Chapter 183: About a Flat III

Danny looked at the beer mat under the chair leg. His ears had gone hot and his hands had gone cold, both at once.

The Sunday. She came on the Sunday. And the card came under Pemberton’s door on the Sunday night. And on the Monday morning he rang Robin and booked Deniz, and on the Monday...

He didn’t let himself finish it at the table.

It was Jodie who said it, carefully, in a level voice, with her eyes on his mother and not on him.

"She came for a flat he didn’t need yet," Jodie said. "On the Sunday. Before whatever it was on the Monday. And that same night an old man at the Sterling got a card saying a boy would come into an office that week. So they knew he’d be going before he knew it himself. Before anything had happened to make him go." She stopped. "Sorry. I’m thinking out loud at your table."

"Keep going, love." His mother’s voice had gone flat and hard. "Go on. What else?"

"The secretary in that house." Jodie turned to Danny. "You said she’s about 50. So 11 years ago she’d have been about 39. Your mum’s just described her to the hair. The cut at the jaw and the red mouth. And good evening. Pemberton said she always says it, at any hour. It’s her. It’s the same woman, with the same haircut, 11 years on. Who keeps everything the same for 11 years?"

"Staff," his mother said. "That’s a uniform, that. I’ve worn one 30 years. You don’t change your hair or your shoes, and you say what you’re told to say at the door. She was at work."

She got up and took the lid off the stew and looked into it without seeing it, and put the lid back.

"Right," she said, with her back to them. "So you’re going somewhere tomorrow. Don’t look at me like that. You’ve had a face on since you came in, and you asked me that like a man that’s got somewhere to be. Where?"

"I don’t know yet. They tell me at half 9 for 10. It’s work, the same kind the 900s came from. It’s the one who asked for me in the first place, Mum. Before Pemberton. Before the ceiling."

His mother turned round.

"Then you go," she said. "And you ask them who sent a woman to my door on a Sunday afternoon when I’d my shoes off. And you ask who told them about the Monday before it happened. And you do the page. Time in, address, who. You give it her." She pointed at Jodie with the oven glove. "And you’re out by when?"

"2 o’clock. It says 10 till 2. 4 hours."

"Then at 2 o’clock you sign it in front of her, and at 5 past 2 you ring me on the ward, and I’ll be stood in the sluice with my phone in my hand. Same day, Danny. Same hour."

"I’ll ring the ward desk if your mobile’s in your locker."

She sat back down and pushed the dumplings across the table at Jodie.

"Eat," his mother said. "Both of you. I’ve not stood over that pan since 10 o’clock for you to look at it."

The ward rang him at 20 to 3, while he was still on the walkway with Jodie’s arm through his. It was a nurse called Bernadette, from Cork, who’d drawn the phones for the afternoon.

"Mr Flynn, is it? Hello there, I’m on Victoria ward, I’m ringing about Mr Pemberton. Now don’t panic, he’s grand, he’s more than grand, he’s after winning. The consultant came round at 1 and he had his shoes on before she’d got her notes open. He’d his coat on over the pyjamas. Your pyjamas, I’m told, the stripy ones.

"She tried telling him Monday and he said, Doctor, I have been told Monday by better women than you and I have survived all of them. And she laughed, God help her, and that was the end of it.

"So he’s to go today, if you can come for him. His kidneys are on the mend. We’ve his tablets made up. That’s a miracle on a Sunday, pharmacy’s usually shut tight as a drum, but he’s charmed the girl down there somehow, I don’t know how, he never smiles.

"And he’s to drink 2 litres a day. I’ve written it on a sheet in big letters and stuck it in his coat pocket. He’ll lose it. Somebody’s to make him drink. Will that be you? You’re down as the next of kin. Neighbour, it says. That’s nice. My neighbour wouldn’t bring me a cup of water if I was on fire."

"I’ll come for him now," Danny said. "I’m in Battersea. I’ll be there by half 3 in a cab. Tell him to sit down till I get there."

Bernadette laughed down the phone. "I’ll pass it on. He’ll stand there in his hat anyway."

Pemberton was sitting on the edge of the bed in his good coat and grey hat with the carrier bag of tablets on his knee, like a man waiting for a train. He stood up when Danny came onto the ward, and swayed, and sat down again without any fuss, and stood up a second time more slowly.

In the black cab going back over the river he sat upright with both hands on the head of a borrowed walking stick and watched London go past. Jodie sat facing him on the fold-down seat with her knees together and the sheet that said 2 LITRES in her lap.

Danny told him about the woman on the walkway. All of it, in the order his mother had said it, down to the 3 neat knocks and the half time.

Pemberton didn’t speak till they were over Lambeth Bridge.

"The card came under my door that Sunday night," he said. "I found it at 10 past 11, when I went to put the chain on." He turned his head. "So she was at your mother’s door in Battersea at 4 o’clock, and something of hers was at my door before 11. I never saw who brought it. I always took it for a driver."

"How long’s she been in that hall? You’ve been going since 1958. She can’t have been there since then."

"She has been there every time I have gone since the 1990s. Before her it was a man." He looked out of the window. "When she first came she looked about 50, Mr Flynn. She looks about 50 now. I told myself for years I had remembered it wrong."

Jodie’s knees came apart an inch and closed again. "Danny’s mum said she was staff," she said. "In a uniform. Doing a job at the door."

"Then she has been on duty for 30 years," said Pemberton.

The cab stopped at the lights on Millbank. The driver had the radio on low, a phone-in about Chelsea’s back four.

"There is one more thing." Pemberton reached inside his coat. "I want you to take this."

It was his fountain pen. Black, old, with a gold band worn thin at the top where a thumb had sat on it for decades. He held it out across the cab.

"Priya says I’m to sign nothing, anywhere, till she’s read it," Danny said. "Not a word."

"Mrs Anand is right. I am not giving it you to sign." The old man kept holding it out. "You told me there was a pen on the table in that hall last Monday, uncapped, waiting for you. Their pen. On Thursday I watched her set out another."

The lights changed and the cab moved.

"If you are asked to write anything on Monday, even the time you arrived, write it with something that is yours and not theirs. This pen has not touched their paper in 70 years. I wrote Mr Deniz’s envelope with it, and my note to you on Thursday. I filled it from the bottle at home on Wednesday night, so it will last you."

Danny took it. It was warm from the inside of the coat.

"I’ll give it you back on Thursday," he said. "At the funeral. After."

"Mm," said Pemberton, and he put both hands back on the stick.

Kieran was on the desk at the Sterling. The woman still had Pemberton’s key, so Danny had Kieran take the building’s master up to 17 and walk through every room first, wardrobe doors open, before the old man went in.

"Nobody, Mr Flynn," Kieran said, coming out. "Crossword’s back. It’s on the chair. Was it gone?"

"It was gone on Thursday night," Danny said. "Kieran, I want a locksmith on that door at 8 tomorrow. A new barrel and 2 keys, both handed to Mr Pemberton himself. Can you ring Naomi tonight and get it signed off?"

"I can try. It’s Sunday."

"Ring her anyway. Tell her it’s me asking. Tell her the police have the lift camera from Thursday."

Pemberton stood in his own hall with his hat in his hand and looked at the crossword on the chair. It had been filled in, every clue, in neat blue capitals that weren’t his.

"Don’t touch it," Danny said. "Nobody touch it."

He photographed it where it lay, then rang the number PC Hale had rung him from on Friday night and got his voicemail, and said who he was and that Mr Pemberton was home and somebody had been in his flat with his key and finished his crossword. Kieran wrote it in the desk book.

Pemberton didn’t touch it. He went past it into the kitchen, and ran the cold tap, and filled a glass, and drank all of it standing at the sink with his back to them. Then he filled it again.

"2 litres," he said to the window. "Miss Carter, you may tell the nurse from Cork I have begun."