She was the only customer in the place. It was dingy, the glass counter thick with dust, the few cakes behind it looking like museum pieces. She sat at the counter with her cracked china mug, blowing on the tea to cool it, thinking only about the men. The news bulletin came to her as if through a fog. Another bomb, this one in a shopping center in Canterbury. Sixteen dead so far. The manageress loudly predicted the guilty parties and looked sourly at the radio as though it had to take its share of the blame. Hopper didn’t respond, and eventually the woman moved off to sit in a little room behind the counter.
After a quarter of an hour, Hopper paid and walked over to the window, glancing out to her left as idly as she could.
The men were lingering a little way down the road. The taller one stood scuffing the ground, smoking. The shorter, balder one gazed abstractedly back toward the café. She could see a little curl of smoke from the taller one’s cigarette. They weren’t even bothering to hide.
Panic flooded her. She picked up her bag and, not knowing quite what she was doing, walked slowly out of the café, toward the men—as though by keeping to her original route she might deflect their attention. They moved off, ambling ahead of her, occasionally looking back. She kept moving. They must know she had noticed them. Their proximity was almost insulting.
She was nearly at the bus stop. Would they stop there? Would they get the same bus?
At that moment, an alley opened up at her side, a little path between two houses. Her feet moved before she had even decided to take it, and she slipped along it as quietly as she could. Behind the houses the alley turned onto a narrow walled path, the sides shaded and sprouting with bushes, and she broke into a run, her arms lashed by overgrown nettles, her feet dodging the stones that strewed the ground. No shout followed her, no footsteps.
She passed what she was sure was the back of Chandler’s house, looking as innocuous as any of its neighbors. How many other houses on this street were cages for people scratching at one another in miserable, hollow lives, waiting for relief that never came?
After several hundred meters the alley opened onto the main road; she crossed and plunged back into the same alley on the other side. She realized now that the bricks on her right were a raised railway line above her head.
The alley emerged, finally, onto another street. Where was she? Somewhere between Camberwell and Elephant. The square she was in had once been pretty—it looked Georgian. It was bisected by the railway line she had been following, which dragged its way across, twenty meters off the ground, cauterizing the houses on either side as it passed through. One of the brick embankments over the road had collapsed, or been partially demolished, and several of the houses were covered in thick-growing ivy that thrived on their shady fronts.
She realized how hard she was breathing. She leaned against a wall under the railway arch, taking advantage of the cooler air. Who were the men? Who had sent them? Were they with Warwick? They must be.
She resolved to walk up to Waterloo and travel to Thorne’s house from there. At least it was overcast. It was just after five in the afternoon. The air was closer, but she would walk the first mile even if she sweated. There were a lot more storms these days than before the Slow. The air was stirring in strange new patterns, drawn onto the land and bringing the sea with it. It was just as well—without rain, the only way to grow a crop would be indoors. Even the big indoor factory farms couldn’t feed forty million people.
North it was, then, back across the river, to Thorne’s house.
The streets grew a little busier as she approached the center of town. She found a bus at Waterloo heading in the right direction; realized with surprise it was the same route she’d taken yesterday. Was it only yesterday? Eventually it dropped her at the same stop in Hampstead, by the little Korean grocery, and as she approached the house she saw with relief that no policeman stood outside. The street was quiet.
Before Hopper reached the gate, she remembered the house across the road from Thorne’s, where yesterday the figure had stood in the window, watching her leave. On an unexamined impulse she moved closer, ducked the thick tangle of brambles hanging over the porch, and rang the bell.
It was answered quickly, by a woman older than Hopper; perhaps in her forties. She had a hard mouth, punctuated at one end by twin points of scar tissue, and she wore a gray dressing gown a little too large for her. She held a baby against her shoulder, and gently jogged it up and down as she spoke.
“Yes?”
“Hello. I’m just here because . . . The house over the road . . .”
“What about it?”
“It was burgled yesterday.”
“So?”
“I’m just wondering if you saw anything.”
“You police?” Her voice was quiet, low, accusatory, and she shifted the baby protectively to her other side.
“No. I know the man who lived there.”
“He seemed nice. Gave me his spare clothing tokens.”
Hopper nodded. “I think . . . there might have been something strange happening. Can you tell me?”
“Why should I?”
“He was my friend. I think he might have been in trouble.” It was close enough to the truth. Hopper tried to make herself as friendly, as harmless as possible.
“The police were outside all afternoon.”
“Did you see anything that wasn’t the police?”
“Couple of fellers in gray coats.”
“When?”
“Just after the police turned up. They walked right past them and went in.”
Hopper thought of the two gray coats who had followed her from Chandler’s home. “I see. Thank you.”
“Except . . .” The woman looked down, tracing an invisible pattern on the floor with her toe, suddenly childlike.
“Yes?”
“Except they came by in the morning as well, before the police arrived.”
Hopper stared at the woman, at her dingy dressing gown, her scarred mouth. “Sorry?”
“They were here before the police.”
She thought back to the words of the policeman standing outside the house yesterday. We were called out this afternoon, he’d said. There’s been a burglary. The woman was staring at her warily, as if waiting for something. Ridicule, perhaps. Hopper tried to disguise her interest.
“Can I just check—you mean they arrived in the afternoon, and the police let them into the house . . .”
“That’s right.”
“And yet they had already been here several hours before?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure it was the same two men?”
The woman gave a little gesture of irritation. “’Course I’m sure. Two blokes. One bald fat feller, one thin one. Gray coats. They was here at six in the morning. I was up with him,” she added, gesturing to the baby. “We have a little balcony. They didn’t see me, though. I was just sitting out. They didn’t have a car. Or if they had a car, they left it a long way off.”
“What happened when they arrived?”
The woman looked at Hopper as if she were dealing with an idiot. “They went through the gate, and I didn’t see ’em after that. You can’t see his front door from the balcony. But I never heard it shut. And it shuts loud.”
“Did they stay long?”
“I don’t know. I was out there for another fifteen minutes, then I had to get him back into his cot. It’s none of my business what people do. But I didn’t hear the door in the next hour.”
“Had you seen them before, ever?”
“No.”
“Was there anyone else with them?”
“No.”
“What did you think they were here for?”
“Visiting the old man.”
“But he was in hospital.”
“I thought maybe he’d come
back. I didn’t think about them too much.” The woman was haughty suddenly, as though affronted at the suggestion that she spent her day idly observing her neighbors.
“All right. Thank you. I think that’s everything.”
“You’re welcome.” The woman looked at her. “What happened to the old man, then?”
“He died.”
“Shame. I liked him.” She paused. “Well, good luck with it, whatever it is.” She cocked her head to one side and moved her free hand in a strange, abortive gesture of friendliness. Then she turned and closed the door behind her.
Hopper looked at Thorne’s house across the road. As she approached it, she felt herself observed.
This street was not what it had once been. The area had been fashionable before the Stop, but so much of London had been left to fend for itself. The really successful people these days—the manufacturing chiefs and the senior politicians and the rest of Davenport’s gang—lived on private estates outside the city, powered by a private stash of fossil fuels. Davenport himself spent almost half the year in his Cotswolds dacha, supposedly stuffed with loot requisitioned after the Stop. There were rumors he had the Elgin Marbles there: they certainly weren’t in the British Museum, famous today only for its acres of smashed glass.
Thorne’s house loomed before her. It seemed deserted. The garden at the front was cool and shaded—the huge hedges behind the wall saw to that—and a vine was growing rampant across a trellis over the central path. Beneath it, the soil was dry. A little central water feature was discolored with rust and moss.
The place was even more impressive than it had seemed yesterday. The ancient, faded brickwork was studded intermittently with black blocks, and large bow windows bulged out beyond the rest of the structure. But the impression of grandeur crumbled on close inspection. There were tiles missing from the little turret in the front. The paint of the woodwork had chipped away, and the windows were stained and smeared, with dark, furry mold around their frames.
Hopper didn’t want to try to enter without having first ascertained whether anyone was at home—perhaps some police officer left to do their work in quiet. She reached out and let the iron knocker crash down onto its plate: it was in the shape of a sun, gray swirling rays shooting out of it. One of Thorne’s little jokes.
The knock echoed through the house.
After a minute or so of waiting, watching a blackbird fussing for insects among the dry leaves, she guessed it was safe to go in. The front door was locked, but there was a path to her right, and a low gate barely tethered at the side of the house. At the other end of the cool passageway, rampant with nettles, the back garden opened up. It was worse than the front: The lawn was yellow, the paving slabs monstrous with algae. The trees at the garden’s edge were hardy varieties, but even they had wilted. The whole place smelled of decay.
She tested the back door. A stroke of luck; it was unlocked, and let her in with no more protest than a low squeak. She moved through into a little study crammed with bookshelves and armchairs. As a final precaution she said, in a voice designed to hide her unease, “Hello?”
In the corner, a black shadow unfurled and moved toward her.
For a second she recoiled, horrified, imagining the men from Chandler’s house—then laughed. The only animal disturbed by her presence was a cat.
It followed her as she moved, butting against her legs. Barring the room she had arrived in, the ground floor was grand and abandoned. She found a kitchen lined with an enormous range, a dining table bearing just one forlorn place mat. She headed into the main hall and moved upstairs. The cat stayed on the ground floor and stared at her as she went. The staircase was broad; halfway up was a little landing with a door off to a bathroom. At the top were four more doors. She picked one, opened it, and gasped.
The room was large and high: huge windows ran from floor to ceiling. It must have been beautiful before it had been torn apart. The wallpaper had been slashed, the carpet ripped up and hacked to pieces. The long cream curtains lay heaped in a corner. The pictures had been pulled from the faded walls and were piled carelessly on the curtains, their backs torn off. A bookcase had disgorged its contents over a quarter of the room—the books had been left open, spines protesting at the unnatural poses they had been left in. This wasn’t a burglary. The thought occurred to her as though whispered in her ear. It was a search.
A desk against one wall was piled with papers, weighed down by a telephone. She picked it up and dialed 0, groping in her pocket for a pen. After a few seconds a bored female voice spoke.
“Operator.”
“This is North 3–74 Harlesden Road.” She looked at the phone. “Uh, 4489. I was just wondering—do you have a list of calls made from this number, please? I’m trying to track down a shop I was talking to and I’ve stupidly lost the details.”
“We’re really not supposed to.”
Hopper pictured the operator, sitting in one of the telecoms centers, cigarette in her ashtray, patching calls to bridge the gaps left when the old exchanges had fallen apart. The woman was probably Hopper’s age, spending her life saying “Operator” a thousand times a day. She put on as subservient a voice as she could manage.
“Please. It’s for my father—I’m trying to get him a gift, and I’ve completely forgotten the shop I identified as just the place. If there’s anything at all you could do, I’d be hugely grateful.”
There was a sigh from the other end of the line. “I need the date the calls were made. I can’t look up more than a few days at a time.”
“Oh, of course. It’s . . .” She fished in her jacket for the hospital notes, found the date of Thorne’s admission. “Just before the ninth of June, please. Anytime up until the ninth.”
“Just a moment.”
Hopper looked around the room as the operator searched the record. An armchair in the corner was lying crazily upside down, pockets of its stuffing bursting through slash marks in the lining like a plant sprouting through a seed case.
The voice at the other end of the phone returned. “Hello?”
“I’m here.”
Just as bored, the operator spoke again. “Here they are.” She rattled off a list of numbers, so fast Hopper had to ask her to repeat a couple. There was a doctor, a few local food shops, the local regional committee. No Gethins.
The operator paused. “What about this: Central 12, Fisher. A bookshop. Was the number phoned a few times?”
“Er . . . yes. Yes, I’m pretty sure I rang more than once.”
“I’d give that a go if I were you. It’s one of the only ones you rang more than once. You rang that three times on the morning of the eighth.”
“Thank you so much. Yes, that must be it.”
“There’s one more number. This one you rang twice the night before the ninth. Could that be it?”
“Possibly,” Hopper said, reluctant to pass up the opportunity. “Could you tell me the details, please?”
“Oh, no, sorry. It wouldn’t be that. It’s Westerly 12. One of the Atlantic rigs. I don’t think you’d be going there for a birthday present, would you?”
Hopper leaned against the table. “I . . . No, I don’t think I would. Did those calls get through, please?”
“Looks like they did, yes. Two calls, two minutes and four minutes.”
“Did he . . . I mean, was that rig phoned before that at all?”
“Not in the previous week, dear. That’s as far back as my records go.” Her voice had softened. “Anything else?”
“That’s everything. Thank you.”
“Not at all. And by the way . . . if it’s a man, and he’s cheating on you, punch him in the eye from me.” The line went dead.
Hopper exhaled, slowly, trying to remove the sudden knot of tension from her throat. Thorne had phoned the rig as well as writing. Why? And who had answered the call? The main phon
e was in Schwimmer’s office. She never used it. There was nobody on the mainland she had needed to talk to. Had Schwimmer deliberately not told her of Thorne’s call?
She looked at her list of numbers, rang the operator again, and got through to the number that had been called three times the day before Thorne had gone into hospital. It purred, metallic, and was snatched up.
“Fisher’s Books.” A man’s voice.
“Hello. Can you tell me your address, please?”
He sounded like he was breathing heavily. Perhaps he had run for the phone. “We’re in Cecil Court, madam, just off the Charing Cross Road. Number 28.”
“Thank you. I’ll try to come by tomorrow.”
She rang off, and resumed looking through the room. To one side there was a tiny pile of papers, notable for their neatness amid the chaos. Whoever had been searching up here must have preserved them. She rummaged through the pile: mostly financial statements, none especially interesting. There was also a collection of correspondence with a lawyer called Stephanie Clayford. She noted the address—in the lawyers’ labyrinth at Temple—then moved on to the rest of the first floor.
Two of the other rooms up here had had the same treatment. But the final room—a bedroom, undoubtedly Thorne’s—had only been torn half-apart. The other half was still neat—pristine, in fact. And in the middle of the room was a tool bag, left open.
The search, or whatever it was, had been left unfinished.
Hopper surveyed the rest of the room. Where would Thorne hide something? She looked between the floorboards, but found none that lifted out. The wardrobe had no inner parts, as far as she could tell, and the small chest of drawers opposite it had already been ripped apart. She searched fruitlessly for twenty minutes, then sat back on the bed.
On top of one of the exploded bedside tables was a photo frame, facing downward and with its back ripped open. She turned it over: a lopsided picture of Thorne and a woman, holding a small boy up between them. All three were smiling. The glass was cracked. And then she noticed it: a tiny corrugation at the side of the photo, a little lump of adhesive.
The Last Day Page 13