Chapter 169: The Sunday Night I

Deniz shut the carbon book on his finger to keep the page.

"He’s in this building," he said. "Isn’t he. The old gentleman."

"Flat 17," Danny said. "17 floors up from where you’re sat."

"Then I want to see him." Deniz stood up with the shoe box under his arm and plaster coming off his knees onto Osei’s clean floor. "He paid me on a staircase 11 years ago, and through your hand last Thursday, and I’ve never once asked him a thing. I’d like to ask him one."

"Tonight? It’s 20 past 10."

"He’ll be up," Jodie said, before Danny could. "He was up later than this on Friday with his pen out. And if he’s in bed, he’ll get up for this."

Ding. 17.

Pemberton opened on the second knock in the maroon dressing gown, without his glasses this time and without a pen. The flat behind him was cold. The gas fire was off and the crossword had gone from the arm of the chair.

He looked at Danny, and at Jodie, and then at the big man in plaster-white work boots with a shoe box in his arms.

"Mr Deniz," he said. "You have kept well."

"So have you, sir." Deniz held the box against his chest. "I’m 11 years older and you look the same. How’s that work?"

"I swim." Pemberton stood back from the door. "Come in, all of you. Keep your boots on, Mr Deniz. I know what that ceiling cost you in boots."

Deniz didn’t sit. He opened the carbon book on the table under the window, put his big finger on the Monday, and started talking, and didn’t stop.

"I’ll say what I came to say, sir, and then I’ll stand in the corner. You rang me off my card in the newsagent’s on Mare Street on a Monday afternoon. That card had been up there 6 weeks and not one person had rung it. You said a ceiling’s come down in a top flat, it wants doing before Saturday, cash, 50 on top. I said I’m booked Monday and Tuesday. You said Wednesday, then.

"So I went round first thing Wednesday, and the whole lot was down on the boards in one sheet, lath and all, and I stood there and thought, this isn’t 4 days, Deniz, this is a week.

"And you were on the landing in your good coat and you said it’ll be done by Friday night, Mr Deniz, and you said it like it had happened already. So I did it by Friday night. I had my lad up there till 11 on the Thursday with a lamp on a broom handle."

He stopped for breath.

"And I wrote that job sheet on the Monday, same as I always do, and Danny says you told him on Friday you first met me on the Thursday. That’s not right, sir, with respect. I’ve got it in my own hand. That’s all I came to say."

Pemberton stood looking at the carbon. Then he sat down in his chair and put both hands on its arms.

"Robin did ring me on the Wednesday evening," he said. "That much I told you true. What I did not tell you is that I had rung Robin first, on the Monday morning, before I rang Mr Deniz."

"Saying what?" Danny said.

"That the top flat was a disgrace and I would pay to have the ceiling done myself. That he was to let it to the first person who came in to take it that week, whoever they were, and ring me the minute they had." The old man looked at his hands. "Robin thought it was vanity. That I could not bear a flat with our family’s name on the lease to look like that."

He smoothed the dressing gown over his knee.

"He rang me on the Wednesday as I had asked him to, and told me a boy had come in with 2 months in cash and a birthday that did not add up. He was laughing about it."

"And on the bench you made it sound like you only heard about me on the Wednesday."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because I have never told the Monday to anybody, Mr Flynn, and I did not know how to begin it in a towel."

Jodie’s hand had stopped on the door frame.

"Begin it now," she said.

Pemberton turned his head and looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at Danny.

"On the Sunday night before, a card came under my door. The same card, the same weight, the same typing as the one you showed me on Friday. Every card I have had before that one was an answer to something I had asked. That one was not an answer. It was an instruction."

"What did it say?" Danny said.

"A boy will come into the Mare Street office this week to take a flat. Take him. See that the roof does not fall on him."

Nobody moved. Somewhere down the corridor a door closed.

"On Friday you told me 4 cards since 1958," Danny said. "The last one in 1994."

"I did, and it was untrue by 1." The old man’s voice didn’t change. "There have been 5. 4 were answers to me. The 5th came 11 years ago and it was about you, and I have never let myself count it as mine."

5. And I’m the 5th. Since I was 17. Since before I’d even got the bus to Hackney.

Deniz put the shoe box down on the table very gently.

"So you’re saying, sir, that I did that ceiling because somebody posted you a card."

"Yes, Mr Deniz. And I paid you myself, out of my own pocket, every penny."

Danny was at the window. His hands had gone cold.

"Did the card say why? Why me? I was 17. I’d never been to Hackney except for chips. Why would anybody in a white house in Kensington care whether a lad off an estate in Battersea had a ceiling over him?"

"It did not say why."

"And you never asked them? 11 years?"

"I have asked every year since, in the way I was taught to ask." Pemberton touched the place on the chair arm where the crossword had been. "I have had no answer to why. That is the truth, Mr Flynn, and you have had all of it I have."

Jodie came in off the door frame and stood next to Danny at the window.

"How did they know?" she said. "That you’d be leaving home that week. You hadn’t left yet. You’d not even walked in there."

Don’t. Not here. Not before Mum.

"Not tonight, Jode," Danny said. "That one’s my mum’s first. You know it is."

She looked at him for a second. Then she took his cold hand in hers and kept it, and turned back to the old man.

"You could have told him on Thursday," she said. "In this room. Before Robin died."

"I could have." Pemberton looked up at her. "Robin never knew about the cards. Not one of them. I let him think it was vanity until the day he died, Miss Carter, and I was not going to tell it across his bed."

Has he been sat up every night for 11 years waiting for somebody to knock and ask him in the right order?

"I’m going to write all of that down," Danny said. "Every word, with the time on it. And I’m going to tell Priya and my mum."

"I would expect you to." Pemberton held the arms of the chair. "Put down that I am sorry for the bench. In those words, please."

At the door Deniz stopped with the box under his arm.

"Sir. That was the best ceiling I did that year. I want you to know that, whatever the card said."

"I know it was, Mr Deniz," Pemberton said. "Mind the step by the lift. It is loose."

The lift took the 3 of them down. Deniz went out into the cold with his shoe box, and the lift took Danny and Jodie up 40 floors on their own.

He wrote it in the pad at the kitchen island while she stood behind him and read it over his shoulder.

22:48. Flat 17. P rang Robin Mon morning first: do the top flat, let it to the first in that week, ring me. Robin thought it was vanity. Card under P’s door Sun night, 11 years ago: "A boy will come into the Mare Street office this week to take a flat. Take him. See that the roof does not fall on him." Not an answer, an instruction. 5 cards, not 4. Not told why. Asks every year. Robin never knew. "Sorry for the bench."

He put the biro down on the stone.

"Somebody’s had me on a card since I was 17," he said. "Before October. Before any of it."

Jodie took the biro, put it in the spine of the pad and shut it.

"Bed," she said. "Now. I can’t look at that pad any more tonight and neither can you."