Chapter 175: All 3 of You I

Danny went up the 5 steps first. Priya came behind him with her pad already open, and Pettit last, with his tea left standing on the railings across the road.

The hall was as it had been on Monday. Black and white tile, beeswax, the clock ticking somewhere up the stairs. The narrow table stood against the wall with the cream sheet squared on it and the house’s fountain pen across it, cap still off. Every light was on.

Pemberton stayed on the hall chair at the foot of the stairs, with his own pen in his hand and his grey hat on his knee. He looked at Danny, and at the library book under his arm, and nodded once.

"Mr Flynn." He turned his head. "Mrs Anand."

Priya’s biro stopped on the page.

She looked at him over her glasses, listening to the 2 words again in her head. Danny could see her doing it.

"We have spoken before," she said. "On the 10th of October, in the morning, on my office telephone. You told me your name was Hollis."

"I did," Pemberton said. "I apologise for the name. Not for the call."

Priya wrote that down, every word, and the time.

"And you will be the gentleman from the insurer," Pemberton said.

"Pettit. Graham Pettit." Pettit had his clipboard against his chest. "And you’re the 17th floor, I’m told. With the pen."

"This pen is mine." Pemberton lifted it an inch. "The one on the table is theirs."

The secretary shut the front door behind them, and the street went quiet behind it. She was in dark green silk again, with her hands folded in front of her narrow black skirt.

"Mrs Anand," she said. "You wish to speak first."

Priya’s biro moved again. Danny read it upside down. 10:01. The order of speaking agreed on the pavement was known inside.

Then Priya stepped forward and held out a long white envelope.

"A letter on my firm’s paper, addressed to the Secretary of the Company, asking to inspect the original of the document my client copied here on Monday. I would like you to sign for it."

The secretary looked at the envelope and did not take it.

"The company does not sign for letters."

"Then I shall lay it on the table beside the document and note the time." Priya laid it down a hand’s width from the sheet and wrote. "10:02. Letter delivered. Signature declined. May I read the original?"

"You may read it where it lies."

Priya bent over the table with her glasses on and her hands behind her back, careful not to touch it, the way Pemberton had bent over the card on Wednesday night. She read it once quickly and once slowly, with her biro going on her pad between the readings.

The clock ticked. Pettit shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Pemberton sat with the hat on his knee and watched her read.

"It is not dated," Priya said, without straightening. "A deed of transfer with no date on it. The witness line is empty, and a transfer of a registered title has to be witnessed or the Land Registry will send it straight back. And it says 2 things at once."

She held the tip of her biro an inch above the paper.

"Absolutely. And 7 words later, to revert. It gives my client the flat outright and then, in the same sentence, takes it back off him the day he stops working. This document disagrees with itself before its first full stop."

"It is the document the company offers," the secretary said.

"Then the company has offered my client something that the first clerk at the Land Registry to read it to the end would refuse to register." Priya straightened up. "I would like to photograph it."

"Photographs of this house do not leave it."

"Then I shall write that I asked and was refused, and the time." She wrote. "10:09. Photograph refused. I have finished, for now."

She stepped back to Danny’s shoulder. Her hand on the biro was perfectly steady.

"Mr Pettit," the secretary said.

Pettit cleared his throat, looked at his clipboard, and then didn’t look at it again.

"Right. I’ll be straight with you, madam. I’ve been 22 years at this and I’ve never stood in a hall like this one, and I’d as soon get it said. I’ve a file on my desk in Reading about a flat on the 40th floor of a building on the river. The man living in it can’t tell me who pays him.

"He’s told me so in so many words, 3 times. I respect that. I’ve written it down 3 times, and my manager hates it. A file with could not name his employer on it will go up the line on Friday and come straight back down with a question mark on it in red, and then it’s me back out on the M4.

"So I’m asking you. In front of his solicitor, who’s writing it down. In front of me, who’s writing it down. And in front of this gentleman with the pen, who I’ve not quite worked out yet."

He took a breath.

"Who pays Mr Flynn?"

"The company pays the host," the secretary said.

"The company. The 3 numbers."

"Yes."

"For what?"

"For attendance."

Pettit wrote it, for attendance, and underlined it twice.

"Attendance where?"

"Wherever the host is sent."

"And the company’s people? The directors. The names behind the numbers."

"That is not a question I am able to answer."

Pettit stood with his pen stopped. Then he nodded slowly, and Danny watched him work it out on his face before he said it.

"Then that’ll go in the file as it stands. The employer is the company, by its registered numbers. The company pays the occupant for attendance, wherever he’s sent. The company won’t name its people. That’s 3 lines I didn’t have yesterday. My file goes up Friday with an employer on it, and if anybody upstairs wants to know the faces behind the numbers, they can come and stand in this hall themselves."

He turned the clipboard round to Priya.

"Have I got that right?"

Priya read his 3 lines against her own.

"Word for word, Mr Pettit. 10:24."

"Good." He tucked the board under his arm.

The secretary turned to the hall chair.

"Mr Pemberton. You asked to be present this morning. You are a party. Do you wish to speak?"

The old man put his hat down on the tiles by the chair leg and stood up slowly, with one hand on the newel post.

"I wish to ask," Pemberton said. "In the way I was taught, in this hall, in 1958. And I wish to ask it in front of these 3 people, so that whatever I am told is written down by somebody other than me."

"Ask."

"11 years ago a card came under my door telling me to take a boy into a flat and see that the roof did not fall on him. I did it. I have asked every year since why the boy. I have never been answered." He looked at the secretary. "I am asking again. Why him?"

The clock ticked 4 times.

"The host was asked for before you were asked to house him, Mr Pemberton," the secretary said. "That is the answer the house gives."

Pemberton stood with his hand on the newel post.

"Asked for. By whom?"

"That is not a question I am able to answer."

Priya’s biro had stopped. Pettit’s was going.

Danny stood in the middle of the hall with The Cruel Sea under his arm and his hands gone cold again.

Asked for. Somebody came to this house and asked for me, before I ever walked into Mare Street. Before I’d got as far as the bus to Hackney. Who’d do that?

Leave it. Not with 3 pens going.

"Mr Flynn," the secretary said. "You wish to speak last."

He put the book down on the table beside Priya’s letter, open, with the 2 cards lying side by side in it, the new one and the one gone the colour of weak tea.

"Same typewriter, 11 years apart," he said. "One told an old man to take me in. One told me you know which flat I’m going to live in before I’ve signed for it. Who put the second one under the door at Pembury on Tuesday?"

"The house records where the host will live."

"I don’t live there."

"You will."

"Nobody told you it was the end flat. Adaeze said it out loud once, in her kitchen. And the man who paid for that flat’s ceiling is sat in your hall. Did he tell you?"

Pemberton looked at Danny from the newel post.

"I did not, Mr Flynn."

"Nobody needed to tell the house," the secretary said.

Pettit wrote that down too. He wrote it slowly.

"Then here’s mine," Danny said. "I’m not signing that sheet. Not for 40, and not to buy Miss Carter’s record shut with my mother’s name and my staff’s names going onto your list instead. On the Monday, 4 weeks from last Monday, I’ll leave the keys to 40 with the night desk at the Sterling and the company can have it back."

"Noted."

"And I’m asking you a thing, with 3 people writing. If I don’t sign, am I still the host?"

"The host is the host whether he signs or not," the secretary said. "The sheet concerns the flat. Nothing else."

So the shifts carry on. I just haven’t got a roof in 4 weeks unless Adaeze’s tenancy goes through.

"Then that’s all I came to say," Danny said. "10:36. Write it down, Priya." He picked the book up off the table with both cards in it.