第6章 The Box With the Rust

Ole Ostrand read the torn leaf standing up, in the reading room, with the lamp on and the harbour going grey outside the window. He got to the fourth signature and had to sit down on the floor with his back against a shelf. "Who is it?" Tove said. "Who are the four?" He turned the leaf so she could see. The signatures were neat and old-fashioned, in black ink that had gone brown at the edges. "Harbourmaster's clerk, 1994. Trustee of the harbour fund, 1995. Owner of the Arawak, 1996. And the last one—" his finger stopped. "Co-signatory, 1996, in the same hand, though it is not his own signature. Somebody else wrote it for him, because his hand was going." "You know the fourth man." "I have known the fourth man since I was thirty-one years old and he came into this library every Friday for a year and never once borrowed a book." Ostrand turned the leaf face down on the table, which was the most deliberate thing Tove had ever seen a person do. "I am not going to say his name in this room. I am sorry. You will understand by Friday." "It is Elmer Doak," Tove said. The old man did not answer, and that was answer enough, and outside the window a gull came off the church spire and made a noise like tearing paper. "The instruction is not to open anything until he is in the room," Piet said. "So we do not open anything. We tell him there is a note for him and we let him decide what to do with it." "And if he burns it?" "Then it is burnt, and we have three photographs, and I have two sentences on a piece of paper and a line of pencil." Tove put the leaf back exactly where she had found it, squared to the edge of the table. "Nothing leaves this building. Not the letter, not the page, not a photograph of a face. If we start carrying evidence around inside our coats we become part of what is being hidden, and then we are no use to anybody." "You have thought about this." "I have watched my mother leave a city and come to a town of eleven hundred people for reasons she has not explained to me once, and I have had six weeks to work out that the reason is not the sea." She looked at the far table, the one with no dust on it. "Somebody is going to get hurt by this, and it is going to be somebody who did not sign anything, and the only way I know to avoid being the one who hurts them is to make sure that every fact in this town has four witnesses in the room when it gets said." Piet nodded slowly. "Okay. Then we open the floor." The note said the box was under the floor. The sixth table sat over a board that sounded different when Tove knelt and knocked on it, so Piet set the shoulder of the reading lamp under the edge and levered, and the board came up four inches on one side and released with a smell of dust and old linseed oil that went straight to the back of her throat. The hole under it was nine inches deep and the size of a bread crate, lined with tarred board, and at the bottom of it sat an iron box. It was the colour of a horseshoe, rusted through in two places so that the rust had bloomed out onto the tar in orange flowers. The size of a biscuit tin. It weighed, when Piet lifted it out and set it on the table, considerably more than either of them had expected. There was a hasp at the front and no padlock in it, and the hasp had been forced once and squeezed back. "Before we go any further," Piet said. "Look at the hasp." Tove looked. Four bright scores in the rust where a screwdriver had been put in and twisted. "It was locked when it went in. Somebody opened it before it was buried. Which means somebody sealed this box, somebody else opened it, and a third person buried it, and those are three different years of somebody's life." They opened it on the middle table under the lamp with the oiled switch, and what was inside took less room than Tove had expected and took up the rest of her life. A length of pencil, six inches, sharpened at one end, with a strip of masking tape wound round the middle and written on in the same small hand: the nib was his. The graphite at the tip was soft, and the point was blunt from being pressed hard into a desk rather than a page. A photograph, black and white, a quarter-plate, glossy at the edges. Three people on a beach under a low green hill. A man of about thirty in a jersey and sea boots, a woman of about twenty-five with her hair pinned up, and between them a boy of about six in a wool hat, holding the man's left hand and the woman's right, and grinning with his whole face because he did not know yet that the picture was going to matter to anybody except the three of them. A single sheet of foolscap, folded in three, unsealed, dated 13 October 1996, the night before everything. And a brass house-plaque, green paint gone to black, that said READING ROOM, unscrewed from a door with a screwdriver. Tove read the letter first, and then read it twice, and then had to hand it to Piet because her eyes had gone. It was addressed to the four of them by name, and it was a resignation, and it was the calmest document she had ever read. I have taken a copy of the draw-down slips for the harbour improvement fund, 1992 to 1996, and I have left the original with the county, which is a formality, because the county does not open the post. On Monday I am going to the Norhaven Register with a man from a paper, and on Wednesday I will be in the water, because a man who audits a harbour fund and a man who walks into the sea is a story this town can live with, and it is cheaper than the other one. I would like the four of you to remember that I said it, and I would like this town to stop pretending that the two of us drowned by accident. Somebody drowned by accident. There is only one of that. I am the other. Yours, Lars Ostler, Librarian, Selkie Cove. Nobody in the room said anything for a while. The harbour went in and out under the window four or five times. "He wrote it the night before," Tove said at last. "He wrote it the night before and he posted it, and then somebody read his post." "Nineteen years," Piet said. "Eleven thousand cards." He was looking at the photograph. "And he still signed the cards." Ole Ostrand stood in the doorway of the reading room for a long time before either of them noticed him. Then he came in, and looked at the four signatures, and picked up the photograph and held it under the lamp, and said one thing to Tove that she would remember for the rest of her life. "You have two days' notice of a funeral," he said, "in a town where nobody has ever once given notice of a wedding." ---