第18章 The Confession at the Counter

It came out slowly, the way a thing comes out when it has been held a long time, and it came out over the bank's green blotter, with the deed box open and the paraffin receipt lying on the paper like a leaf that had fallen there. Bertram Lampitt's father, Gregory, had been in the timber trade, and in 1979 the Wexford mill was the last rival in the valley that mattered, and the mill was insured, and Gregory Lampitt had a man who did the sort of work that never gets talked about, and one autumn night that man went into the mill office with a can and a length of fuse and did a small, careful, cheap job that grew into a fire and into a death and into a town's opinion, and nobody ever asked who had gained by it, because it had never occurred to anyone that a fire in a dying mill could be anyone's business except the man the town had already decided was guilty. "He never told me," Lampitt said. "That's the truth of it. He died in ninety-four and he never told me, and I bought that mill because it was cheap and because I thought a man could make something of it, and I have been buying up this town for two years because I thought a town that was going nowhere might as well go somewhere with me in charge of it." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I did not know what was under that floor. I had a surveyor look, and the surveyor found the earth turned, and I thought it was kids, or the woman in the green coat, and I told him to leave it. That's the worst I've done, and it's not nothing, but it's not what you think." "He asked about the box," Bellwether said quietly. "Three times. I put him off three times. I've been putting off my own conscience about this town for thirty years, and I've been good at it, and I'd have gone on being good at it if a locksmith hadn't asked me a question I couldn't answer with a longer question." "You knew?" Netta said to him. "I knew there was a box and a story," he said, "and I did not know whose it was, and I did not ask, and that is the whole of my defence and it will not stand up and I know it." Frayne wrote it all down, slowly, in a little book, and when he had finished writing, he looked at Netta. "Miss Wexford," he said. "You have broken into four houses, removed five objects, and misplaced one locksmith's ledger. I have no wish to make a criminal of you for taking back your own mother's bell. But there are ways of doing a thing, and one of them involves a police station and a telephone, and from now on you will use that way." "I will," Netta said. "And Mr. Lampitt." Frayne turned to him. "The mill is not mine to give and not yours to bury. I'll be writing to the county about a building with a fire in its history and a floor that has been tampered with, and there'll be a survey and a listing, and in the meantime you'll not demolish a thing, and you'll keep your men off the site, and if you want to do something for this town after two years of buying it up, you can start by paying for the new lock on the mill gate yourself." Lampitt opened his mouth, and closed it, and nodded. Bellwether, behind his desk, put his glasses back on and did one decent thing, which was to take the file with the red corner and slide it across the blotter without being asked. "The deed box file," he said. "The standing order, the rent, the whole of it. It's yours now, Miss Wexford, and whatever the county wants from the bank they'll have, and I'll write the letter myself before I go home." He paused. "Thirty years I've kept this branch tidy, and the one thing I never did was open a file I'd been told to leave shut. My father told me to leave it shut. I should have asked him why." "You should," Frayne agreed, and wrote that down too. Lampitt stood by the counter with his folder under his arm and did not look at any of them. He was, Verity thought, a man who had spent two years buying a town and had just discovered that it had been writing to him all along, in a hand he had never bothered to read. When he spoke, it was to Netta. "I'll pay for the mill roof," he said. "Not the gate. The roof. If the county lists it, it'll need a roof, and I'm the only man in this town who can afford one, and I'd rather it was my money that kept the weather out than my name that kept the truth in." He looked at her, and then away. "You don't have to forgive my father. I'm not asking." "I know you're not," Netta said. "And I won't. But I'll take the roof." Afterwards, outside, on the steps of the bank, in the thin Saturday sunshine, Netta Wexford stood with the deed box under her arm and did not seem to know what to do with her hands. "Your mother's letter," Verity said. "You haven't read it." "No." "Then go somewhere warm and read it. The Crane and Kettle does a decent pot of tea and Bridie Vardy won't charge you for the second one." Verity took the green ledger out of her bag and held it a moment, her father's book, worn pale at the corners, home again at last. "And then come and see me at the shop. You still owe me the key to my own door." Netta looked at the ledger, and then at Verity, and something in her face worked loose that had been wedged there a long time. "You could have had me arrested," she said. "Any day this month. You had the tape with my thumbprint and the shed and the four houses and every reason." "I know." "Why didn't you?" Verity thought about it, standing on the steps of the bank in the thin Saturday sun, with her father's book in her hands and a warrant's worth of evidence in her bag and a woman beside her who had spent a year being invisible to keep a promise to a mother who had spent forty years being somebody else. "Because on the first evening of all this," she said, "I knelt on Enid Tunnicliffe's step and found a lock that somebody had changed without asking the person who lived behind it. And the whole of this town has been doing that for forty years, Netta. Changing the locks on a family and not telling them, and calling it keeping the peace." She tucked the ledger under her arm. "I open doors for a living. It's the one thing I know how to do properly. So I'm not going to stand on a step and keep one shut." Netta Wexford looked at her a long moment, and then she nodded, once, and went down the steps into the market square, and Verity watched her go, and neither of them said another word, which, as they both knew, meant the conversation had gone well. ---