Sam
Twenty-seven days. Friday.
Clive had pasted posters on Harbour Road for the last four Scarholme elections, and said that in all that time nobody had ever come out to watch.
"They're watching now," he said.
They were. It was ten to eleven on Friday night, the frost was already thinking about it, and by the third bus shelter there were seven people on the pavement outside the Seagull with their pints, and a man holding a tray of chips like a hymn book.
Clive drove a white Transit with a ladder on top and a bucket of paste in the back that smelt like a school. He was sixty, with forearms like rolled carpet and the rhythm of a man who could do it in his sleep. Four swipes of the brush, one slap, one smooth. He took a sheet off the roll and it came open in the shelter like something being born, and there she was.
Six feet high. A woman in a red duffel with her back to the town, hands on the pier rail, hair going sideways. The lamp behind her, laying a long pale arm along the water. Across the top, in white, HAVE YOU SEEN HER? Across the bottom, smaller, the show, the frequency, and the studio number in figures you could read from a moving bus.
"That's good," said Clive, which from Clive was a medal. "What's she looking at?"
"The sea."
"Aye, well." He pressed a corner flat. "Nobody ever looks at what they say they're looking at."
"That's my Janice," said a man outside the Seagull.
"It isn't," I said.
"It's the spit of her. Walked out in nineteen eighty-eight." He squinted over his pint. "That's the North Pier, that. Where the lamp comes round."
My stomach went cold in one narrow strip, like a ruler.
"Is it?" I said.
"Know that rail anywhere." He drank. "Dropped a wedding ring off it."
We did eleven shelters on Harbour Road. When we'd finished I walked back to the first and stood on the kerb and looked down the road. One every forty yards, going away from me in the frost, getting smaller. Eleven women in the same coat with their backs to Scarholme, facing the sea. A vanishing point. I'd made a woman six feet tall and stood her at a bus stop, and I'd stood her three hundred yards from the one place in the city I'd told nobody about.
"You've gone quiet," said Clive.
"It's the scale."
"It's forty shelters, son. Don't go getting scale."
The whiteboard in Studio B used to be Hector's, for the shipping forecast. I'd taken it over. It said DAYS LEFT in red, and a number, which I changed at midnight, and which Wren said she could hear me changing through the wall. That night it said twenty-six, and under it, in black, the figure Ruth emailed each morning: sixteen thousand eight hundred, against thirty.
She did the Saturday show with the face of somebody who's been told she's won a holiday and isn't sure it's one. At three, the pips, the news, the light going out, Hector playing a record about a lorry to nobody, and we went down in the lift and out through the car park.
Her Fiesta was by the skip. Its windscreen was white.
Across it, in the frost, at the height of a man's finger, somebody had written STILL NO SIGN.
I stopped about eight feet off. It's an old habit. You stand back from a mess and listen before you touch it. I listened. The sea, the skip, a very small wind in a very big chain-link fence. And no steps, no engine, nothing running.
The letters were neat. Capitals, an inch and a half high, done with one finger, the kind a person makes who liked school. The frost had already begun creeping back into the strokes, so it had been done since we went in, and not long ago.
"Well," Wren said. "That's a review."
She was laughing. It had a sort of crack in it, like a plate that's been put in the dishwasher once too often.
"Ring the police," I said.
"It's frost."
"It's frost with a message."
"It's his line. It's a lovely line. It's his line, Sam, it's the one thing everybody in the city knows. It's a lad. It's some daft lad who's seen the poster."
"At three in the morning. At the back of the building. At your car."
She stopped laughing. I hadn't known what I was going to say until I'd said it, which is the way with most of the things I get right.
She rang the non-emergency number. She was told she was fifth in the queue. Eleven minutes later we got a woman called Sandra, and a reference, and in nineteen minutes two police officers drove into the car park with their lights off, which I think was for tact.
The tall one had a notebook, and the weary dignity of a man who's been to every pub in Scarholme and knows what's in the toilets. The young one had a tablet.
"Has anyone threatened you, madam?" said the tall one.
"Not as such."
"Has anyone said they'd harm you?"
"He tells me to wrap up warm."
The tall one's pen paused. "Who does?"
"The Lighthouse Man."
"Oh, I love him," said the young one. "My nan's got the honey out."
The tall one gave him a look that had thirty years in it. "Does this individual ring you from a known address?"
"A payphone," Wren said. "It comes up on the board as a payphone."
"A payphone." He wrote it down. "Has any threat been made from that payphone?"
"He talks about the weather."
"Do you know where it is?"
"We've never looked," said Wren.
"We don't know," I said.
It was a very careful sentence. I've written a lot of them. It had a we in it, and a don't, and not one word I could be held to. The tall one didn't look at me. The young one didn't either. A wind got into the chain-link.
"And the message on the vehicle," the tall one said. "Threatening in tone?"
"It's a line from a radio programme."
"Written in frost," he said slowly, to the young one, as if it were something he'd have to hold up to the light, and I watched him decide it wasn't a crime. The decision went all the way across his face like a man crossing a car park. "I'll log it. There's a number on the card. If anything else happens—"
"What counts?" I said.
"Anything with more than frost," he said, and gave us the card, and a smile with no harm in it, and they went away with their lights off, being tactful at the barrier.
Wren stood with the card between two fingers and looked at the windscreen. The frost had nearly got back to the middle of the second word.
"Right," she said. "Well. That's me taken seriously."
Ollie put out an episode on Saturday at six. I listened to it on the laptop in the launderette room with the dryers going round below me like a cheap sea.
Nightjar, episode sixty-one. "Is It Bev?"
His audio was beautiful. That's the worst thing about him. It was clean as a plate. He'd put a little music under the opening, a single guitar, and then his voice came up, with a question mark on the end of every line.
"Okay so? Three things. One. Every Thursday, at twenty to two, Bev Lumsden switches the radio off. That's, like, a fact. Gaz, on air. Two. On the twenty-second of January, the old man says, and I quote, 'You'd see it from the Quay, if you looked.' And the Lamp Café is on the Quay. Three. Her husband left in the nineties, and nobody, genuinely, nobody has asked why. I'm not saying it's Bev. I'm just asking the question."
A pause, with a guitar in it.
"And I rang the Lamp yesterday. I said, 'Bev, are you the woman in the red coat?' and she said, 'Would you like chips?'" Another pause. "Which is, like, what you'd say? If you were?"
He'd cut it so you could hear the chips. I'll say it. It was good. It was a case you could put in front of a jury, and not one word in it was a lie.
At eleven, going back into town, I looked across the harbour from the car park and saw the Lamp lit up on the Quay with a crowd in front of it. Thirty, forty people. A man in an anorak holding a thermos like a trophy. A woman with a placard that said WE ARE HERE FOR YOU BEV, in felt pen. And behind the steamed glass, behind the counter, a small figure in a tabard, with her head back, laughing, and taking everybody's money.
Wren did what Wren does.
"Scarholme," she said, at four minutes past twelve, "I'm going to say this once, and then I'm going to say it a lot. Bev Lumsden is the best woman on Fish Quay. She feeds you when you're drunk, she feeds you when you're sad, she fed me when my nana died and wouldn't take a penny. If you're stood outside the Lamp with a thermos, go in and buy a bacon barm. If you want something else, you can have it from me."
The phones lit. I wrote it in my log. Of course I keep a log. Thursday, one forty-one, him. Thursday, one fifty-eight, Vi. Nightly, two fifteen, Gaz, plus or minus ninety seconds. The point of Gaz is the jokes, and I'd started grading them.
Gaz was due at two fifteen. At twenty-one minutes past one, never her time, line two lit.
"Vi," said Wren. "You're early. It's twenty past one."
"I can tell the time." Behind her, the loud clock. Close, and slow. "I've heard about the woman at the café."
"Vi, honestly, it's—"
"Leave it, love," Vi said. "Some things want leaving."
And she put the phone down.
She didn't slam it. I'd have heard that. She put it down so carefully that the cradle made no sound at all, and the clock was the last thing on the line, and then it wasn't.
Wren sat with her hand flat on the fader. "Vi?" she said, to nothing. "Vi, are you—" She looked at me. "That was almost kind."
"It was fourteen seconds," I said.
"What?"
"Nothing."
I wrote it down. Vi: one twenty-one. Fourteen seconds. Not a Thursday. And under it, because I can't help myself: Tells us to leave a woman alone. I'd put a ring round a woman. A widow with a clock, now telling a whole city to stand back from a woman at a chip shop. If I'd been a woman at the end of a pier for three years, I'd have wanted that too.
At two fifteen, indicator going, Gaz came on and said he'd been stopped by two coppers on the Quay at four on Saturday morning, and they'd asked him, as a witness, "if I'd seen any suspicious frost."
"I said, officer, it's January. Gaz, rank two, over and out."
I gave it a seven. It was a good night for him.
At twenty past three she stood in the kitchen behind Studio B with the kettle on and her back to me, and told me.
"I might take Leeds."
I'd got a custard cream. I stopped holding it.
"I'd have a flat in the daylight," said Wren. "I'd have a window. I'd have a lovely, ordinary, boring, four-till-seven in a nice clean building with a security man called Phil. I wouldn't have a poster. I wouldn't have a hundred strangers on the Quay. I wouldn't have somebody writing in my frost. I keep looking at it." She turned round. She had the green mug in both hands, the chipped one, and she was holding it like something she might throw. "I'm frightened, Sam. I'm not being daft. Tell me I'm being daft."
She meant it. She wanted me to say it, and I couldn't, because if I said you're not in danger, I'd be guessing, and if I said you're safe, I'd be lying. I knew where the box was. A telephone on a pier, halfway out, where I assumed somebody with a cold in his chest stood every Thursday, in a place I had stood and she hadn't. I had my hand on it. I'd had it since Friday, and it was heavy, and if I let go of it she'd have everything and I'd have nothing.
"You're not being daft," I said.
"That's it?"
"It's what's true."
She looked at me for a long time. I'd wanted to say Don't, and Stay, and It's probably a dead show, in that order, and I said none of them.
"Right," said Wren. She put the mug down. "Right. Good."
I slept on her sofa. It wasn't an invitation. It was a sort of treaty. She said, at four, in the hall, "It's a settee. It's got a rug on it. Don't take that as anything." I said I wouldn't. She said, "Good," and shut a door.
The flat was small and warm and smelt of toast and the curtains were taped. I lay on the sofa with my coat on and the rug on top. In the dark you can hear a flat the way you can hear a ship. A fridge in B flat, slightly under. A radiator ticking as it cooled. Through the wall, her breath, long and slow, and then a catch, which is the sound of somebody who is asleep and not quite believing it.
At ten to five she came out in a very large T-shirt for a glass of water.
"You awake?"
"I'm listening to your fridge."
"What's it doing?"
"It's in B flat. A bit under."
"You could've told me. I'd have bought a different one." She stood in the kitchen doorway. The light from the street made a long shape of her. "Sam."
"Yes."
"Nothing," Wren said. "Night."
"Yes. Night."
We had both started the same sentence. I could hear the shape of hers, a breath held on the front of it. I could hear mine.
She shut the door. I lay on my back and I counted, which I do, and I got to eight hundred and nine and it was light.
At nine on Sunday morning, Studio B was empty. Carpets downstairs, nothing above. I let myself in with the key Hector had given me on the second day, in a tone that said I'd lose it.
The whiteboard said twenty-five, in my handwriting, from midnight. I looked at it for a while. And then, in the bottom corner, small, in blue, so that it looked like a smudge unless you were standing in the one place I stood, I wrote the number of the box. All eleven digits.
I stood back. It looked like a smudge.