been told to. It was the first time she had done as she was told since Friday, and it felt like putting on somebody else's shoes.
The flat was as she'd left it before six that morning. The bed was made, because otherwise there'd have been a remark. There was the table with its oilcloth, and the chair, and the window with the fog against it, and the hook where her coat went. She didn't hang the coat on it. She sat down at the table in the coat, with her hat still on, and looked at her hands, which had a good deal of Wharf Lane on them. She had no keys. Her pocket felt light on that side, like a tooth that's gone.
She did what she always did, and counted, but there wasn't much to count. A doctor who wouldn't. A coroner's officer who wouldn't unless there was a doctor. A sergeant who wouldn't, and a superintendent who had. A girl in a felt hat who had walked into a police station and been told her word was worth a sweetheart's. A man in a cell, and seven o'clock coming down the road at him like a bus. It's the rope, Miss, if it's murder. It was the shortest list she had ever made. She turned it over to see if there was anything on the back.
Overhead a floor creaked, and a kettle went on, and stopped. Feet came down the stairs, fast, in slippers.
"I heard the street door," said Mrs Ruddock, coming in without knocking, as she'd come in every day for six years. She had the brown teapot in both hands, and a cup hooked on one finger by the handle. "Nobody shuts it that quietly but you, and only when you've been told off. Who's told you off?"
"How do you know I've been —"
"Sit up. You look like a wet Sunday."
She put the cup down in front of Dot, and poured, and stood back with her arms folded, and Dot looked at the tea. It was the good brown colour. It was hot.
"It's not in the book," said Mrs Ruddock. "Don't get used to it."
"I've been suspended."
"You've been what?"
"Mr Marchbanks. He's had the undertaker on the telephone." Dot's voice was doing something odd, and she let it. "And I took my keys out and put them on his blotter."
Mrs Ruddock's mouth went thin.
"Suspended," she said. "Six years. Never a day off but the chilblains, and that was a Tuesday, and you went in on the Wednesday with them wrapped up in a scarf." She began to look for something to hit and, finding nothing but the teapot, put it down. "A man that takes a girl's keys and calls it pending. I've met his sort. They hand you your bag and tell you it's a kindness. And what did Cyril do? Did he stand up? He'll have stood by the stove looking at the floor."
"He said he'd had a note on his file before."
"That's Cyril. He'd hold your coat and give evidence against you and say it was procedure. I'll speak to him." She pulled out the other chair and sat, upright, with her hands on her knees. "I'm not saying anything against what you did. I don't know what you did. I'm saying it's a poor thing to do to a girl on a day like this, when you can't see your hand."
"Maureen Tapsell said he was a good man," said Dot. She didn't know she was going to. "Mr Bracegirdle. She said he cried on her step."
"Alf Bracegirdle cried at his own barrow when the strawberries went off," said Mrs Ruddock. "It didn't stop him charging for them." She topped up the cup.
Somewhere above them, and not near, a slate had come off a roof. Neither of them had heard it land.
There was a knock.
It was a knock with a helmet in it. Two knocks, careful, and then a cough.
"That'll be the law," said Mrs Ruddock, and got up.
Constable Garrard stood on the mat with the fog steaming off his cape. He was about twenty-one, with a long white face and a helmet a size too big for it, and he had the look of somebody who had been sent on an errand by somebody who wasn't going to come himself. Dot had seen him last night on the step at Cinder Row, with a pair of handcuffs and Winston's elbow, and he had looked exactly like this.
"Miss Amory. I'm sorry to trouble you at home. The Sergeant's compliments." He took out his notebook. It had a rubber band round it. "He'd like your Sunday statement tidied, for the inspector, who's back at seven. It's only to be read over and signed."
"Read it, then."
"Miss D. Amory, deputy registrar, states." He found the page with his thumb. "The lodger Ferrar had words with the deceased about the rent. That's all of it, Miss. Is that what you said?"
The room went quiet.
Dot remembered saying it. She remembered the bench, and the boy with the label pinned to his coat, and Bowyer's pencil, and her own voice going on ahead of her like a dog off its lead. Well, about the rent. But —
"Yes," she said. "I said it. I said it wrong. I said it much too fast, and he wrote down the bit he wanted, and I've been trying to unsay it since, and there isn't a way, Constable, I've looked. It's on paper now. It's in a hand like a lawyer's."
"If you'd sign, Miss —"
"No."
"It's what you said."
"It's what I said. It's not what I meant, and you won't put what I meant, because it's not in your book." She took her hat off. "So I'll say it again, and you'll write it, and I'll sign that. Have you a pencil? Put: Mr Ferrar came to me himself. On the Saturday, at closing, at the office. Put: to say it before anybody said it about him."
Garrard's pencil moved. He had an awkward, slow, school hand, with the tongue very slightly out. "The inspector's particular about the wording, Miss," he said, to the page.
"So am I," said Dot. "Put: he is the only one in that house who told me the truth."
"I can't put opinions, Miss."
"It's a fact."
"It's an opinion."
"It's an opinion that's been very well tested. Put it."
He put it. He wrote it slowly, and read it aloud under his breath, and looked up, and he was so young and so uncomfortable that she nearly said something kind.
"I brought him in last night, Miss," said Constable Garrard. "In the — in the bracelets. He asked would I mind his Bible, on the way. I've it in the drawer. I'd not been asked that before."
"Did you mind it?"
"I put it on top of the file."
"That's something," said Dot. "Thank you."
"If you'd just sign the first part, Miss, and I put the rest as a rider —"
"She'll not sign anything," said Mrs Ruddock. She hadn't moved from the door. She was five feet nothing in a pinafore, with her arms folded over it, and she filled the doorway from one side to the other. "She's poorly. She's been on her feet since Friday, and she's had a morning to bring the roof in, and you'll be wanting to go. Out. Go on. And next time you come into a respectable house you wipe your boots. There's a mat. It's there for a reason, and the reason's you."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And tell your sergeant his mother took in washing and she'd not have taken his."
"Yes, ma'am," said Garrard, going a rich red from the collar, and he went. They heard him on the step, wiping his boots on the outside mat, as if it had been the first thing he'd thought of, and then the fog took the sound.
Mrs Ruddock shut the door.
"Well," she said. "I don't know why I said that last part. It's true, mind." She came back and put another inch of tea in the cup.
Dot laughed. She hadn't known it was there. It came out with a sort of hiccup, and was followed at once by the other thing, and she put both hands over her face and let it come. Mrs Ruddock said it was a waste of good tea, and did not go.
Mr Pike came at half past two, by the front door, with his hat on and his hands full.
He'd brought her handbag, and her umbrella, and a paper twist that clicked when he put it down. He stood in the doorway of her flat and looked at the room, in case it had moved since he was last in it.
"Your bag," he said. "It has been sat on by the Superintendent Registrar. I mention it. Your pencil tin. The barley sugars from your drawer, because I do not care to see a drawer emptied by a superintendent, and I got there first."
"Cyril," said Mrs Ruddock. "Your hat."
"I am wearing it."
"You're wearing it in a lady's flat."
"It is not your flat. It is Miss Amory's flat." He took the hat off, and looked round for somewhere to put it, and put it on the bed.
"Not on the bed! It's been on that office floor."
"It has been on a hook."
"A hook's the floor with a nail in it."
"Mavis," said Pike, with great dignity, "the hook is at the height of my chin."
He heard it himself. There was a small silence, and they looked at different corners of the ceiling. Then Mrs Ruddock picked the hat off the bed and hung it on the back of the door, with a face, and went out for another cup, and came back with it, and put it down on the side of the table where he'd sit. Pike sat there.
Dot took a barley sugar out of the twist and put it in her cheek. It clicked against a tooth.
"There were thirty-one in the queue when I left," said Pike. "Three asked for you by name. I told them you were unwell." He turned his cup a quarter round in its saucer. "I do not lie well. I said it twice, and one of them offered me a lozenge."
"Did you take it?"
"It would have been a bribe."
"Mr Marchbanks has sent to the Labour Exchange for a temporary," said Pike, to his tea. "She arrives at four. I have told her the ink is difficult."
"Is it?"
"It's the same ink."
"Mr Pike —"
"I have told her the front counter is a matter of judgement," said Pike. "She will start with a cold. It generally works." He stirred, though he had put nothing in it.
There was a knock at the open door, which was a courtesy; the street door had been left as Pike had left it, and somebody had come in behind him.
Stanley Bracegirdle stood in the passage in the black overcoat that was too big for him, with the crooked band on the sleeve, and his cap in one hand. In the other, held out in front of him like a thing brought to be blessed, he had a pie dish. It was washed. It shone.
"Mrs Ruddock," he said. "I brung your dish. I washed it."
"So you have." She took it from him, and looked at the bottom, and found nothing to say about it. "Put the cap on the table, you're making the place look like a chapel. What is it?"
He didn't put the cap down. "It's nothing. It's Mr Gully."
"It's never nothing with Norman Gully. It's a price."
"I been up at one," said Stanley. "About the balance. I said it'd be a week, for the savings, Fennimore's said a week." He said it slowly, in the order it had happened. "He says he won't screw Dad down till he's paid. He says they're at him from the Council, about the yard, and he's forty waiting, and he's not a bank. He says it's the paupers' if it's not settled, for a man that's been four days in the accommodation." He turned the cap a full turn. "I never said I'd not pay. I said a week."
"What's he owed?"
Stanley told her. He gave it in pounds and shillings and pence, with the pence, because that was how he'd been given it. Dot's barley sugar had stopped clicking against her tooth.
Mrs Ruddock put the dish down on the table.
"That," she said, naming it back to him, which made it sound worse. "That's what. And a week's the difference between a man that's paid and a man that's dunned." She looked at the ceiling as if the sum were written on it. "A shilling in the pound for the week, and you'll sign my book. It's fair. You'll not get fairer from Norman Gully, and you'll not get it from a bank that shuts at three."
"Mrs Ruddock, I never come to —"
"I know what you come for. You come for a dish." She had already gone. They heard her on the stairs, quick, in her slippers, and a drawer, and the slippers coming down. She counted the money into his hand on Dot's oilcloth, note by note, with a little wet click of the thumb, and wrote it in her rent book with a pencil out of Dot's tin, and turned the book round, and Stanley signed it slowly, in a hand that took up three lines.
"Pay the man and have done, lad," said Mrs Ruddock. "You'll get no peace while he's owed."
"She is right about the boy," said Pike, to his cup.
"Yes, Mrs Ruddock," said Stanley. "Ta."
He held the money in both hands against his coat, like a man carrying a bird, and he went out without his cap on, and they heard the street door close behind him, and, a moment after, his boots, going up Flax Street, not fast.
Dot found her barley sugar had gone to nothing. She did not say anything.
It was then that the window rattled.
It wasn't much. It was the sound of a hand tapping on a pane, a small dry knock, then again. Dot looked up. The sash was going in its frame like a loose tooth, and outside it the fog, which had been standing against the glass for four days as flat and grey as a wall, was moving.
It was going sideways. It slid along the window from left to right, whole, in a single sheet, and behind it another came, and another; and under the door, all round her ankles, went a draught that was cold and clean and tasted of the river.
"Somebody's left a door open," said Mrs Ruddock.
"That's not a door."
The house shook. It was like a train going by underneath, not loud but all at once, and the sash gave three sharp cracks and the whole of the window went white with it.
It was light. A slant of it fell across the oilcloth, clean-edged as a plank, and lay there on the table with dust turning slowly in it. It touched Pike's cup and the paper twist and the sugar bowl, silver on the china.
It found things. A ring on the oilcloth where a cup had stood. A crumb. Her own name, in pencil, on the wall by the door, where she had tried a nib in 1946 and never rubbed it out. Through the glass, over the roofs opposite, a row of chimney pots stood up sharp as teeth. She counted eleven. She'd have sworn there were six.
Mrs Ruddock had got up. She stood at the window with her arms folded, looking out at what Dot couldn't yet see.
"Well," she said. "Look at that."
"Daylight," said Dot.
"What's that?"
"Dr Kemp. In the cellar. He said nobody's seen a face in daylight for four days, like it was the weather and you couldn't help it." She was on her feet. She didn't remember getting up. "It's not an excuse, though, is it? It's a fact. There hasn't been any daylight. He said, bring me daylight."
"What time's sunset?"
He didn't ask why. He looked at the ceiling. "Eight minutes to four," said Pike. "It is in the almanac. I read the almanac in the slack half hour."
"Then it's an hour, and a bit, of anything you'd call light. And Mr Gully puts the lid on at five." She was pulling on her coat. She had one arm in and couldn't find the other. "That's what he said, sealed at five, council orders, and after that they can screw it down in the dark, and tomorrow the ground's shut. Nobody digs up a fog death in December. It's got to be now. It's got to be while there's a sun, and five o'clock, the lid —"
"Miss Amory," said Pike.
He was on his feet. He said it slowly, as a clerk says a total he would rather have had wrong.
"Gully seals when he's paid. He has forty waiting. The boy will be in Wharf Lane in ten minutes."
"You're suspended," said Mrs Ruddock. "You're poorly. You've not slept since —"
"It's lifting."
"You can't go and —"
"It's lifting, Mrs R, look at it. Look." She had the other arm in. She had her hat in her hand and couldn't think what hats were for. "I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to look."
Pike took the hat out of her hand, and turned it the right way round, and gave it back to her. He said nothing. He had gone to the door before her, and stood with his hand on it, and she went past him into the passage, and along the passage, and pulled the street door back so hard that it hit the wall.
The step was dry. That was the first thing. She could see the step. It was wide and grey and chipped at the corner, and she had walked over it every day for six years and had not laid eyes on it since Thursday. Then she looked up.
Across Flax Street, where for four days there'd been a wall of fog with a lamp in it and the cough of unseen people, a woman in a flowered pinafore stood on her step shaking a rug. She was about fifty, with her mouth open, and she was shaking that rug as if she'd been waiting all her life to do it. Dust went off it in long slow curls and hung in the light.
And above her, in a strip between two roofs that had been a lid for four days, there was a slice of sky, and it was blue.