Chapter 186 Room 4 II

At 8 Danny rang Priya from the window. He gave her the times and nothing else, on the phone, the way the rule said.

"10 till 2," she said. Her biro was going. "The address comes at half 9, you said. You will not give it to me on this line. Good. Then at half past 2, if you have not rung, I ring the police and then Lorraine, as before. And Mr Flynn. You are being paid for this?"

"It’s a Grade 3. It pays into the same account."

"Then it is income, and Lorraine will see it, and I will tell her before she sees it, so she does not ring me at 4 o’clock asking what a Grade 3 is." She stopped writing. "I do not like this. I want it on the record that I do not like it. And sign nothing."

"I’ve got Mr Pemberton’s pen in my pocket to make sure of it."

"I do not understand that sentence." There was a pause on the line. "I am going to let it go."

At 20 past 8 Kieran texted from the Sterling desk.

Locksmith done 8:12. New barrel. 2 keys, both handed to Mr P in his hand like you said. He says to tell you he has drunk 3 glasses of water and a cup of tea and the tea counts.

At 9:30 the phone went gold on the floorboards.

[ 10:00. ] [ Room 4, St Columba’s House, Mare Street. ] [ Grade 3. ]

Danny read it, and felt his stomach drop through the floor of the flat.

"Mare Street," Jodie said over his arm. She was dressed now, in a black polo neck that hugged every line of her, and a grey wool skirt she’d made herself that stopped at the knee, and black tights, and her coat over the top. "That’s where Robin’s office was. That’s where you walked in at 17."

"And where I rang my mum from the phone box that first Saturday with 40p." He was already texting. "St Columba’s is the hospice. Halfway down, past the town hall. I’ve walked past it 1,000 times. It’s 12 minutes from here on foot."

He sent the address to Hale at 9:31, exactly, and to Jodie, so it was on her phone as well as the page. Jodie wrote the time and the address on his mother’s page in her bag, in her neat hand, with who left blank.

Jodie buttoned her coat. "They gave you 30 minutes for a 12-minute walk. So it was never about stopping anybody getting there first. I’m walking you there, and Hale can be there in an hour. They don’t care who’s on the pavement. It’s who’s in the room they care about."

"It’s a hospice, Jodie. Whoever’s in that room isn’t coming out to me. I go to them."

They walked. Down past the Downs with the dog walkers out and the grass white, and along through the market with the stalls going up. On Mare Street, opposite the Hackney Empire, the old letting office where Robin Hollis had signed his tenancy was a vape shop now, with a neon cloud in the window and a lad with a beard behind the counter. The phone box on the corner was gone. There was a square of newer paving where it had stood.

Danny didn’t slow down for either of them. Jodie looked at both, and then at him, and put her arm through his.

St Columba’s House was a Victorian building set back from the road behind railings and a strip of lawn, with a modern glass front stuck on it and a ramp up to the doors. Inside it smelled of coffee and lilies. There was a man at the front desk of about 70 in a cardigan with a VOLUNTEER badge, doing a word search.

"Morning! Hello there. Visiting? Lovely. I’m Clive, I do Mondays and Thursdays and every other Saturday unless my daughter’s got the grandkids, in which case I’m in the car to Chelmsford and God help me. Who are you here to see?"

"Room 4," Danny said. "I was told 10 o’clock."

"Ah, you’ll be her young man at 10. She told me first thing, a young man’s coming at 10 and you’re to send him straight down, Clive, and no chat." He turned the visitors’ book round anyway. "Lovely lady, Mrs Marsh. She’s been with us since the 10th of October. I know that because it was my granddaughter’s birthday, the 10th, and I brought the leftover cake in on my next shift for the staff room.

"They said we’ve a new lady in 4, and I took her a slice, and she said, young man, I have not eaten cake since 1971, and then she ate the lot. I like her. She’s sharp. She does the crossword faster than I do the word search."

Jodie’s hand tightened on Danny’s arm.

The 10th. The day before anything about me was written down.

"Does she get many visitors?" Jodie said.

"Just the niece." Clive lowered his voice. "Very elegant woman. Very quiet. Comes most evenings at 6 and sits with her till 9. Always says good evening when she comes in and good evening when she goes, even at 9 at night, so I suppose that’s right enough then. Oh, and she’s in now, actually. Came in at half 8 this morning. She’s never done that. I said, you’re early, and she said yes."

"Was she in on Thursday?" Jodie said. "Or Friday?"

Clive frowned at the book and turned a page back.

"Now you come to say it, no. She missed Thursday and Friday. First time. She rang Thursday teatime and said she was kept at work, and Saturday she was back as usual." He looked up at Jodie. "How’d you know that?"

"We were working near her on Thursday." It was true. Jodie’s hand had gone tight on Danny’s sleeve.

Thursday night she was letting herself into 17 with Pemberton’s key. Friday at 6 she was walking him into St Thomas’. Kept at work.

He pushed the pen across.

"Sign there, and your time in. Lovely. Mrs Marsh is down the corridor, last on the left, the one onto the front lawn."

Danny took Pemberton’s fountain pen out of his inside pocket and signed the visitors’ book with it. D. Flynn. 09:57. The ink went on black and wet.

Outside on the bench by the ramp, Jodie took his mother’s page out of her bag and held it on her knee.

"Time in," she said. "Write it."

He wrote 09:58 with the same pen. Jodie wrote Mrs Ida Marsh in the space for who, and looked up at him.

"2 o’clock," she said. "I’ll be on this bench. Go on."

The corridor had a carpet that swallowed his footsteps and paintings of boats on the walls. The last door on the left stood half open. Danny knocked on it with one knuckle and went in.

It was a big bright room with French windows onto the front lawn, a bird table and a bare cherry tree, and a low hedge with the railings beyond it.

There was a hospital bed by the windows, raised up, and in it a very old woman, tiny under the blanket, with white hair set in waves as though she’d been to a hairdresser that morning, and red lipstick put on carefully and slightly over the line of her top lip. She had a crossword folded on the blanket and a pair of glasses on a chain round her neck.

The secretary was in the armchair in the corner.

She had the grey coat over the back of the chair and was sitting with her legs crossed in a narrow black skirt and black stockings, and a grey silk blouse buttoned to the throat, with a folder on her knee. The bob was exactly at her jaw. The red on her mouth was exactly the same red as the old woman’s.

Danny’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

[ Clocked on. 10:00. ]

"Good evening, Mr Flynn," said the secretary.

"You were outside my flat last night at 10 to 12."

"Yes."

"Why sit out there at midnight? You’ve walked through every door I’ve had this month. Why not knock?"

The secretary looked at the bed.

"I asked her to," said the old woman. Her voice was a surprise, clear and East End under the polish, like Pat’s would be if Pat had been to elocution lessons in 1955 and walked out halfway.

"I wanted to see where they’d put you. Not the big flat by the river. The real one. So she had the driver take me past, and she propped me up in the back on 3 cushions so I could see up to your window. I can’t sit up on my own in a car any more, love, it does my back in.

"She held her hand up to you for me. I couldn’t lift mine that high. I’m sorry if it gave you a turn."

She patted the blanket.

"Sit down. Not in that chair, that’s hers. Pull the other one over. My name’s Ida Marsh, and nobody’s said it to me out loud for most of my life except the girl in the canteen here and that nice Clive, and I want you to say it."

Danny pulled the plastic chair over to the bed and sat on it.

"Mrs Marsh," he said. "I’ve been told to come to the one who asked for me. Is that you?"

"That’s me." She looked at him properly then, with eyes that were pale blue and wet at the rims and didn’t miss anything. "Look at you. Look at the size of you. You were a skinny thing at 17, they told me. Sticking out at the elbows."

"Who told you? You’d not laid eyes on me before last night."

"They told me. That’s all I ever had." She folded her hands on the crossword. "I’ll tell you all of it I can, and you can stop me when you’ve had enough, and I’m warning you now I go on. I’ve been 61 years in that job, and you get no conversation in it, and I’ve been saving it up.

"I was a host, love. Same as you. There’s always a few of us, and you never meet the others while they’re working. I’m not working now. 61 years, every door they sent me to. Big houses, mostly, and once a little flat in Bow with a man that kept birds. I sat with your Mr Pemberton twice, in the 70s, at his mother’s, and he made me tea in a pot and never asked my name, and I never told him it.

"And when you’ve done 50 years, they tell you to ask for the one that comes after. You ask in the way you’re told, same as everybody asks, and the house finds them, and they keep them. That’s what asked for means. I asked 11 years ago, on a Saturday night, at the table in the hall.

"I stopped on the 10th of October. That was my last door. They brought me here the same afternoon. And the next day, they tell me, you got your first one."