Tuesday, the ninth of December. A quarter past four, and the lamps coming on.
Dot went home by the Drift. It was shorter, and it was the one way in Lowmarsh where she could be sure of meeting nobody, and she wanted very much to meet nobody.
You went in at the Wharf Lane end, down three worn steps. Under her boots the cinders were a foot deep in places, raked over by every child in the borough. She had walked it on Sunday in the fog with a borrowed torch that lit her own glove and nothing else, and a wall to keep on her left, and voices coming out of the dark with no bodies on them. Now the wall was a wall. It had a top to it. Over the top she could see the sky going from green to navy, and a chimney with smoke going straight up, and, ahead, the backs of Cinder Row stepping down the hill in the last of the light, each one with its little yard and its privy and its washing stiff on the line like boards.
The lamplighter was ahead of her, going slowly, his pole on his shoulder. He'd done Wharf Lane, and the Drift came last, he said when she caught him up, because nobody ever complained about it.
"You'd be surprised what people don't complain about," he said, and put his pole to the lamp by the Wharf Lane steps.
The lamp came on. It lit the wall, and the cinders, and Dot's boots, and a stripe of railing along the top of the wall that the war had missed. She had known she was going to say it before he'd finished the sentence.
"I'll tell you what I think," said Dot. "And then I'll tell you why it's wrong, and then we'll see what's left."
"Miss?"
"Not you. Well, you. It doesn't matter, you needn't listen, it's the only way I can do it." She started walking, and he came along at her elbow with the pole, as though it were an ordinary thing to be told a murder between one lamp and the next. "It's Gully."
It was Gully, and it went beautifully for nine lamps.
He'd threatened a man on Thursday teatime, in his own yard, with Micky listening. He'd gone out of Maureen's back door at ten to two on Friday. He'd stood at a funeral tea and said he never had. And then this very afternoon he'd said it himself, to a sergeant: the back of the Row, at ten to two. He'd taken five pounds in silver off a lady nobody could name, and silver was what Cinder Row paid its rent in. He'd been loose round the Flax Street end at half past two, near enough to have Mrs R off her own step. That same afternoon somebody walked in at her back door and had her savings off the dresser. And her tin had come back over her wall with a square of his purple folded up inside it. Maureen Tapsell had known that purple in the half-dark by the coal. She'd buried it. He had a workshop full of dead people and a smile like a coffin lid, and if you'd asked Dot on Sunday who would gas a man in his sleep for the price of a place in a queue, she'd have said Norman Gully without stopping to wipe her feet.
"And that's why it's wrong," said Dot.
She'd reached the office's back gate. It was shut, with Mr Pike's bolt across it, and the lamp above it lit the top of the wall and the yard beyond, and she went past it without looking.
"Because he said it himself. In front of a yard full of customers, with Micky to swear to the wireless and Mrs Dace to swear to the stool. Out of Maureen's at ten to two, and slap into a woman at some gate a couple of minutes after, and in his own yard with the pips at two, wet to the knees. You'd have to go up a yard and turn a tap off and wait for the flame, and turn it on again, and take a bag and lay a snake and walk out, and still be home in time to clip a boy's ear. I don't see how you do it in that." She took a breath. "And she came out of the gate at him. Out. She'd been in. And he never saw Mr Bracegirdle but in his bed, laid out, on the Saturday. And a man that takes cash for coffins doesn't pay himself to jump his own queue. He's the one that was paid. And from two o'clock till dark he never left that yard, so he never had Mrs R's tin off her dresser either, whatever he keeps on his sill." She waved a glove at the dark. "And whoever it was nearly had her off her step, she can take that up with him herself. She'll enjoy it."
"Dear me," said the lamplighter.
"So that's Gully. Which leaves Stanley. Except he paid Vail in notes, and rent comes in silver. Silver can be changed for notes, I know that. But I'd lay a week's wages the notes were his own Post Office savings. You don't carry your savings book to a will-reading unless you've just been at it, or I don't think you do. I never opened it. It wasn't mine. And if he'd a bag of silver under the floorboards he'd not be borrowing Gully's balance off Mrs R with the interest wrote in her book. And Stanley says bed because he was told bed. He'd say bed if you set him on fire."
The lamplighter lit the next lamp and waited for her under it, politely, as for a lady with a pram.
"And Elsie. Bowyer's Elsie, with her slops. She said one, and I think it was one. I asked her on the landing, and she laughed at me, and I've never seen Elsie lie laughing; she goes red at the neck. That's not proof. It's what I've got. And the bag lay three days somewhere shut and dry, and nothing comes out of that basement dry. Not even Reg." She had to trot to keep up. "And Mr Marchbanks, who couldn't find this alley with a map and a dog. That's the lot. That's everybody, and every one's wrong."
The lamplighter looked at her from under his cap with the wary courtesy of a man used to being told things by strangers in alleys.
"I don't know any of your people, love," he said. "I know the lamps."
"No. You wouldn't. It's no good. I had them all in a row on the back of a hymn this morning, at six o'clock, and I underlined the wrong one. Twice."
They had come out along the side of the tanyard, where the bombed ground fell away on her right into a black lake of brick and willowherb. She stopped. She put her glove on the railing along the top of the wall. It was cold, and greasy still with the week. She counted the uprights under her breath as she always did, out of the light of one lamp and into the next. There were nineteen. She counted them again. There were nineteen.
"Right," said Dot. "Start at the beginning. What have I got."
She started with what she'd been given an hour since, in a yard full of coffins, by a man who was frightened of a pencil. Ten to two I come out of the Tapsells' back. Some woman comes out of a yard gate slap into me.
They'd come to the back of number fourteen. The lamplighter went on ahead to the lamp by the yard gate. Beyond the low wall was the yard, and Kemp's lock-up with its doors shut, and the back door with a step scraped white.
"Which gate?" said Dot.
The lamplighter had one arm up. "Which what, miss?"
"Gully comes out of number nine at ten to two, going like a train, because he's a Friday at two and he's late. So he comes this way. Past eleven. Past here. A couple of minutes, he said." She looked on along the wall towards Flax Street, the way he'd come, and then at the gate in front of her. "Not nine, he'd just come out of nine. One of them in the middle, he said. And up this one there was a man asleep by his fire with the gas on, and his bag on the table."
"I wouldn't know, miss," said the lamplighter, with great feeling, and lit the lamp.
It came up yellow and steadied, and lay on the gate. It was an ordinary gate, grey boards and a latch, with the bottom rotted where the cinders had banked against it.
"She came out of this one," said Dot. "With her scarf up to her eyes and her bag held up in front of her. And she walked slap into Norman Gully in the fog and called him an undertaker. To his face. Like it was language, he said." She laughed, because it was funny, and the laugh went off along the wall and didn't come back. "Who calls Norman Gully an undertaker to his face? He'd bury you for it. He'd do it at cost."
She said it, and then, because she'd said it, she heard it.
It was Saturday night. It was half past seven. She'd come up Flax Street talking, and there'd been a line of light under Mrs Ruddock's kitchen door, and Mr Pike on the lino with the back off the wireless, and the trombones going away into the wall. And Mrs Ruddock at the range with the tripe, dishing up her wrongs in sums. The thief. The bolt, and three and ninepence off Dot for her third of it. The coal. And Norman Gully. I'd not got my foot off my own front step when Norman Gully comes round out of Tanyard Road at me like a hearse with the brakes off. "Mind yourself, you great undertaker," I said. He didn't like that.
And Pike had said, from the floor, that he was an undertaker. And she'd said he was a great one. And Dot had laughed with her mouth full and argued about the three and nine.
At her front step. On Flax Street. Going for her flask, a bit before half past two, by Dot's own sum.
"How many women in Lowmarsh," said Dot, "call Norman Gully an undertaker to his face in one afternoon?"
The lamplighter had gone on to the next.
At half past two Norman Gully had been in his own yard with a widow on his stool and a boy with a clipped ear. He'd never been near Flax Street. He had never once been at her step. He'd had one collision on Friday, and it was here.
"She got the time muddled," said Dot, to the gate. "That's all. It's the fog, it muddles everybody. I had Sunday for Monday twice this week and I'm paid to know."
Then she'd got the place muddled too. Her own front door, on Flax Street, with its step she whitened Mondays, and this gate at the back of the Row, the other side of all the houses, in the Drift.
"She'd have said. If she'd been along here. She says everything." Dot heard that, too, as it went out of her. "She says everything."
She didn't know she'd started walking until the gate was behind her. She had her hand on the wall and the wall was going by, and then she had to stop and get her back against something, and the something was the back wall of number eleven, cold, with the frost starting on it.
She said it as a sum, because a sum could be got through.
Friday. Mr Pike had brought the soup at dinnertime, in Mrs Ruddock's flask. I passed her door, he said.
"So she'd have to come for it," said Dot. "Because she's kind." And then: "She's not. She's mean with a flask. She'd want it back by teatime." Which was the same thing, from the other end.
And twenty to three. Dot had been down the strongroom for a new volume. She'd heard St Saviour's strike the half through the grating, and come up to find her on the radiator. She'd fixed it herself, afterwards, off the church clock. She'd said so on the Sunday, across the counter, to Pike, pleased with herself. "I did her sum for her," said Dot.
In at the front. Round by the road, the long way, fifteen minutes. So that in her own story she'd never once had to come past this gate.
Mrs Ormerod at her window, through the ceiling of this very house: a coat and a bag, up the yard, before Woman's Hour. Elsie had laughed and said that'll be me with the pail, and Dot had let her.
The tin, thrown back over her own wall by the coal, where the girl asleep in her kitchen would go down for it in the morning. "A thief'd chuck it in the river," said Dot. "Anybody'd chuck it in the river. It's two minutes."
The purple. Every furnisher from here to Gravesend lines with it. The Co-op had a drawer of it. But there'd been a tray of it on Gully's sill, loose, and a lady stood at that window on Saturday morning counting forty coins into his hand, and nobody could name her.
"The Co-op never had a lady at its window," said Dot.
The pie dish, going up the stairs of number fourteen on Monday morning, for Stanley's black tie, and a drawer that wouldn't shut.
And the money. Half past two this afternoon, in her own kitchen, with the pie dish washed. What's he owed? She'd counted it into Stanley's hand and written it in her book. Pay the man and have done, lad.
"She'd lend her own mother at interest," said Dot. "That's only Mrs R." But Pike had known Gully sealed the minute he was paid, and he'd said so at the window. The whole Row knew it. She'd known it.
She started walking again, slower, past the back of number nine, where Maureen's window was dark. Everything came clear and hard, edged with lamp, like something cut out of tin.
Mrs Ruddock. She pays a Bracegirdle every Friday, same as half of Flax Street. Dot had said that across her own counter to a man in a black armband, pleased with herself, as though she knew what it meant. In six years of Fridays she had not once seen the bag go across that kitchen table. She couldn't have told you which way it went. Because he takes a tenth, she'd said, in the same breath, the same morning.
"Takes it off what?" said Dot. "You can't take a share of nothing. A share of what he collected, for somebody. For someone else. And Stanley on the kerb outside Fennimore's: That's all he ever had. So whose was the rest?"
And the last line in the notebook, ruled under all the rest. Thursday. Told. No more. Written the night before Alfred ever stood on Maureen's step and gave a year's rent back. Somebody on the stair on the Thursday night, Winston said, low, once, that he couldn't swear man or woman. And then the back door.
"No," said Dot.
She said it to the alley. She went at each piece like a girl at a locked door, with love, with her whole weight, and each piece stood.
She'd have to tell Bowyer. And what would she tell him? A flask of soup. A word called at a man in a fog. A tin in a coal yard, and a bit of cloth.
"He'd laugh," said Dot. "He'd laugh, and then he'd charge Winston at seven."
Unless it was said again, in that kitchen, to somebody Bowyer couldn't laugh at.
The end of the Drift was her own gate.
She had never once come home this way. Six years of the front door and the street, a hundred times with her key out, and her own back gate had been a thing she saw from the scullery. The lamplighter had got there before her. He was at the corner with the pole reared against the last lamp, and the light came on as she came up, and lay on the gate and the wall and the top of the coal bunker, and on her.
"Are you going up Tanyard Road after this?" said Dot.
"Where else would I be going, love?"
"The register office. There'll be a light at the back. Knock, and ask for Mr Pike, and tell him Miss Amory says Flax Street, five o'clock. His good coat. The street door'll be on the latch. He's to come up quiet and stand on the landing, and not come in." She found her last sixpence and put it in his glove. "Say it back."
"Flax Street, five o'clock, his good coat. Up quiet. Not come in." He looked at the sixpence, and then at her. "Is it a surprise?"
"Yes," said Dot.
He touched his cap and went round the corner.
Number twenty-two was three storeys of dirty brick, and the back yard was the size of a tablecloth. The whole back of the house was dark. Then, on the first floor, the kitchen light went on.
Mrs Ruddock came to the window with the kettle in her hand. She was in her apron, with her sleeves pushed up, and the light behind her put a soft grey edge on her hair. She was going to fill it at the tap. She stood a moment, with the spout tilted, looking down into the yard as she looked at everything, checking it for dirt. Then she saw Dot.
Her face did what it always did at the sight of Dot coming home in a state: the scowl started, and turned halfway into something else. She put the kettle down on the sill, and lifted her free hand, and waved.
Dot stood by the gate in the lamplight with the whole of Lowmarsh clear at her back and the stars coming out over the roofs, and her hand went up and waved back.