第13章 The Man Above the Bait Shop

The bait shop was on the north side of the harbour, four doors along from the chandlery, and it had a window with three crab pots in it and a counter with a brass scale on it and no name on the door anywhere, inside or out, which had always struck Tove as a strange thing for a shop that had been in business for forty years. The outside stair went up the side of the building on iron treads with a rope handrail and a landing at the top, and it had been painted four times and had never once been repaired. "He comes down at seven," Hester said. "Some mornings. He never looks at anybody and he never goes into the shop, and the shop is shut on the days I have seen him, which I have worked out means he is the one who shuts it." "He is not coming down today." "He came down at ten past seven and he is sitting on the wall." She had her coat on over pyjamas again, because she had not gone to bed and had not intended to. "He knows I have been watching. He waved, in September. He waved at me through my own window like a man waving at a bus." The man on the wall was eighty if he was a day and had a tartan blanket over his shoulders against a sun that had given up by ten, and he stood up when the three of them came down the shingle, which cost him something, and he took the blanket off and folded it and gave it back to his own hands. "Elmer Doak," Tove said. "You have been quick." His voice was thin and dry and had a pause in the middle of it that came and went like a light with a bad contact. "I had a week or two put by for the rest of you. Sit. No, do not sit, you have all got somewhere to be, that is the whole difficulty with young people." "You sent the letter to Hester," Piet said. "I sent the letter." "You wrote the thing at the school window. Or you gave it to somebody." "I wrote the thing at the school window, and I broke a cup in a kitchen in February and could not get near the school at night, and I want that on your tape because a girl of sixteen broke that window and I have not once said so out loud to her, and it is eating me, and I am going to say it now." He looked at Hester. "You broke that window." "Yes," Hester said. "Good. I have been sitting on it for five months." He walked slowly, and Tove and Piet went with him because he was clearly going to fall over if he did not, and the outside stair took five minutes, and the flat above the shop was two rooms and a kitchen and smelled of pipe smoke and wool. There was a telescope on a wooden tripod by the window. It was brass, it had a wooden tripod with three legs of unequal length, and it had been lashed to the middle leg with a strip of leather. It was pointed out of the window, and out of the window, two hundred metres away and four hundred and forty degrees around the bay, was the split rock at the far end of the strand. "It was in the lifeboat station until 2011," Doak said. "They sold what they did not need. I paid ninety euros for it and I have not been in a boat since 1988." There was a thermos on the sill and a school exercise book open on the table with a tide table copied into it in a small neat hand, and every tenth entry had a ring round it. "You have been checking the spring tides," Piet said. "Every one since March. The note goes in at the highest of the month or it does not go in at all, and the highest of the month is a spring tide, and the spring tide comes over that crack like a hand closing." He put his hand flat on the table. "I am the one who puts the note on the shelf. I have been putting notes in that pool since November of last year. Six of them before you had yours, girl, and I have told that man with the broom every one of them and he has told no soul, which is why he has been sweeping that apron with a secret under his broom since November." "So you wrote them." "I wrote them. And I wrote your pencil circles and your foolscap and your letter to the girl, and I have written to the man in Norhaven twice a month for nine years without ever once putting a stamp on it, because I did not want a postmark on a thing with his name near it." He looked up. "And the notes you have been reading in the car park are not mine." Piet put his hands in his pockets, which Tove had seen him do exactly twice before, both times when he was thinking harder than he was talking. "Then who—" "A man who has never set foot in this town in his life and who sends you to the right register every single time." Doak let himself down into a chair by the wall. "I write in a hand I practise. You can see that in the foolscap, everyone can see that, the girl here copied it well enough to fool a school newspaper. But I could not in eleven years put my finger on a register and tell you bay nine from bay twelve, because I have not opened a volume since 1997 and my eyes are going. He knows which bay because he has been told which bay. He knows which list because somebody with a list has read it to him over a telephone." "Silas Teal," Tove said. "Silas Teal," said Elmer Doak, "wrote every one of the notes you have read, and I have never met him, and I have wanted to since the second one, because a man who can write in that hand and choose those pages knows something about a page that nobody has taught him." The room went quiet in the way that rooms do when the tide is under the window. "Mr. Doak," Tove said. "In 1996 there were four signatures on a leaf in a box under the library floor, and a man with a broom has told me there are four men on it, and he has said one of them is you, and he would not say it in the room." "I am the fourth." Doak turned his right hand over and looked at the palm of it the way you look at a receipt. "Harbourmaster's clerk in 1994. Trustee of the fund in 1995. In 1996 there were four names on the draw-down page and mine was the last of them, and in August of that year my hands had gone far enough that I could hold a pen but not steer it, and I could not sign my own name and I was going to be asked to sign it in front of an auditor in the spring." He put the hand down on his knee. "So I asked a man to write it," he said. "And he did, and I have never once regretted asking him, and I have had thirty years to regret it in other ways." "Who?" "He was thirty-one. He came down to the cove for four days in the spring of 1990 and he did not go out on the water once, and in 1996 he came in for gear and sat in the harbour office on a Tuesday afternoon with the door shut, and I asked him, and he wrote." Doak looked up at Tove, and his eyes were very clear. "He wrote it exactly the way I have signed it for forty years, the loops and the little back-turn on the g, and he did it in about nine seconds, and then he put the pen down and would not take a drink of tea, and I have thought about that refusal every year since." Piet had gone the colour of the wall behind him. Tove watched him do it and did not understand it for another four seconds, and then she understood all of it at once, in the middle of a room over a bait shop, with a telescope pointed at a rock. "Your father," she said. "My father," Piet said, "has never once used a telephone, and he has never once in his life refused a cup of tea in front of me." The flat was very quiet. Out of the window the sea came up over the shelf in the split rock and lay there for a moment, the way it did at the top of every spring tide, and then went back down. "The fund," Tove said. "The hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Where did it go?" Doak looked at her for a while. "Some of it built a landing stage and a bus shelter," he said. "And some of it went out of this harbour in cash in 1994 and 1995 and 1996 in a box, in a different box, and I carried it four times to a bank in Norhaven and I have never been able to tell you whose box it was, because I did not open the second one. I put it down in the passage of a building in Bridge Street and it was gone before I was to the end of the street, and I have carried that for thirty-two years and there is nobody alive in this town who can take it off me." ---