Chapter 3 The Question No Stranger Should Know

I told my mother it was nothing. *A client's name, Mum. A deed I'm cataloguing. Never mind.* And I listened to her breathe out on the other end of the line, a long, shaky, grateful breath she tried to disguise as a laugh, and I said goodnight in a voice I'd learned from her.

I didn't sleep. Around four, I gave up pretending, and made a list, in pencil, on the back of a conservation report, which is how I make every list that matters.

*1. The letter is Emeric's.*

I looked at that for a while. Then I crossed it out and wrote: *1. The letter is consistent with Emeric's.* That was truer. A conservator never says *is.* She says *consistent with,* and she keeps her hands in her pockets.

*2. Rook knew about the crossword.* *3. Rook knew about the paste. (Did he? He didn't say. Ask.)* *4. Ruth is frightened.* *5. Ruth lied.*

I wrote the fifth one very small.

At seven-forty I put the letter, in a clean polyester sleeve, into my satchel. At eight, I was standing on Tallow Lane in the cold, looking at a shopfront that had been a printer's for ninety years and had never quite stopped smelling of it. The old gilt lettering still showed through the paint on the glass, *RAWLINGS & SON, PRINTERS,* and below it, on a card in the window, in a plain hand: *Rook. Records. Authentication.* The door was ajar.

I'd made rules on the bus. I'd practised them, the way you practise a speech to someone who's wronged you. I pushed the door open.

It was a single long room, high-ceilinged, the old press still bolted to the floor at the back like a sleeping animal. Metal shelves of archive boxes. A trestle table. A kettle. Two desks, one tidy, one not. The tidy desk had nobody at it, and the not-tidy desk had a man leaning on the frame of a back door with a mug in his hand, forty or so, broad, bald, with the amiable, unsurprised face of someone who'd seen a great many people walk into a great many rooms and had never once been astonished.

"She's early," he said, to the air.

"I said eight," said a voice from the stairs, and Cassian Rook came down them with his shirtsleeves turned back to the elbow and a folder under his arm. He stopped on the bottom step. In daylight, he looked less like a threat and more like something I had no word for: a man who'd been awake most of a night and was too well-mannered to mention it. "Mrs Mercer."

"Rules," I said.

He nodded once. "Go on."

"One. You answer what I ask. Not what you think I ought to ask." I put my satchel on the trestle table and kept my hand on it. "Two. If you don't know, you say you don't know. If you won't say, you say you won't. You don't dress it up."

"Fair."

"Three. You don't tell me what I feel. You don't tell me what I can handle. You don't," and I heard my voice catch on it, so I went on over the top of it, "decide anything on my behalf. Not a single thing."

For a moment nothing in his face moved at all. Then, very faintly, as if I'd struck a bone, something behind his eyes did.

"I'll try," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It's the true one. I don't make promises I might not be able to keep." He glanced at the bald man by the back door. "This is Joss Okafor. He works with me. He'll stay, if you don't mind. He's the closest thing I've got to a conscience, and he's usually better at it than I am."

"Don't flatter me," said Joss. He raised his mug at me. "Mrs Mercer. Sorry about the intrusion last night. He told me not to follow you, so I didn't."

"I didn't see you," I said.

"That's how you know I didn't."

I almost smiled, and hated that I almost had. I took the letter out of my satchel and set it on the table in its sleeve, and Cassian looked at it without touching it, with the same stillness he'd had at the lab door. "You've read it," he said.

"You already knew what it says."

"I knew what it was for. I haven't read it." A beat. "He told me roughly what he'd written. I never asked to see."

That was the first lie, though I didn't know it yet. Or it was the first half-truth, the kind that is made entirely of true words laid in the wrong order. I only remember that he said it simply and that I believed him, and that in the part of me that kept lists, something went quiet and made a note.

"I'm going to ask you some questions," I said. "Things only someone who knew him could answer. If you get one wrong, I walk out of here and take this to the police."

"All right."

I'd prepared a dozen. I discarded eleven of them as I stood there, because they were all things a good investigator could have found in a week. I picked the one that was left.

"What did he hum?"

He didn't hesitate, which frightened me more than hesitation would have. "The first four bars of 'Shenandoah.' Always the first four. Never the fifth." His eyes were on the middle distance, as if he were hearing it. "When he was reading a ledger and something didn't add up. He didn't know he did it. Joss used to tell him to stop and he'd say, *stop what?*"

Behind him, Joss said quietly, "He did, you know. He did say *stop what.*"

I put my hand flat on the table. The wood was cool, with old ink worked into the grain. *Four bars. Never the fifth.* I'd gone twenty-nine years without knowing that I could be undone by something as small as the fifth bar of a song.

"Why did he call you?" My voice was almost steady. "That night. Why you?"

"To ask me to hold a letter." He said it without softening. "And to promise to give it to you after two years."

"Why two?"

"He didn't say. He said it was the length of time he needed." He paused. "He said it twice."

"And you agreed."

"Yes."

"Without asking what was in it."

"I asked what it was for. He told me that."

"That isn't the same thing."

"No," said Cassian Rook. "It isn't."

The silence went on a moment longer than was comfortable. I realised he was looking at my hand again, the one on the table, the left, with the wedding band on it and the little scar on the thumb. Not at the ring. At the way I was holding it: fingers pressed flat, thumb tucked in, as if I were keeping something down. I took it off the table and put it in my pocket.

"Stop looking at my hands."

"I'm sorry." He looked up at once. "I notice things. It isn't-" He stopped, started again. "It's a habit. I wasn't aware I was doing it."

*That,* said the list-making part of me, *is another one.* But I let it go, for now. I had a larger question and I was running out of ways to come at it sideways.

"You said the death was wrong," I said. "At the lab. You said a warning, and you didn't say it was an accident. I want to know why."

He glanced at Joss. Joss, without being asked, put his mug down and went and stood with his back to the door, as if he were keeping something out.

Cassian opened the folder.

"This is a copy of the coroner's report," he said. "I'd like you to read it before I say anything about it. I'd like you to read it all the way through, and not look at me while you do."

I took it.

It was four pages, stapled, the type slightly blurred by whatever machine had copied it. *HM Coroner for Port Alder. Inquest touching the death of EMERIC JAMES MERCER, aged 33.* I had read the verdict once, in a bright wood-panelled room, with Ruth's hand on my arm. *Accidental death.* I had never been able to read the rest. I'd signed things, and been handed things, and put them in a drawer.

I read it now the way I'd read an object. Slowly, from the outside in.

*Deceased found at the foot of the north service stair, Hale Archive Trust, at approximately 20:35 by a member of the cleaning staff.*

*Cause of death: multiple injuries consistent with a fall of approximately fourteen steps.*

*Toxicology: blood alcohol concentration of 0.09 per cent.*

I stopped.

"Read it all," Cassian said gently, not looking at me.

*Dr K. Banerjee, forensic pathologist, notes in her opinion that the deceased survived the fall for a period of approximately forty minutes before death.*

Forty minutes.

I read that line three times. I put the paper down. I picked it up again.

"No," I said.

"Mrs Mercer-"

"No. Emeric hadn't had a drink since his father's funeral. That's four years. He told me the night of the funeral. He said he'd decided he didn't like who he was with a glass in his hand." I could hear myself getting louder. I couldn't stop it. "He didn't *keep* it in the house. He wouldn't even cook with wine. When people brought bottles to dinner he'd put them in the cupboard for the next person. *Nine* per cent-that's nearly twice the limit, that's four, five drinks-"

"I know," said Cassian Rook.

I looked up, at last, because that was the wrong thing for a stranger to say. Not *I'm so sorry.* Not *that must be hard.* *I know.* He said it with the quiet of a man confirming a figure, and there was nothing on his face I could use. No pity. No relief. Only a kind of grim, patient attention, as if I'd just done a sum he'd already done on his own, in the dark, several times.

"Forty minutes," I said. "He lay there for forty minutes."

"Yes."

"And the police, the inquest, they-it says *a member of the cleaning staff found him at twenty thirty-five.* The fall was at seven-forty. Where was-" I couldn't make the sentence come out. "Why did no one find him sooner? Why was there no alarm? Was someone with him? Why is nobody asking *why?*"

"I've been asking for two years," he said. "Quietly. I don't have the standing to ask loudly. Nobody listens to a man with no relationship to the deceased."

"You said you knew him."

"I knew him for a matter of months. That isn't a relationship. That's an acquaintance with a very bad ending." He closed the folder, and then, to my surprise, slid it across the table. "Keep it. It's yours. It was always going to be."

I took it, because I couldn't do anything else. My hands were shaking in a way I hadn't allowed them to for two years. I pressed the pages flat to the table and ran the side of my hand down the first of them, smoothing it, the way I smooth everything, as if I could press the whole terrible thing back into order.

And there, in the top right-hand corner, in the thin dark grey of a fax machine's header, small enough that you'd need to look for it, was a line of text.

*TO: SOLICITOR'S COPY. FROM: HM CORONER'S OFFICE PORT ALDER. PAGE 1 OF 4. 19 MAR.*

Nineteenth of March. Not this year. I knew, because I knew the date I'd collected my own copy of the coroner's findings, and the weather that day, and what I'd worn. Nineteenth of March, the March before last. Twenty months ago.

He had said he'd been *asking for two years, quietly.* That was consistent.

But I looked at the page and then at the man, and I said, in the careful voice I used to speak to difficult donors, "How long have you had this report?"

He didn't move. Behind him, so slightly I'd have missed it if I hadn't spent a decade watching how objects changed under pressure, Joss's shoulders shifted.

"Since last week," said Cassian Rook.

I looked at the header again. *19 MAR.*

I did not tell him that I'd seen it. I did not say that a man who'd had the report only since last week could not have had it faxed to a solicitor twenty months before. I didn't say anything at all. I folded the page along its original crease, and slid it into my satchel with the letter, and put my hand over the clasp.

"Thank you," I said. "That will be all."

"Mrs Mercer."

"I'll be in touch," I said, and I was at the door, and Joss stepped out of the way without a word, and I walked out into the grey cold of Tallow Lane with my heart going like something trapped.

I counted my steps to the corner. Forty. I counted them again. By the time I reached the bus stop I had stopped being afraid of the report, and of the forty minutes, and of the man in the print shop who knew how my husband hummed.

I was afraid of the lie.

Because a stranger who lies about *when* has something he doesn't want me to know about *why.*