Chapter 189: A New One II

At 4 o’clock Pemberton opened the door of 17 with the new key still on its paper tag on a loop of string round his wrist. He was in his cardigan, with a glass of water in his other hand.

"I have drunk 6 of these," he said. "The nurse from Cork rang me to make sure. I do not know how she got my number."

"From me," Danny said. "She asked for a landline for you on Sunday, for the next of kin form, and I gave her it. She’s the kind that rings."

The crossword had gone from the chair in the hall. Pemberton saw him look.

"I put it in the bin," he said. "I did not want another man’s answers in my flat."

"Hale wanted that. I told him about it on Sunday."

"Then PC Hale may have it out of the bin. It is under this morning’s tea leaves, in a carrier bag, and I have not touched it with my hands." He stood back. "Come in, both of you. Sit. Miss Carter, you have been crying in the cold. Sit by the fire."

Danny told him in the order it had happened: Ida Marsh and her 61 years, and the words she’d used when she asked, and then the 1 record and its deadline. He didn’t tell him what Jodie had asked on the ramp. Not yet.

Pemberton sat in his armchair with his glass on his knee and didn’t interrupt once. When Danny stopped, he put the glass down on the little table beside him.

"Mrs Marsh," he said. "A small woman. Red lipstick, always a little over the line. She came to my mother twice, in 1971 and in 1974, when my mother was dying by inches in a flat in Maida Vale. She sat with her through 2 nights. I made her tea. I never asked her name."

"She remembered your tea," Jodie said. "She said a pot."

"Mm." The old man looked at the gas fire. "Close Miss Carter’s, Mr Flynn. There is nothing to think about. She is 28. I am 90. She has 60 years of that house ahead of her and I have perhaps 4."

"Tell him the rest," Jodie said to Danny. "Or I will."

So Danny told him about the secretary at the railings. If the host shows Miss Carter the work after it is closed, the house will begin a new one. And that it didn’t listen at tables, only looked.

Pemberton sat very upright. Then he took his glasses off and held them in his lap.

"Then it is not a gift to her," he said. "It is a door shut on her, with you on the other side of it." He turned to Jodie. "Miss Carter. You have told him to choose me."

"On the 55. In front of a woman with a pram."

"Then I will tell you both a thing I had not meant to tell anybody." He folded the glasses. "A man whose record is closed is not asked for. He also cannot ask. Not ever again, for himself or for anybody else.

"I have asked the house a handful of times in my life for things I could not do myself. The last was on Thursday, in that hall, to close my record, and I was told no. The one before was after the pool, that you should not be harmed by Mrs Anand’s letter. If my record is closed, Mr Flynn, I can never ask on your behalf again. Whatever comes."

Nobody said anything. The gas fire ticked.

"So you’d lose that," Danny said. "To lie next to Robin."

"Yes."

"And you still want it, knowing that."

"I have wanted it since Robin’s diagnosis. I want it less this week than I did last week. That is the truth." He put his glasses back on. "It was given to you, Mr Flynn. Not to me, and not to Miss Carter. Mrs Marsh did not ask either of us. Do not ask us to make it easier for you."

Before they left, Danny rang the funeral directors from the window of 17 with the river going brown below it, and told the woman on the phone that the car for Thursday was to come to the Sterling Riverwalk at 10, and that Mr Pemberton would be in the lobby in his good coat at 5 to.

"And yourself, Mr Flynn?"

"I’ll be stood next to him in my suit."

Flat 40 was still his for 3 more weeks. The fridge was empty and the terrace door was locked. They ate chips out of the paper at the kitchen island at 8 o’clock, and Jodie looked out at the lit-up river and said she’d lived in the shadow of this building for weeks and not set foot in that pool.

Danny rang down to the desk.

"Osei. What time’s the pool shut?"

"10, Mr Flynn. Attendant goes at 8. It’s dead in there of a Monday night, nobody uses it. Mr Pemberton does his in the morning and Miss Doyle does hers at 7."

"Is there a camera in there?"

"On the door from the lifts. Not in the pool hall. They took it out years ago, the residents complained." A pause. "Is everything all right?"

"Everything’s fine. I’m taking my girlfriend for a swim."

Jodie had nothing to swim in. She came out of the bathroom at 40 in a pair of black knickers and nothing else, with one of the building’s big white towels round her shoulders like a cape, and stood in the hall barefoot.

"Lift’s got a camera," she said.

"Then keep the towel on in the lift."

The pool hall on the 3rd floor was dim and blue and warm as a bath, with the underwater lights on and the rest of the room dark, and the big windows full of black river and the orange lights of Vauxhall across it. The water was dead flat. The filter hummed.

She dropped the towel on a lounger and walked down the steps into the shallow end without stopping, and the water came up her thighs and over the black knickers, and she gasped at the first touch of it on her nipples and laughed out loud, and the laugh went round the tiles and came back.

Danny was in after her in his boxers.

I caught her round the waist in the middle of the shallow end, where the water was up to her ribs, and she turned in my arms and kissed me with her wet mouth, and her tits pressed against my chest, slippery and warm, with the nipples hard on my skin.

"Somebody’ll come in," she said against my mouth.

"The attendant went home at 8. It’s ours till 10."

"The man on the desk’s never seen me in a pool."