Chapter 11 The Bay Behind the Paint

Hester wrote it on the back of a tide order in pencil, because she wanted to see her own handwriting saying it, and then she read the line out twice. One page out of every register in the basement of the town hall. Taken in 2010 by a person who unscrewed a back board. Bay twelve, the one with the shelf taken out and the wall painted over. Then she put the pencil down and said, "I have been down there twice with a torch in my teeth and I have not told one living soul, and the reason I have not told anyone is that I did not want to be the girl who was wrong about a wall." "You are not going to be wrong about a wall," Tove said. "You have been right about a shelf, a window, a girl and a year. Put it on the rota." The rota was still pinned inside the library door, written out by Iona Pratt on the back of a reservation card, and there were five names on it, and number six had been sitting there under a bracket since September with nothing after the bracket. "Mrs. Pratt, that is unfair." "It is a rota." She took the card down, wrote *Six: B. Vinter* under the last line in her upright tidy hand, and pinned it back up. "She has sat in this building since 1972 and not one person in this town has asked her a question in fifty years. I am going to ask her one question in front of five witnesses before any of you print anything else. That is the arrangement and I am not discussing it." They went down at seven in the morning because Ole Ostrand was in at seven and would not be there at eight. He had brought his own scraper down in a carrier bag, a flat blade with a wooden handle worn pale in the middle, and he worked without talking, and the paint came away in flakes the size of roofing slate and dropped onto a sheet of newspaper spread on the floor of the aisle. Underneath, at about the height of Tove's shoulder, there was a rectangle of lime plaster a different colour from the paint around it, and inside the rectangle there was a second rectangle, darker, the size of a sheet of foolscap, and Tove understood it the way you understand a thing that has been in front of you for a month. A shelf had been there. Then it had not. "Ten minutes," Ostrand said. "And I am going to stand at the door while you do it, and if anybody asks me afterwards, then I painted this wall in 2010 because it needed painting. That is the whole truth and it is also a lie, and I have been standing on top of it for sixteen years." "Do you want to tell us—" "I have been telling this town things in that room since 1972." He did not turn round. "I have never once told it something it did not want. Ask the question you brought." The plaster came off in a sheet the length of a shovel blade, and behind it the brickwork of the outside wall had a hole in it, a long low rectangle of the height of a dictionary and six feet along, and two steel brackets were still screwed into the brick at each end, painted the same colour as everything else, with the screws in them painted over too, which meant whoever painted had not been in a hurry and had not been able to bring themselves to paint round a hole they had been asked to fill. Piet put his arm in to the elbow and felt along the bottom of the void and came back with an armful of dust and a scraping noise. "Brick," he said. "And board. And there is something flat on top of it." It took them twenty minutes and a folding stepladder and a certain amount of language that Mrs. Ostler from the Co-op would not have approved of, and what came out of the hole at the end was the shelf board itself, oak, three inches thick, painted on its top face in the same municipal grey, and laid on top of it, squared up like a set of plates in a dishwasher, was a stack of cut leaves of paper. Twenty-nine of them. Piet counted them twice and wrote the number on his hand in biro, which Tove made him scrub off with his own thumb because if a thing is going to be evidence then it does not go on a skin first. "They are all the same," he said. "Same printed line at the top, same size, same cut. Somebody did twenty-nine of these in one sitting with a blade and a straight edge, which means somebody with a very steady day and no hurry at all." Each leaf carried a single printed line across the head of the page in the same typewriter face as the volumes themselves. *Pages removed from this volume under authority of the council.* Under that line there was a space, ruled off in pencil on every single leaf, and on twenty-seven of them the space was empty. Tove took the 1996 leaf out of the middle of the stack and carried it to the window that looked up the slope toward the church, because that was where the light was, and she read it the way Iona Pratt reads a book she has read before and does not enjoy. *Two, both along the line of an entry. By order of E.D. By hand of B.V.* Hester reached past her and put one finger a millimetre above the two letters at the end without touching the paper, the way a person touches a name on a stone. "B," she said. "Yes." "V." "Yes." The cat came along the aisle at exactly the wrong moment, because the cat always did, and Minutes went past them with her collar going and did not look at anybody, and somewhere above them Ole Ostrand said, to the door and not to them, "Well." "You knew," Tove said. "I knew there was a hole." He still had not turned round. "A man brought me tea on a Sunday in 2010, in a thermos, the good tea, and he stood where you are standing and he told me there was a hole in bay twelve that wanted filling, and he stayed while I filled it, and he was extremely polite, and he never once gave me his name, and I have been extremely grateful for that for sixteen years and I have never once been able to say why." "Was it a big man?" "An old one. Smaller than he sounded." Ostrand put his cap on. "Tove. I have kept a town in a basement for forty years and I have never taken anything out of this room that I did not write on my own sheet first. You are about to take something out of this room that four people in this town know about and one of them is your grandmother. I am going to ask you the only question I have ever asked anybody in this room, which is: what are you going to do when you find out?" "I don't know yet." "Right answer." He went up the stairs with his hands in his pockets, and the bulb in its socket swung for a while afterwards. They photographed every leaf, face and back, with a ruler in the frame and Piet's hand holding a scrap of card with the date on it, because he had read one book about how you prove a thing and had taken notes. Then they put them back the way they had found them, squared, and the shelf board back into the hole, and the shelf back into the brackets, and the plaster back into the bay, and then they left the paint alone, because a scraped wall in a town hall at eight in the morning is a thing that gets a telephone call, and this town made telephone calls about a paper cut in April. The back of the 1996 leaf was blank except for two lines in pencil, in the small careful hand that had numbered the pages of the 1996 register, cut a date into the library jamb, and written on a foolscap sheet pushed through a broken window. *Ask the man who painted me what I cost him.* *Ask the woman who typed me what she was asked for.* Hester read it twice and then said, "Your grandmother." "My grandmother," Tove agreed. "You told me on the telephone in September that she said burn it, and I thought that was all she had." "That was all she had on the telephone." Tove folded the air with her hands, which was a thing she did and which Piet had learned to ignore. "She has never once told me a small true thing in my life. She has only ever told me the shape of the big one, so that I would go looking for it in the wrong room." Down on the apron, in the wind off the harbour, the day turned up its collar and went to school. The bell went nine times and the school started without them. At twenty past nine, Tove's phone rang in her coat pocket and she took it out and it was Piet, and he said one sentence. "The fifth one is in the crack. I have got it. It has got your grandmother's address on it." --- ---