Tuesday, the ninth of December. A quarter to six, and a hard frost.
Mrs Ruddock put on her good hat.
She did it in the mirror over the dresser, with the long pin in her mouth, and drove it through the felt and the knot of grey hair beneath without looking, as she'd done it every Sunday for thirty years. She put on her good coat. She took her handbag off the hook, and looked in it, and shut it. Then she went to the door of her own kitchen and stood there with her back to it, straight, and waited for the two of them to be ready, like a woman at a bus stop.
Dot's right hand was in a wet tea towel. Mr Pike carried the ledgers. He had wrapped them in a pillowcase from the airing rack, and he held them across his chest with both arms.
They went down the stairs, one behind the other. Nobody spoke. At the bottom Mrs Ruddock stopped and switched off the landing light, and tried the street door twice.
The frost had come down like a lid. The fog had gone off the top of the borough and taken the warmth with it, and Flax Street lay hard and white under its lamps, every railing sparkling, every slate. There were stars over the chimneys. Dot had forgotten there were stars. People had come out on the pavements and were just standing, in coats over their nightclothes, some of them, breathing, looking up, with their faces turned to the sky like people at a wedding.
"Evening, Mavis," called Mrs Pollard, over the railings. "Where are you off in your good hat?"
"Out," said Mrs Ruddock.
"Well, it's a lovely night for it."
"It's perishing," said Mrs Ruddock. "Mind your own step, Ada, it's ice."
She walked between them, a little ahead, and at the corner where the pavement shone she took Mr Pike's arm, because of the ice, and he let her. That was all. He walked on with the pillowcase under the other arm and his eyes straight in front of him. It was fifteen minutes to the police station by the streets. Dot had never known it so short.
Sergeant Bowyer looked up from the desk.
"Miss Amory." His eyes went to her hand in its tea towel and moved on. "I've the inspector at seven and a prisoner to see to. If it's the lodger, he's —"
"I've brought Mrs Ruddock," said Dot.
Bowyer looked at the old woman in the hat. She looked back.
"Ernie Bowyer," she said. "How's your mother's leg?"
"Your landlady?" said Bowyer. He looked at Dot. "You're having me on."
"I'm not," said Dot. "I've never been less."
"She killed Alfred Bracegirdle," said Mr Pike.
He put the pillowcase down on the desk. He did it carefully, without hurry, as he'd have put down a register, and straightened his back.
"Sergeant Bowyer, I am a registration clerk of thirty-three years' standing," he said. "I shall say what I heard, and I shall say it in the order in which I heard it, and I would ask you to write it down in that order and not to interrupt me."
It took him six minutes. He did not use an adjective. He gave the times as he'd heard them and the sums as he'd heard them and the names of the people, and where he wasn't sure, he said so; and once, in the middle, he stopped for a breath and began again exactly at the word where he'd left off. Bowyer had the pencil out by the second minute. By the third he was writing. At about the fifth he stopped writing and simply looked at Mr Pike, and the constable at the far end of the room stopped what he was doing and turned round.
When it was over, the station was quiet.
"Mrs Ruddock," said Bowyer, at length. "Is that what you said?"
"I'd like a cup of tea," said Mrs Ruddock. She had taken the bench under the noticeboard with her handbag on her knees. "I'll have it strong. You've stood me on my feet twenty minutes and your mother'd be ashamed of you."
"Is it what you said."
"Cyril's never told a lie in his life. It'd spoil the look of him." She glanced at the pillowcase. "The books are mine. That's Tanyard Estates, that is, I've a right to it. The rest of it he's got exactly."
Bowyer put down the pencil. He undid the pillowcase and lifted out the top ledger, and looked at the burnt edge of it and the black spine and the gilt still on the label. He turned a page. He turned another.
"You didn't burn them very well," he said.
"That's Miss Amory," said Mrs Ruddock. "She's a daft girl."
Nobody else said much. It was not that kind of an evening.
Gully was fetched at half past six, by the young constable in the Wolseley, and stood in the passage in his black with his hat in his hand and looked at Mrs Ruddock under the station light for as long as it takes to be sure. "That's the lady," he said. His eye went to a square of purple satin on the desk by the tin, and stayed there. "And that's my offcut." And then, in the voice of a bill: "I'd like it noted I was misled."
Mr Fennimore, telephoned at his home in Blackheath, gave up his client's name before the word murder was finished.
At five to seven the divisional detective inspector came in out of the frost in a wet mackintosh, straight from the river. He was a tall, stooped, tired grey man who took his hat off in the passage. He read Mr Pike's statement, and Dr Kemp's, and a girl's statement from Brook Street, and the sergeant's notebook, and the black spine of a ledger, and the cover of a collection book, and then he looked at all of it for a moment with his mouth shut.
"Have Mr Ferrar's things brought up from the property room," he said.
He charged her himself, at a quarter past seven, at the desk. He was courteous. He said the name, and Mrs Ruddock said, "Ruddock. Two Ds, and a C-K. Put it right, it's on the deed."
Then he said the rest of it, and Mrs Ruddock, in her good hat, said that she understood.
Dot stood by the wall and watched a small sharp elderly woman being told a very long sentence and looking, all through it, as if she'd been asked to check the sum.
They took her down the passage. She didn't look back. At the turn she stopped, and said something to a policewoman about the tea being stewed, and went on.
PC Garrard brought him out.
Winston came down the passage between two constables with his cap in his hand, and when he came into the light of the desk he stopped and put the cap on his head, as if the desk were a platform and he had a route to run. He hadn't shaved. He looked, all in one, as though he'd been up all night and won.
"Sergeant," said Winston. "Good evening."
Bowyer was at the desk. He had been there all the time, very upright, looking at nothing.
"Ferrar," he said. "You'll be wanting your things."
"I'll be wanting to hear you say Mister," said Winston, pleasantly. "But I'm not a greedy man. Things'll do."
He didn't wait for them. He stopped at the board behind the desk, among the notices of the missing, where a page ruled in block capitals had hung on a drawing pin since Sunday, and read it through, taking his time.
"That's mine, I believe," said Winston. He took the pin out, and folded the page in four, and put it in his breast pocket, and gave the pin back to Bowyer, point first. Beside the space where it had been, the notice about a tin from 22 Flax Street was still up on its own pin. Nobody took it down.
Sylvie Arliss had been on the bench by the door since half past six in her London Transport coat, with her hat in her lap and her back as straight as a ruler. She stood up as he came. Dot heard a small sound from Bowyer, a chair being shifted. Sylvie crossed the boards in six steps and took Winston's arm, hard, above the elbow, in front of the whole room, and held it.
"Well, come on," she said. "It's cold."
They went out together on to the front steps. The door swung, and Dot saw them through the glass: two dark shapes under the lamp with the whole frosty night behind them, not talking, walking slowly.
She found she had put her good hand on the wall.
"Sit," said a voice. "Hand."
It was Nurse Rhys. She had come in without a sound, in her navy cape, with her bag in one fist and her hat crooked, and she looked as though she'd walked the whole of Lowmarsh and had it out with every step. She took Dot's wrist. She unwound the tea towel as if unwinding a bandage on a soldier, and looked, and said something short under her breath that was not English.
"It's nothing," said Dot.
"You've cooked that palm like a chop, Dorothea, and you've been carrying a wet cloth in your fist for an hour like a Sunday hat. Open."
Dot opened. Rhys got out lint and a tin of something yellow and did it without tenderness, and very quickly, and wound the lint round and round in a neat white mitten.
"I'm in to make my statement," she said, not looking up. "The gas. The window, and the tap. The chest, and the bed, and the time, and who told who. Sergeant Bowyer'll have all he wants of it, and the magistrates after. I'll go in on my own two feet."
"You were right to."
"Was I." She tied the ends. "And the rest?"
Dot thought of a brown bottle in an open bag. She thought of a pound a month in a dead man's pencil.
"The rest is yours," said Dot.
Rhys held her wrist a moment longer than the bandage needed. Then she let go and stood, and put her shoulders back under the cape.
"Keep it dry," she said. "Don't touch anything. Get something hot inside you. You're a menace, Dorothea."
She went through the door to the desk. Dot heard the sergeant say her name, and then the tramp of somebody's boots, and then nothing.
"Miss."
It was Stanley. He had come in from the street and stood dripping frost on the mat, in the overcoat cut for a bigger man, with his cap crushed in both hands. He had been in Gully's yard since three.
"They've took him for the cutting," he said. "Dad. The van come. I went with it to the door."
"I know, Stanley. I'm sorry."
"It's all right. It's what's to be done." He turned the cap over. "I want to ask you a thing."
"Ask."
"When you wrote him. Saturday. In the book." He said it slowly, looking at the notice on the wall. "Retired greengrocer. I want it changed. I want it put right. Put rent collector, Miss. On his line. He'd want it right now."
Dot drew a breath.
"I can't, Stanley. Not tonight. I'm suspended. Mr Marchbanks took my keys." She saw his face begin to shut, and hurried on. "But I can ask. There's a margin beside every line. Corrections go in it, if the informant asks, in front of a witness."
"That'll do," said Stanley. He considered it. "And his watch."
"His watch."
"His gold one. With the chain." He looked at the floor. "It weren't on him, Friday. Gully's lad never had it. I asked the policeman. It's not on the list."
"No," said Dot. She'd have liked to have something to give him. She had a bandaged hand and a suspended job and a sore ache under her ribs, and no watch. "If it turns up."
"If," said Stanley. He nodded, slowly, and put his cap on, and went out into the cold.
Nobody had it. It was on no list that night, and Mrs Ruddock, who had said everything, had not said watch. Dot put it back on the shelf with the other things, where it was not the only one.
At half past eight the room was nearly empty. The lamps over the desk had a look of a shop closing. Somebody had taken away the tea things and somebody had put out the stove, and in the corner by the door, on the bench under the notice-board, Mr Pike was sitting with his hat on his knees.
She sat down beside him. He didn't move.
He looked at a spot on the wall about four feet in front of him.
"The mortuary telephoned at eight." He said it to the wall. "Sergeant Bowyer read it to the inspector in my hearing. The blood is as Dr Kemp said, and the test agrees with him. Coal gas." A pause. "I thought you would want it said plainly."
"There has been no word from Mr Marchbanks," he said. "I rang the Town Hall at six. The hall porter says Mr Marchbanks is at his dinner."
"I don't think he'll ring."
"I don't think he will." A minute. "I have dined at that table five days a week since the spring."
"Mr Pike —"
"I don't wish it said." He gave her a very level look. "I was on the landing by the sum. I could have gone in at the sum. I did not go in. I stood there and heard the rest of it."
"You're a witness," said Dot. "I sent for you. That's what you were for."
"Yes. I understood that on the stairs."
They sat.
After a while he put his hand in his overcoat, without hurry, and brought out a key. It was the office key, the iron one, on its bit of brown string, with the small strongroom key threaded on beside it. He held it out to her flat on his palm, as he'd have handed over a certified copy.
"It is warm in there," he said. "The stove is laid. I would not like to think of you sitting somewhere cold. Take it."
"You'll want it in the morning."
"I have another."
"You've —" She stopped. She took it, in her left hand, and it lay in her palm like a stone.
"I'll walk you home," said Mr Pike, and got up, and began putting on his hat.
Then he stopped, one hand on the brim. He looked at her a long moment under the lamp.
"No," he said. "You've not got one tonight, have you."
It came out very gently. Dot opened her mouth and nothing came. Her ears, for once, stayed cold.
They had not gone far. She saw them from the top of the station steps, under the lamp at the edge of Lowmarsh Green: a tall man in a greatcoat and a girl in a London Transport hat, standing close together in the ring of it with their breath going up.
Then the tall man turned round. He said something to Sylvie, and Sylvie let go of his arm. And he came back across the road with his long uneven step, in the frost, with his hands in his pockets, and stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up.
"Miss Amory," said Winston.
"Mr Ferrar. You've — you needn't wait, I'm all right —"
"I know you are. You've a hand like a boxing glove, and you're standing on a step in a frost like this." He took his cap off and held it against his chest. "I'll say it once, and then I'll go and be embarrassed somewhere. You've no house."
"I've a — no. Well." She laughed, a little. "No. I haven't."
"Brook Street. Number six's Sylvie; you know that. The one two doors up. Number ten. Mrs Campbell." He said it as he'd have called a stop. "She took me in, in 'forty-six, when every card in Lowmarsh said no. She'll take you. You give her my name and she'll do the rest. She does it for anybody the fog's put out. Tell her I sent you."
"I couldn't —"
"You could." He put his cap back on. "She'll want a word with me about chapel. I'll take it."
He went back across the road to Sylvie, and they turned the corner together into Brook Street, and were gone.
Dot stood on the steps of the police station with a key in her good hand, and the frost in her lungs, and the whole night open in front of her, and did not go.