Chapter 10 The Girl Two Doors Down

The guest book was exactly as described: hardback, green ink, a leather spine gone pale at the corners, and eleven entries since 2019 written in the same upright tidy hand. Jorunn Beaulieu was a small woman of fifty-eight with forearms like a fishwife and an accent from the west of Ireland that thirty-one years in Selkie Cove had worn down to a workable hum. She made four cups of tea before anybody had asked, and she put them down without looking at anybody, and then she stood with her arms folded while two seventeen-year-olds and a sixteen-year-old read her book over her shoulder. "Hester," she said, when Tove got to the line. "Twelve euro the night, breakfast extra. She paid three months in cash in April, which nobody does, and she has been in that room since the eleventh of April, and she has paid to the end of October, and I have never once asked her a single question about herself, which I would like you to understand has taken more out of me than you would believe." "You knew." "I knew she was not here for the sea." Jorunn picked up her own cup. "There is one other guest. He is the one in hospital. And there is a girl in room three who has the key of a stranger's flat and a letter she will not put down, and she does not watch the boats, and she does not go to the shop, and she goes out at six every morning with a torch." "To the strand," Tove said. "To the strand." Room three was at the top of the harbour office, at the end of a corridor with three doors and a bathroom with the door off its hinges. Hester Kowal opened hers before Tove had knocked twice, which meant she had been listening. She was small for sixteen and had her mother's face, Tove thought, and then realised she had never seen her mother, and how on earth she knew that, and let it go. She had a coat on over pyjamas and a paperback face down on the bed and an envelope in her hand. "You're the girl with the note," she said. "I am." "Sit down. Both of you. If you're going to do this in my room then sit down, because I have been sitting in this room for one hundred and seventy-one days waiting for somebody to knock on this door, and I have a whole lot of it stored up and I would like to do it in order." They sat. She got up, turned the paperback over, and put it on the shelf, and said, "Ask me the hard one." "You came back in April because a letter told you to." "No, I came back in April because a letter told me to, and I have not told a living soul that a letter told me to, and there is a woman in this town who has been quietly arranging for me not to be told anything." Hester sat down on the end of the bed. "March the nineteenth. No postmark town, just Norhaven. Four lines. It said: come to Selkie Cove and do not tell your aunt why. It said: your father is one of four men on a page you have never seen, and the man who sent you this is not that man, and the man who signed it is not the man who will be caught. And it gave an address in this town, and it was a room over a shop." "The bait shop," Piet said. "Yes." "What's the name on the door?" "None. It's a bait shop. It has been a bait shop for forty years and it has a flat above it and a man comes down the outside stair at seven in the morning and he never looks at anybody and I have watched him from this window for five months and he is the only person in this town who has ever looked at the sea the way I look at the sea." She turned to Tove. "And then on the ninth of April, when I got here, somebody put a sheet of foolscap through the school newspaper window with a photocopy on the front and a note on the back, and the note said three was a room, and I have been waiting for three since April." "The brick in the window," Tove said. "You threw the brick." "I broke the window. I did not throw the brick, a man called Hallberg's caretaker brought the brick in from the car park in a carrier bag like a shopping item." Hester's mouth moved very slightly. "And the foolscap was mine. I copied the minute at the library microfiche and I wrote the back in a hand I practised in a notebook for a week, and I said it was not me who broke the glass, and the person who wrote it did not sign it, so I cannot tell whether I have been a coward for five months or whether two people have been talking to each other and one of them is me." "You have been a coward," Piet said. "Brilliant, thanks." "You have also been sitting eleven feet from my wall since April," he said, "so let us get to the part where I say the thing and you do not like it." He put his hands on his knees. "My name is Piet Beaulieu. My father is Yannick Beaulieu, and he is sixty-one, and he skippers the Kestrel, and he is the third name on that page, the owner of the Arawak, 1996." He looked at her steadily. "I have known since the photograph. I looked at the four signatures in a reading room in September and I read the third one and I read it again and it was a hand I have watched sign for a trawler's diesel book every Christmas for fifteen years. I did not tell you because I came here to be a person who had nothing to do with any of it, and then I wrote down five digits at a time for a week and I became part of it, and I have been carrying it around since Wednesday." Hester did not move. It was the single most controlled thing Tove had ever seen a sixteen-year-old do. "So the man who sent the letter," Hester said. "Is not my father, because my father has never once used a telephone." "It might be him. People who say they never use a telephone use a telephone." She stood up and went to the window and looked out at the harbour, and the harbour did what it always did. "You said the man who signed it is not the man who will be caught." "Silas Teal wrote those notes," Piet said. "He taught thirty-one children in a school in Norhaven for nine years and he can put a hand on a page and make it look like somebody else, and he is a physicist, and he has spent thirty years being told by an entire town that he is somebody else. I would know that hand anywhere. I have been looking at it since September." Tove had not thought of that. She thought of it now, and it made the whole thing tilt. "How do you know?" "Because the first note in the tide pool, in September, the day she found it, had a smudge on the third line where somebody's thumb went across it." Piet shrugged. "You get a thumb-print when you are holding a pencil you have not held in thirty years, and you get it on the third line because the third line is where the sentence actually starts. He is a left-hander who has spent his life pressing hard, and he pressed hard on the first word and then got frightened and went light for the rest of it." Hester turned round. "Ask one more thing," she said. "The old woman who was in the room when you opened the box. Berta Vinter. Ask her what came out of the shelf in 2010." Tove's hands went cold on her knees. "The shelf," she said. "There is one page missing out of every register in that basement," Hester said. "One, and it is not a loose leaf, and it did not fall out. Somebody unscrewed the back board of a volume in 2010 and took the page and put the volume back, and I have been in that basement twice in five months with a torch in my teeth, and I know exactly which board, and it is in the bay that has the shelf taken out and the wall painted over." ---