第15章 The Canal Tunnel

She went at eleven, an hour early, against everything Frayne had made her promise, because she wanted to see the mill house before the mill house was ready to be seen. The night was still and cold and there was a fog coming off the Noke, the low grey kind that eats the edges of a thing and leaves the middle. Verity left Rufus at the shop with strict instructions, which he had agreed to in the way that a boy agrees to anything he has already decided against, and she walked the mill track with a torch in one hand and her bag over her shoulder, and the water of the cut went past her on the left, flat and pale as milk. The mill house stood at the end of the track with one window lit, as before, and she did not go straight up to the door. She went along the towpath instead, past the house, to where the cut ran under the old tunnel beneath the mill, because a person who wants to understand a place should know where its doors are, and a tunnel is a door lying on its side. The tunnel mouth was a black semicircle in the brickwork, choked with nettles and a fallen gate, and on the dry ledge just inside it, where a person could sit out of the weather and watch both the house and the track, somebody had been sitting a great deal. The nettles were pressed flat. There was a circle of stones around a cold patch of ash. And pushed back against the wall, half under a sack, was a box. A metal deed box, old, green, the paint going to rust at the corners, and on the lid, in a hand Verity knew, three letters: A. W. She did not open it. She sat down on the ledge beside it, out of the fog, and waited, because she had come to be a witness and a witness does not go through the papers before the person who owns them has said a word. The ledge was a good place to sit. Verity understood why, in the way she understood a lock, from the inside out. From here you could see the mill house and its one lit window, and the track down to the town, and the tunnel at your back to get out through if the track was closed. Whoever had sat here had sat here a great many nights, and had chosen the spot the way a careful person chooses a spot, which was one more thing about the woman in the green coat that did not fit the shape of a thief. The fog turned slowly over the water. Somewhere out in the dark a moorhen called once and thought better of it. Verity sat with her hands in her coat and found that she was not frightened, and had a moment of wondering why, and understood that too. She had spent twenty-three years being let into other people's houses at the worst moments of their lives; she had opened doors for people who had locked themselves out in the rain, and doors for people who had locked themselves in against something, and she had learned to tell the difference between a person who was dangerous and a person who was afraid. The woman who had pinned a photograph to a shed wall and bought a hot water bottle for a mattress on the floor of a dead mill was afraid. That was the whole of it. Which left only the question of what she was afraid of, and whether the fear had a door in it, and whether Verity Callender was the person to open it. At midnight, footsteps came along the track, and the woman in the green coat came down the towpath with a torch held low, and stopped when she saw Verity sitting at the tunnel mouth with the box beside her. Verity had spent an hour working out what she would say, and in the end she said nothing, because she had also spent twenty-three years learning that the first thing a person does when they are caught somewhere they should not be tells you everything about why they are there. The woman did not run. She did not reach for the box. She stood in the fog at the mouth of the tunnel and looked at the locksmith who had found her out, and then she did the one thing Verity had not expected at all, which was to put her torch down on the ledge, open-handed, like a person laying a weapon on a table. "You came early," the woman said. "I did." "Alone?" "Not entirely," said Verity, and it was true, because she had told Frayne after all, and Frayne had told her no in every language he had, and then had gone away and quietly arranged to be someplace that a woman who was afraid of the dark could reach in twenty seconds if she shouted. The woman looked at her a long moment, and then, to Verity's surprise, she laughed, a real laugh, small and tired and genuine. "My mother used to say that the Callenders were the only honest family in this town," she said. "She meant it as a compliment, and she was wrong about the rest of the town, and I think she was right about you." She sat down on the ledge, on the other side of the box, and put her torch down, and for the first time she looked directly at Verity without the careful flatness on her face. "My name is Annet Wexford. Everybody calls me Netta. Beatrix was my mother. The man who rented a bank box the day after the fire was my grandfather, and I have spent a year looking for the thing he hid, because it is the only proof that my family did not burn the mill." Verity did not say anything for a moment. She looked at the woman beside her, at the good green coat gone shiny at the cuffs, at the hands that had copied a locksmith's ledger by hand over a long winter, and she thought about how a person could carry a name for forty years that a whole town had decided was a shame. "You could have come to me," she said at last. "You could have knocked on my door in the daylight and told me all of it over a cup of tea, and I'd have got the book down and gone through it with you, door by door." "Yes," Netta said. "I know that now. I have known it for a fortnight, and I did not know how to stop being the person who was doing it the other way." She almost smiled. "It turns out that when you have been invisible in a town for a year, the last thing you want is to be seen." "That I understand," Verity said. "Better than you think." She reached down and put her hand flat on the lid of the box, and did not open it, and looked out at the fog on the water. "All right, Netta Wexford. I'll be your witness. But you'll tell it from the beginning, and you'll tell it true, and when it's told I'm going to take you to a man named Frayne, and you're going to have to do the rest of it his way, because I open doors and he closes cases, and one of us has to be the one who knows the law." ---