Chapter 3 The Ledger

Marisel Veyron Pov

By seven in the morning there were nineteen people in my stairwell.

They came up from Harrow Row and Mbeki Close with pots and buckets and a wheelbarrow and one man with a fish crate under each arm. They came because Odile had gone round knocking on doors with my photocopied notice in her hand, and because by seven it was already too hot to stand in the sun on the street, and because the stairwell of my building was three floors of shade with a tap that still worked.

The tap was on the half-landing between the first and second floor. It was a maintenance tap, put in for the cleaners, and it had never been metered, and it came out cold, which is the only reason any of them stayed.

By half seven the queue went down to the front door and out onto the step.

By eight the tap had slowed and there were two men at the front of the queue arguing about who had been there first.

"Enough," I said.

Nobody listened. The bigger one had his hand on the neck of the tap and the other one had a hold of his wrist.

I got between them. Neither of them moved their hands.

"Take your hands off each other," I said, "or I turn the whole thing off at the main and nobody in this building drinks today."

They both looked at me.

"I know where the main is," I said. "I've been up all night with this tap. I know what it does. Take your hands off each other."

They let go.

I got my notebook out of my bag - the same one I use for the shop accounts, half a page of last month's bread order still at the front - and I sat down on the step with it and started a list.

"Name," I said to the big man. "House. How many in it. What you've brought to fill."

He stared at me. "What for?"

"Because in five minutes I'm going to time this tap and give everyone a turn, and if your name's not on this list you don't get a turn. Name."

That was how it started. Not the water. The list.

By nine there were thirty-one names on it. Forty-four people, counting children, and eleven of them from Harrow Row where the tap had been dead since three in the morning. I wrote down every container, every pot, the man's two fish crates, the wheelbarrow with a plastic liner in it, Odile's baby bath. When I'd done that I gave everyone a number and told them the tap ran from nine to twelve and then off until four, because a tap that runs all day is a tap that's dead by noon, and after that we'd see.

A woman called Mira Tull, from the second floor, said, "And who put you in charge?"

"Nobody. But I've got the notebook and the tap's on my landing."

That got a laugh, which was better than an argument.

Sable came down at ten with her four cans from her own flat and a plastic tub of drinking water under her arm and looked at the stairwell full of people and stopped dead on the stairs.

"What did you do?"

"I started a list."

"You started a-" She looked down at the notebook and then at the queue. "Marisel. There's a man with a fish crate."

"He's third in line for the afternoon. He's got a bad leg. I put him third."

"He's got a bad leg because he was first in line and you gave him a number."

"That too."

---

Crawe came at eleven.

Crawe is the caretaker. He's got a flat on the ground floor and a key to everything and a face like a man who has spent thirty years being blamed for things. He stood at the bottom of the stairs with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the whole queue of them.

"Mrs. Veyron."

"Crawe."

"You've got half the street in my stairwell."

"They're filling pots. Not breaking anything."

"There's water coming out of that tap."

"There is."

"That tap's on the building's supply. That's the building's tank on the roof. That's not for the street."

I came down the stairs to him. "How much is in the tank?"

He looked at me.

"Crawe. How much is in the tank?"

"Full, near enough. It fills off the mains overnight. There's a float valve-"

"So it filled last night, before six."

"It would have, yes."

"Then there's a tank full of water on this roof that'll last this building a fortnight if we're careful and four days if we're not." I kept my voice down. "And there are forty-four people on my list and I know thirty of them by name, and in five days when the taps come back on and Alder Vale has been drinking out of cans bought off this road at four in the morning, those thirty people are going to remember who let them fill a pot and who didn't."

Crawe looked at the queue again. There was a woman at the front of it crying quietly into her sleeve while her pot filled.

"Don't let them on the roof," he said. "Don't tell anyone there's a tank. And when it runs dry, Mrs. Veyron, it's your name they'll be saying, not mine."

"I know."

He went back into his flat and shut the door and I stood in the stairwell and wrote tank - rooftop - how much? in the back of the notebook, and underlined it twice.

---

Dacre came at half twelve.

He came alone, which surprised me. He stood on the step in the sun with his sunglasses pushed up on his head and looked at the queue going up the stairs behind me, and I watched him count it, and I watched him understand what he was looking at.

"This is my water," he said.

"This is the building's water."

"I bought sixty cans off this road this morning-"

"Off Halim. Who's got a stall on the corner and a nephew who can't count and a wife with a bad hip, and who you've known for eleven years." I stayed on the step. "You didn't buy this road, Dacre. You bought a man's stock at four in the morning and now you're standing on my step telling me it's yours."

"You're going to be very sorry you did this."

"I've been sorry before. I'm getting used to it."

He took his sunglasses off. That was the tell with him - always was. When he wanted to be believed he took the sunglasses off, and it worked on me for six years and I watched it not work now and I felt nothing.

"Marisel. Listen to me. I've got a buyer. Vesper's cousin knows a man with a hotel on the coast, three hundred rooms, and he's frightened and he's got money and he'll take everything I can put in front of him by Sunday. Everything. Do you understand what I'm telling you? I'm not sitting on cans this time, I'm not filling a shed for nothing, I'm selling. There's a market for once and I'm in front of it."

"Then sell it."

"I'm trying to." He put his hands out. "I need more than sixty cans. I've got the hundred and forty empty in the warehouse and a man on Kessel Road selling fifty-litres out of a lock-up. I need them filled by Sunday and I need a place with a good tap to fill them and there's the whole of it." He nodded at my stairwell. "You've got the tap. I've got the buyer. We do it together and split it."

And there it was. Not the water. Not the heat. Not me on the floor of his hallway. He'd come to my step to rent my tap.

"Who does the counting?" I said.

"What?"

"You said Vesper does the counting. Does she do the counting on this too?"

He blinked. "She's good at it."

"So she does the counting, and you do the buying, and I do the filling, and I wonder who does the splitting." I came down one step. "Dacre. She told you she counted sixty cans into that truck this morning."

"She counted sixty."

"Halim sold you sixty. She wrote something else first and then crossed it out." I watched his face. "I saw her do it. She wrote a number, turned the page back, looked at it again, and wrote a different one."

"That's a lot of nothing from across the road."

"It is. So ask her."

He didn't say anything. Behind him, in the street, the one-shoe woman was sitting in the shade of her shutter with her shoes lined up in front of her and a bowl of water beside her, and she was watching us both.

"You know what your problem is," he said at last. "You've got no head for business and you've decided it's a conspiracy."

"My problem's your problem in about six days," I said, "and it's got nothing to do with business."

He put his sunglasses back on and walked off down the road and didn't look back, and I stood on the step until he turned the corner onto Alder Vale.

Then I went up to the second floor and knocked on Mira Tull's door.

Mira Tull is a woman of about fifty with a good head and a bad temper and a brother who drives a delivery van for a wholesaler on Fenner Street. She'd been second in the queue that morning and she'd complained about it the whole time.

"You want something," she said, standing in her doorway.

"I want to know what's in the wholesaler's warehouse on Fenner Street."

"Fenner's got four wholesalers."

"Then I want to know all four." I held up the notebook. "I've got thirty-one names on this list and about a hundred litres of goodwill. I want to spend it before the sun comes down on us on Wednesday. Can your brother get me in?"

Mira looked at the notebook, then at me. "He can get you in. He can't get you a discount."

"I don't want a discount," I said. "I want to know who else has been in there since Tuesday."