Chapter 6 The Tone at Seven-Eight

She worked the record on the kitchen table for nine hours, with the laptop's fan at a steady pitch and the kettle off the stove and the heater off and the window open a finger's width to let the room hold its temperature. She did the mathematics. A tone at seventy-eight hertz, one point four seconds, steady, with a harmonic at one hundred and fifty-six, a ratio of two to one, exactly. The ratio was the ratio of a struck metal body, not the ratio of an electrical fault. An electrical fault would have given her a line at the mains frequency, and harmonics at twice and three and four times that. She had a line at seventy-eight, and a line at one hundred and fifty-six, and nothing else. That was a struck body. That was a bell, or something like a bell. She did the second mathematics. The interval was one minute and twelve seconds, plus or minus a second. She had nine hundred and sixty observations of the interval in her file, and the variance was under two per cent, which is better than the clock of the recorder, and the clock of the recorder was a quarz oscillator rated to five parts in a million. She printed the spectrum and the interval plot and the amplitude trace and pinned them to the wall above the table, in the order she had made them, and she looked at them, and she understood. The interval was not fixed. The interval was fixed to a cycle. She had six complete cycles in her file, and she plotted them against the tide, and the tide was running a spring tide, and the cycle of the tone was the cycle of the tide. The tone came loudest at slack water, and quietest at flood and ebb streams, and it was strongest at the lowest point of the tide curve, and it was at its weakest at the highest. That was not how a buoy bell worked. A buoy bell struck on a fixed interval. This struck on the interval of the water. She sat back in the chair and looked at the wall. Seventy-eight hertz. One point four seconds. One minute and twelve seconds between. Loudest at slack. Quietest at stream. Steady for six days, since the fourteenth. No drift in pitch. No drift in interval. No drift in amplitude. A mechanical device would drift. A mechanical device has moving parts. Moving parts wear. Worn parts change their pitch. This had not changed its pitch by a single hertz in six days. She got up and went to the hall and looked at the bell on the wall, under its dust sheet, and lifted the sheet, and looked at the bell, and put the sheet back, and went back to the kitchen table. The bell on the wall was brass, and it was twelve inches across, and it had a crack running down its side, and it had a striker that was gone, and it had a rope that was gone, and it had a ring that was worn half through. She took the bell off the wall. She set it on the table. She did not ring it. She pulled the laptop across and opened the record, and played the file at half speed, and listened, and the tone came in at seventy-eight hertz, and the second tone at one hundred and fifty-six, and the interval held, and the amplitude held, and she closed her eyes and listened. It was a bell. Not a buoy bell. A bell. A struck bell, at a distance, under water, at a pitch that was the pitch of a struck bronze body of about the size of the bell on her table. She opened her eyes and looked at the bell on the table and looked at the screen and looked at the bell again. She called Deveril. Deveril answered on the second ring, in the flat voice of a woman who was not surprised. "You rang the thing," Deveril said. "I didn't ring anything." "You took it down. I can hear it." "Where are you?" "I'm in the kitchen." "You're in your kitchen. You can hear my kitchen from your kitchen." "Deveril." "Put it back on the wall." "Deveril, where are you." "I'm here. I'm in my kitchen. I'm making tea. Put the bell back on the wall." "I'm not putting it back on the wall." "Then you'll leave it there and I'll come and put it back." "I'll meet you in the yard." She went out. The yard was empty. The cottage next door had a light in it, and a kettle in it, and a woman in it, and no sound of either of them came through the wall. She went back in and sat at the table and looked at the bell and looked at the screen. She called Lowri. "Did you ever play that cassette?" Lowri asked, before Tamar had spoken. "I haven't played it." "Good. Don't. Here's what I want you to do. Look at the record you have. Find the first tone in the file. Look at the time stamp. Then find the second. And the third. And plot them against the tide. That's what you'll want to do, anyway." "I did." "When?" "An hour ago." "Good. You did it before you called me. That's how I knew. Now tell me what you got." "The tone comes loudest at slack water. Quietest at stream." "Tell me the interval." "One minute and twelve seconds." "Tell me the amplitude." "Sixty-one decibels, peak, in the water." "Tell me what you did with it." "I called Deveril." There was a long pause. "You took the bell off the wall." "I took it off the wall." "Put it back." "I'll put it back when I've told you what I need to tell you." "Tell me." "The bell is ringing in the water. Not the buoy. The bell. And the bell is the same pitch as the one on the wall, and the wall's been bricked up since eighty-four, and the bell's been there since, and it's been there, and it's still there." "Where is it?" "I don't know." "Can you triangulate it?" "I have one element. I need two." "You need two. You said Friday. Ruan said Friday. Go out Friday." "I can't. Ellerby won't sign off the weather." "Then you find another way to get a second element in the water. There's a second element in a drawer in this room. It's the one I used for the soundings in ninety-one. It's not calibrated. It'll give you enough." "I'll come for it." "Come for it tomorrow. And Tamar." "What." "Do not play the cassette. I'm asking you, because I don't want it played, and I don't want it played in this room, and I don't want it played in any room that has a screen in it. I've been here nine years, and I've never played it, and I don't know what it's for, and I don't want to be the one who finds out." ---