第12章 The Whisper in the Market

The market on Wednesday was Thistlecote at its loudest and its kindest, forty stalls of eggs and jam and second-hand books and one man who sold nothing but horse brasses and did well out of it, and Verity went down among it with a shopping basket she did not intend to fill and an ear she very much intended to use. Myrtle Soper's egg stall was the heart of the market, and Myrtle was in fine form, because a town in trouble is a town that talks, and Myrtle was never happier than when she was the vent through which the talking came. "There's been a woman," Myrtle said, before Verity had even asked. "Strange woman. In the shop Tuesday, buying tea and candles and a hot water bottle, which is a thing you buy when you've nowhere proper to sleep, and she had the manners of a person who's been away a long time." "What did she look like?" "Grey, neat, good green coat. Paid cash. And she asked Mrs. Tunnicliffe for the post office what time the last bus goes, which is a question a person asks when they're thinking of leaving." Verity bought a half dozen eggs she did not need and moved on down the line, past the horse brasses, to where Tabitha Osgood was selling yesterday's bread at yesterday's price, and Tabitha, who had not forgotten her cellar door, had something for her too. "Did you hear about the flat over the phone shop?" Tabitha said. "Somebody's taken it. Cash, no references, the agent in Kettering did it sight unseen, and the only person who's seen anybody go in is old Mr. Coote, and he says it's a woman and she keeps her curtains shut." "How long?" "Three weeks. Which is about the same time as everything else started, isn't it, Verity, and don't tell me that's a coincidence, because you don't believe in coincidences any more than I do." At the end of the row, past the man with the horse brasses, Edgar Pargeter was sitting on an upturned crate with a cup of tea and the remains of his Saturday auction in a cardboard box beside him, and Edgar, who had sold lot thirty-nine and been paid in cash, had a thing or two left to say about the woman in the green coat. "Bid like she'd been taught," he said. "Didn't flap, didn't gloat, didn't stay for the next lot. A bidder who walks out the moment they've won is a bidder who came for one thing, and a person who comes to an auction for one thing and pays twice what it's worth is either sentimental or frightened, and I've sold long enough to know the difference." "Which was she?" "Sentimental," Pargeter said, and then, after a sip, "and a bit of both." Verity walked home the long way, past the phone shop, and stood across the lane from it and looked up at the two small windows above the shopfront, and one of them had a curtain that moved, a fraction, the way a curtain moves when a person behind it has been watching and has stepped back too late. She did not go up. She had a rule about doors, and the rule was that you knock, and the rule also said that a person who is not ready to answer will not answer no matter how hard you knock, and a person who is ready will come to you in their own time. So she went home and made tea and sat in the shop with Tibbs on her knee and thought about a woman who had been in town three weeks and had taken only the things that were hers, and who had bought a hot water bottle for a mattress on the floor of a mill, and who had written a child's drawing on the back of a bank envelope, and who had said, in a voice like ice going under a boot, that the ledger was a map of a crime. She took the torn page out of her pocket and laid it on the counter and read it through for the tenth time, and then she did the thing a locksmith does with a lock she cannot open, which is to stop looking at the key and start looking at the door. The four houses that had been entered were all on her father's list, and every one of them was on the list for the same reason, which was that at some point in the last fifty years a Wexford had needed a door in it opened. Tunnicliffe, ninety-four, the year the post office was refitted. Osgood, twenty-eleven, the year the bakery changed hands. Vardy, two thousand and three, the year the tea room took over the old mill-office furniture. Frayne, ninety-eight, back door only, the year the sergeant bought his house from a family that had once worked at the mill. Every door on that list was a Wexford door, and every building behind it had been bought, sold, refitted or rebuilt, and at the bottom of the page, in the second hand, the words ran on past the entry for her own shop, in ink that was newer than the rest. *Ask the bank. Ask the box. Ask who kept the key.* "Somebody's been reading over your shoulder for a while," Verity told Tibbs, and Tibbs, who had no opinion on ledgers, closed her eyes. She telephoned Delphine, because Delphine had been in this town longer than anyone still working in it, and because a doctor hears the things a town will not tell a locksmith. "Nineteen seventy-nine," Verity said. "You were at school. Was there ever a second name in the fire? Not the Wexfords. Somebody else. Somebody the town pointed at for a week and then stopped pointing at." There was a long pause on the line, the sort a doctor makes when she is deciding how much of a memory she is allowed to hand over. "There was a builder," Delphine said. "From over at the county town. He did work at the mill, and he was questioned, and he was let go, and by the autumn he had moved away, and I remember it because my father said at the table that a man who moves away in the autumn of a bad year is a man who has been told to." Another pause. "I was eleven. I could be remembering a conversation about a different builder entirely." "You're not," Verity said. "You're remembering the thing the town stopped saying, which is exactly the thing it decided to say instead." "Then look at the receipts," Delphine said. "Builders give receipts. It's the only thing they're honest about." Verity put the phone down and sat a while with the idea of a receipt, which is a small, dull, honest sort of paper, and the sort of thing a man might keep if he were frightened, and might hide if he were frightened, and might, if he were a miller with a bad heart, put in a safe place and tell his daughter, in a letter, where. At five o'clock somebody knocked on the shop door, and Verity looked up, and through the glass she saw a neat grey figure in a good green coat, standing on the step in the last of the daylight with her hands at her sides, waiting to be let in. ---