第27章 The Fourth Tape

The deputy met her at the county jail in Harlow with the expression of a man who had arrested a murderer and discovered, in the process, that the murderer was the least strange thing in the room. His name was Deputy Lowell, and he had been the one who found the cabinet, and he had not stopped turning it over in his head since. He led Maggie down the corridor past the holding cells, and he said, in the flat voice of a man narrating something he still did not believe, that Merrick had asked for her twice, that he had been calm the whole way through, and that the only thing he had said about the cassettes was that he had been waiting forty years for someone to take them out of that wall. Merrick was sitting on the bench in the holding cell with his hands folded in his lap, wearing the same gray cardigan he had worn in the bookshop, and he looked up when the door opened the way a man looks up when an appointment he has kept for forty years finally arrives. He did not stand. He nodded at the chair across from him, and when Maggie sat down he said, You found the drawer, then. I told you the door was not locked. I did not tell you everything, because I was not sure you were ready to hear it. You are here now, so I will tell you the rest. He told it the way he had told the first part, calmly, unhurried, the way a man reads from a ledger he has memorized. In the summer of 1979 a young records clerk named Curtis Foyle had come to the Port Alton annex to audit the courthouse files, and the audit, which was supposed to end in August, had stretched on past Christmas, because the clerk had found the files fascinating in a way the county clerk had found merely slow. Merrick -- Emmett Vane, then -- had noticed the auditor watching him in the maintenance yard, had felt it the way you feel a door being quietly closed behind you, and had done what he always did when someone watched him: he had smiled, and kept moving, and told himself he was imagining it. He was not imagining it. Two weeks after Angela Voss died, Foyle found him at the bus station, waiting for a bus he had no intention of taking, and stood beside him in the cold, and did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, I know what you did to her. Vane had felt the world go still around him, the way it goes still in the moment before a car hits something. And then Foyle had said the words that had decided the rest of his life. I am not here to turn you in, he said. I am here to tell you that you are interesting, and I have decided to keep you. You will do what I tell you, when I tell you, and in return I will make sure that no one ever looks at you twice. It was not a threat, Merrick told Maggie now. It was a contract. He was offering me an alibi for my whole life, and all he wanted in exchange was that I never ask why. Maggie asked the question she had come four hundred miles to ask. Why did you ever say yes. And Merrick looked at her for a long moment and said, because he was the first person who had ever seen me, Maggie. Not my face. Me. He saw what I was, and he was not afraid of it, and he was not disgusted. He was interested. When you have spent your whole life terrified that someone will see you, it is a relief beyond words to be seen by a man who does not mind. I was not his partner. I was his specimen. And I was too grateful to notice the difference. In 1982 Foyle had told him to take the lease on 112 Sycamore Street. There is a woman at the end of the block, he said. Watch her the way you watched the other one. I have been watching this street for six months, and she is the one. Vane had done it, the way he had done everything since the bus station, and Foyle had been there at the end of it, in the house, in the dark, with the tape machine running. He had made the recording himself, standing in the corner of the room while Vane did what he had been told to do, and when it was over he had talked to Vane the way a man talks to a tool after a job, and that was the voice at the end of the tape. The voice Maggie had played for forty thousand listeners, the voice she had taken for the killer's. She had played the wrong man, and Merrick had let her, because he had been waiting, for thirty-nine years, for someone to be smart enough to play it twice. Maggie said, The photograph. The man outside the Harper residence. Foyle took it. Merrick nodded, and something like a smile crossed his face and then left it. From the window across the street, he said. The room with the lamp that never went out. He told me about that photograph once, years later, and he laughed when he told me. He said it was the only picture of me he ever needed, because it proved I was where he had put me, doing what he had chosen. He said evidence is not for the police. Evidence is for the man who keeps it. It reminds him why he keeps it. She asked him about the cassettes, and the drawer, and the fourth tape with the initials and the date, and for the first time Merrick's calm cracked, just at the edges. He said he had known about the wall cabinet for years, had known Foyle built it and keyed it and told him it was for later, but he had never opened it, because opening it was the one thing Foyle had never told him to do, and he had learned that the things Foyle did not tell him to do were the only dangerous ones. He did not know what was on the tapes. He guessed they were copies -- Foyle never kept originals where a stranger could find them, he said. He is a man who files. He keeps the first copy of everything somewhere only he knows, and he puts the second copy where someone will find it when the time is right. The copies are for the audience. The originals are for himself. Find the room where he files the originals, Maggie, and you will find him. That is the only way anyone will ever find him. He will not be caught. He will be located. And then, because Maggie had named him, because the name was already in the air between them, Merrick said it aloud for the first time in thirty-nine years, quietly, the way a man says a word in a foreign language he has been saving. Curtis Foyle. He nodded, once, as if confirming the name to himself. He told me once that the first one frightened him. He was nineteen years old, and he had practiced what he would say for a week, and he still almost turned back. Everything after that was just filing. When the deputy brought the evidence bag with the four cassettes, Maggie held it up to the light and looked at the one with the writing on it, and the writing was the same careful, unnatural print as the message slip from the tip line. L. V. -- 1976. And in the corner, smaller, a single word, the street he had learned her name on. Elm. She put the bag in her coat pocket, next to the files, and she stood up, and Merrick looked at her from the bench and said, When you find him, tell him I kept the appointment. And Maggie said, I will. And she walked out into the Harlow evening with the fourth tape in her pocket, the one Foyle had made before he knew what he was doing, and she understood that she was carrying the only page of his life that had ever frightened him -- and that he had filed it where she could find it, because even the thing that frightened him was, in the end, just another record he wanted read.