Chapter 27 The Fisherman

The train to Norfolk took four hours, and the last hour of it ran beside the sea, flat grey water sliding past the window as if the land were slowly giving up on itself. Margaret sat by the glass with the message folded in her pocket and the shape of a name, Helmut Voss, turning over in her mind, and she watched the coast until the houses thinned and the fields gave way to marsh and the marsh gave way to the long, low line of Wrackmore. Wrackmore was the kind of village the war had passed through and forgotten to leave. A single street of flint cottages, a church with a tower that leaned a little, a harbour of weed-grown walls where three or four boats lay at anchor, their nets hung up to dry and their paint peeling. The water was the colour of old lead. The air smelled of salt and mud and woodsmoke. She found Arthur Crane where the postmistress said she would find him, on a bench at the end of the harbour wall, mending a net with the slow, patient hands of a man who had done it every day of his life. He was a big man gone to bone, with a face like a sea cliff and eyes that had been looking at the horizon for seventy years. He looked at Margaret for a long time before he spoke. You will be the one from London, he said. The one who caught my girl. Margaret sat down on the wall beside him. I did not catch her, she said. I stopped her. There is a difference. Is there. The old man did not look at her. He kept mending the net, his fingers moving through the knots with a rhythm as old as the village. They came from the police in the morning, he said. Told me what she had done. Told me who she was. I told them they had the wrong girl, and I told them twice, and then I stopped telling them, because it did not matter what I said. The whole village knows now. They will not meet my eye, and I do not blame them. I am not here about the police, Margaret said. I am here about the man who taught her. For the first time the old man's hands stopped. He looked at her then, and his eyes were hard and bright and full of something that might have been fear. Who told you about him? No one, Margaret said. That is the problem. No one ever told anyone about him. She did her work for five years and left no trace of herself in any record, because she had been taught to be invisible. Teachers leave marks, Mr. Crane. I have spent my life learning to read marks. I came to find out who put them on your daughter. Arthur Crane was silent for a long time. The wind came in off the sea, cold and clean, and the nets rattled softly on their frames. Then he set the net down on the wall and folded his hands, and he told her about the man called Olafsen. He came before the war, Arthur said. Nineteen thirty-eight, in the spring. A Norwegian coaster captain, he said, running cargo between the Baltic ports and the east coast. He had a boat, small and fast, and he needed a berth, and he paid well, and the times were hard. I let him moor at the end of the quay. He was a quiet man. Spoke good English with a strange way of shaping his words. And he took a liking to Edith. She was sixteen, Margaret said. She was fourteen, Arthur said quietly. She was clever, my girl, cleverer than the school could ever teach her, and he saw it. He said he would teach her figures and navigation, that a girl with her head should have a trade. I did not think much of it. He was a decent man, or he seemed to be. He taught her three evenings a week, in the boathouse by the quay, and she came out of those evenings with her head full of numbers and her eyes full of something I did not like and did not know how to name. What did he teach her, Margaret asked. Truly. Not figures. What did he teach her? The old man looked out at the sea, and his voice was very low. He taught her to hide things in plain sight, he said. I know that now. I did not know it then. He would set her a page of numbers and tell her to find the one that did not belong, and she would sit over it for an hour, and then she would point at it, and he would laugh and say good girl, good girl. And there were the marks. Little marks she would make in the margins of her schoolbooks. I thought they were doodles. He would go over them with her, patient as the tide. They stopped in September of 1939, the week the war came. Olafsen came to the house the day before he left, with a bottle of whisky and a folded paper for Edith. He shook my hand and he said he was sorry, that he was a Norwegian and Norway was his home and he had to go back to it. He sailed out of the harbour at dawn and he never came back. And Edith, Edith never spoke his name again. She burned the paper he had left her on the kitchen fire the same morning, in front of me, and she said, that is the end of him. And I believed her, because I wanted to believe her. Margaret sat very still. Fourteen years old, she thought. A child. And a man who had come to the coast of England in 1938, before the war, to find a clever child and teach her to hide things in plain sight. The German naval intelligence service had not recruited Edith Crane at Bletchley. They had been growing her, slowly, for years, like a crop. The boathouse, she said. You said he taught her in the boathouse by the quay. Is it still standing? It is, Arthur said. I have not set foot in it since the war. Edith kept the key. Margaret stood up. I need to see it. The boathouse was a low stone building at the end of the quay, its roof half gone and its door held shut by a rusted latch that gave way to a push. Inside it smelled of salt and dry rot and the particular cold of a place the sun never reaches. There was an old workbench under the single window, and a shelf of jars, and a loose plank in the floor that Margaret would have noticed at once, because she had spent her life noticing loose planks. Under the plank was a tin box, wrapped in oilcloth, and inside the box was the past that Edith Crane had tried to burn on her kitchen fire and could not. A stack of schoolbooks, filled with rows of figures in a child's hand, each row hiding the one that did not belong. A schedule of sailings from the winter of 1938, with a column of dates and the letter S marked against the first Saturday of each month. And at the bottom, face down, a photograph with the corner torn away, the missing half showing nothing but a man's shoulder and the edge of a face turned away from the camera. On the back, in a hand Margaret knew from the key logs at Eastcote, were two words. The teacher. Margaret put the photograph in her coat pocket and closed the box and slid the plank back into place. She left the boathouse without looking back, and she walked up the harbour wall toward the church, past the boats and the nets and the men who did not quite meet her eye. And it was not until the train was pulling out of the station at Wrackmore, an hour later, that she put her hand in her coat pocket and found, folded small and slipped in beside the photograph, a note that had not been there when she arrived. Ask the old man what he carried, the note read. Ask him what he carried, and who paid for the mending of the nets. Margaret read it twice, and then she read it a third time, and she felt the cold settle into her that had nothing to do with the Norfolk wind. Someone in the village had watched her go to the boathouse. Someone had known exactly what she would find there. And someone wanted her to know that the Fisherman's line was not a thing of the past at all. It was still here, still watching, still writing keys by a different hand. And it had been waiting for her all along. ---